A 3-Step Process For Generating Opportunities For Your Sales Team

We all know that the promotional challenge to originate new sales opportunities is difficult. Prospects, understandably, have a natural tendency to ignore our promotional outreach.

But that’s only half the picture. The real reason why the generation of sales opportunities is a significant challenge is that we don’t have a choice. We MUST generate sufficient opportunities to keep our sales team fully utilized. Failure cannot be an option.

The logic here is simple.

Capable salespeople are expensive, difficult to find and costly to replace.

If you have a salesperson you have a commitment to keep that salesperson fully loaded with true selling activities. It makes no sense to claim that you can afford a salesperson but that you can’t afford to keep them busy selling!

And to get them busy selling you have to generate sales leads.

But it’s not all bad news. Here are three steps you can follow in order to generate sales opportunities for the sales team.

But first a few words of warning!

The importance of definitions

It’s important to understand that I’m using the word promotion to refer to the origination of sales opportunities.

So, in my book, The Machine, promotion is anything we do to generate (or originate) a sales opportunity – and that’s all it is.

The term (sales) opportunity refers to a prospect with which salespeople are engaged. It’s important to note that the term does not infer any kind of value judgment. If a salesperson is engaged with a prospect, that prospect is an opportunity – irrespective of the likelihood of a sale.

We can expand the definition of promotion now: promotion is anything we do to generate an engagement between a prospect and a salesperson.

These two definitions are important because they provide us with an objective framework for the management of the promotional function.

Step One: Form a Promotions Committee

You’d be forgiven thinking that the starting point would be the appointment of a marketing manager (read guru). You’d be wrong. The most important first step in generating new sales opportunities is not the appointment of a person but that of a committee. Let’s call this the Promotions Committee.

The Promotions Committee must include a number of senior people. Typically, these people are the head of marketing, the head of sales and the head of new-product development. In smaller organizations, the CEO should be a member of the committee.

The job of the committee is to conceptualize campaigns. In this context, think of a campaign as an initiative (like a military campaign), as opposed to a piece of promotional collateral.

Each campaign has three critical attributes. First, there’s the offer and the market segment: what you’re selling and to whom—exactly—you intend to sell it. Second, there’s the ultimate proposition: a proposition so powerful that your prospect will ultimately be compelled to purchase! And third, there’s the initial proposition: the initial commitment we’ll be asking the prospect to make, at first point of contact.

These three decisions provide the campaign coordinator with what we call a campaign concept. The campaign coordinator can then use that concept to actually run the campaign. To query the house list. To commission new research. To create the pre-approach email. To release new opportunities to the sales team and so on.

As you can see, the Promotions Committee process is a powerful one—but for it to function effectively, you need regular committee meetings.

Step Two: Appoint a Campaign Coordinator

The role of the campaign coordinator is to execute the campaign conceptualized by the Promotions Committee. A good campaign coordinator shouldn’t be a brilliant copywriter, graphic designer or marketing guru. In fact, it’s better if they stay away from clever words and pretty pictures all together!

The campaign coordinator is responsible for just one thing: queuing campaigns and opportunities in front of the sales team.

There is two main ways the coordinator can do this.

They can run a query in CRM to find more prospects from within the EXISTING house list that suits the current campaign. Or they can commission a research analyst to compile a NEW list to supplement the existing house list. Of course, as inbound leads come in, they can assign them too.

Step Three: Make Sure The Sales Team Play By The New Rules

It’s important that we insist that all outbound sales opportunities are generated by the campaign coordinator: not by salespeople hunting and-pecking through CRM looking for someone to call next.

This is critical as it ensures that salespeople are actually presenting the proposition that the Promotions Committee plans for them to present. It also means the organization has control over both the volume and type of opportunities that the sales team prosecute.

The flip side of this is that the campaign coordinator—and the Promotions Committee upstream from the coordinator —must take their mandate seriously and ensure that salespeople’s opportunity queues are ALWAYS full.

If you think about it, these two rules protect the feedback loop in the campaign process. The first ensures that all prospects are approached by salespeople and the second ensures that all conversations between salespeople and prospects at least begin with the proposition specified by the committee. It’ll probably seem trivial to declare these two rules incontestable—so you’ll need to remind your team (and yourself) periodically what’s at stake here.

A Word On Sales Opportunities

It would be amiss here not to talk a little about where opportunities come from.

There are three sources.

All but the smallest of businesses will have a certain volume of sales opportunities that arrive without incremental effort. We call those organic opportunities.

They consist of existing customers, expressing interest in product categories from which they are not currently purchasing and potential customers who are referred to you by existing customers.

There are two great thing about organic opportunities. The first is that they are high-probability opportunities (the highest, in fact). The other is that they are free. The bad news is that, by definition, you have virtually no control over the rate at which they appear.

The next source of opportunities are also those that come to you—but that come to you as a result of incremental effort on your part. Inbound opportunities, as we call them, emerge as a result of promotional effort (or expenditure).

So, inbound opportunities might result from pay-per-click or traditional advertising. Or from publicity. From tradeshows or other types of events.

Or from writing posts on your blog — or guest posts on other peoples’.

Typically, inbound opportunities are lower-probability than organic ones. These prospects come to you, which is good—but it’s less likely that they come to your with an intent to purchase. It’s more likely that they’re requesting an information package, a sample, or registering to view a video. The good news is that you have control over the rate at which these opportunities appear. If you discover a lucrative source of opportunities, you can increase your spend and increase the flow—up to a point.

Outbound opportunities are those that you originate—and allocate directly to salespeople. Outbound opportunities are generally inexpensive, but they are the lowest probability of all three sources.

You need to mitigate against the low-probability of outbound opportunities by doing two things.

Number one, you need to do careful research to ensure that the list you build contains prospects who are likely to find your offer appealing.

And, number two, you should always initiate an outbound opportunity with a pre-approach email (or, sometimes, in the case of high-value opportunities, with a physical pre-approach package).

The big advantage that outbound opportunities have over the other sources is that they are easy to scale. And, as anyone in business knows, this is what’s important.