Six-Sigma for Sales Professionals: Defining and Assessing your Opportunity - Chapter 2

If you have any questions or would like assistance working through an opportunity, please reach out to me via LinkedIn Messaging. I will be happy to help. Stew

The goals of this chapter include:

• Providing you ways to clarify the sales opportunity in terms that will clearly demonstrate the benefits to you, your company, and your customer.
• Providing you ways to assess the benefits of winning, BEFORE investing a lot of your valuable time and resources for a high probability win that ultimately is not worth the effort. The “Too good to be true” scenario!
• Providing you ways to assess your chances of winning, BEFORE investing a lot of your valuable time and resources in chasing a low-probability sale.
• Providing you ways to identify gaps in your approach. Gaps that can be addressed to make your proposal more viable.

Clarifying the opportunity

Start with a simple and high-level process map called “SIPOC”.  https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/sipoc-sales-professionals-stewart-sherman/?published=t. This will take just a few minutes, but we want to know what we know, what we don’t know, and what ultimately, we can and can’t know! Please don’t diagram that last sentence, you’’ get a circle! ??

Ask, Answer, and Document your responses to the following questions:

1. What information do we need in order to successfully pursue this opportunity? Can I get it all, or at least enough to put together an effective response or proposal? Who will provide it to me?
2. What am I going to do with that information? How will it help me put together a great customer value proposition, sales strategy, pricing, etc.
3. What are the outcomes/results of the information you obtained and used? Do you have a selling strategy? A great solution for the customer? Can you tell them how your solution addresses their needs? Better than competitors? Can you “sell” this proposal internally?

As an example the benefit of this step; If you think you’ll need to know something about the competition in order to be able to develop a top 2 or 3 type proposal; but you currently don’t know anything about them; is the opportunity even worth pursuing? If you have a way of finding out about the competition, then yes but if not – maybe you’re rolling the dice on your chances against the customer’s alternatives to your proposal.

Here’s an example of a SIPOC for a sales opportunity.

For more on the “How To” see the SIPOC Module: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/sipoc-sales-professionals-stewart-sherman

Now that we’ve clarified (at least a little) the opportunity, let’s ask a few other questions.

What are the benefits of winning? What are your chances of winning?

Answering those two questions will give you a good idea as to whether you’re wasting your time or have a real opportunity worth pursuing.

Benefits of winning

You have goals (resulting in benefits) to achieve by winning a deal. Your organization also has goals (and resulting benefits). To answer the question regarding the potential benefits of winning; we’ll use a C&E matrix type analysis which will focus on the internal goals (yours and the organization’s).

The question here - does winning the opportunity result in you and your organization meeting your stated goals? If it doesn’t; see if you can modify the customer’s requirements in a way that does allow you to meet your requirements. Modifying the customer's requirements by the way, is not as hard as you might think! See "Sales E.D.G.E." by accomplished author, public speaker and presenter, Gene McNaughton. Visit https://www.getthesalesedge.com/toolkit/ for your complimentary toolkit. Guidance in this book and toolkit will help you identify opportunities “Gaps” the customer might not see without your consult, and in this process you are likely to uncover factors that make the opportunity more desirable. 

Chances of winning

If winning a deal will satisfy your requirements, and you’re confident in your chances of winning the deal; then it seems you’d want to pursue it right? But what is driving that confidence? Sometimes it’s obvious; a customer with whom you have a good relationship might simply tell you “do this and you’ve got the sale”.  But even in those [increasingly] rare cases where a customer gives you direct guidance; the “do this” part could be a problem and you’d want to discover that early on if it is the case. And in the majority of cases where you don’t have that guidance, you’ll want to quickly assess your chances. It’s all about the pursuit of the right opportunities and eliminating the waste of pursuing opportunities that won’t meet your goals even if you win them.

Analysis - Quantifying the benefits and chances of winning

Here are 3 key stakeholders that you must successfully serve in order to have a good chance of winning a deal, along with some ideas as to what you want to know from each. 

• Your [Potential] Customer: You won't win a deal that's not good for the customer. What specifically is your customer trying to accomplish? What are the key goals your customer has and what is the relative importance of each? How will they measure your proposal? What alternatives (i.e. competitors) do they have?
• You: Pursuit of a deal that ultimately will not be good for you is a waste of your time! What are your goals for the sale? Winning? Commission? Taking a customer from a competitor? Getting that last contract needed to get you into your organizations reward club? There may be a myriad of goals you will have for an opportunity, and they may be different from opportunity-to-opportunity. And the importance of each of these goals may also be different.
• Your Organization: If it doesn't meet the requirements of your organization, your deal is not likely to be approved for you to pursue. Typically, your organization will provide guidance as to profitability, size of deals, the composition (mix), the contractual terms and conditions, and many more constraints. You’ll want to know what these are. Many large companies have a “Delegation of Authority” guide that lay it out for you. If you don’t know these rules and goals, FIND OUT before you waste your time on a deal that won’t meet the requirements of your organization.

In order to quickly assess your chances, you will use the information you identified in the SIPOC, to compare what you plan with the goals you’ve identified. For this step, you’ll use a C&E matrix. Actually, you may use several of these. One to map your plans against the internal goals that you’ve identified for yourself and your organization; a second that maps your plans against your customer’s goals, and maybe even a third in a later step that maps your solution against the customer’s decision criteria relative to all of their alternatives!

Here is an example of a C&E matrix for your plan against your customer goals. It shows that you believe (based on your intelligence) the most important factor to the customer is an installation within 90 days (rated a “10”). Your plan to create a rapid response install team rates as a high impact to that goal, and reasonable impact to the others. The C&E analysis revealed that this is the most impactful thing you can offer within your proposal and also provides remaining plan elements in order of importance. VERY powerful tool for creating and vetting your proposal before submitting to a customer giving you indications of changes that will improve your chances.

For more on the “How To” use C&E, see https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/ce-sales-professionals-stewart-sherman. 

Thank you for reading this article, I look forward to your comments, constructive criticism, and suggestions for further articles. Stew