Successful salespeople won’t often dissect the dynamics of the sales environment, and what they do within the environment, but most will agree that there are two sides to selling: using sales skills to make a sale, and using people skills to make a sale.

We call these opportunity focus, and relationship focus; the two dimensions of selling.

Opportunity Focus

Salespeople need to know how to sell. Through experience and trial and error over many years, experts have developed the science that governs a winning sales process. There are countless interpretations; hundreds of books have been written describing it, and literally millions of successful salespeople have been weaned on it. Knowing how to sell—using proven rules and experience—that’s opportunity focus.

Relationship Focus

In the sales opportunity, both customer and salesperson pit their skills against each other. The customer wants the best deal, and the salesperson who wants to win the sale without compromising their company’s profitability. The selling process has a large element of negotiation about it, and all aspects of the process create tension. Relationships, if they can be struck, used, and sustained through the sale, can ease the tension. Leveraging interpersonal skills is the other dimension of selling, and that’s relationship focus.

The key to being a successful salesperson is not just using one or the other—it’s blending both, and also knowing when to shift focus from one to another.

–Excerpt from OPM: Opportunity Portfolio Management, the upcoming book.

The objective of the Opportunity Portfolio Management sales methodology is to unlock the potential in the overall portfolio of sales opportunities. To do this, each opportunity must be valued; once a value is established, salespeople can correctly apply their resources, most importantly their time. The most valued opportunities will be those most likely to be won, given appropriate attention. This caveat is important!

At first glance, valuing a sales opportunity may seem straightforward, but it isn’t. Putting effort into a one million-dollar deal at the expense of a twenty thousand dollar deal may not be the best way to go. There are many important factors other than dollar value that can, and do, come into play.

The attention given to one sale might be at the expense of something else, because there is only so much time to go around. The ability to administer sufficient attention to each opportunity is the only way for the salesperson to get the best out of their portfolio. Some opportunities may need a lot of attention, and others, hardly any.

If you are not valuing your opportunities properly, and therefore investing your efforts optimally, you could be losing out overall.

Salespeople usually get trained by “learning on the job.” Depending on who’s teaching, that may be OK, but it often leads to non-conformity of understanding from one salesperson to another. As salespeople move around, they find that they have little in common with their fellows as far as understanding the fundamental language of the sale.

Without formal academic teaching, the language of sales has developed in a distorted way. Even some of the most commonly used words, such as opportunity, can be understood differently from one salesperson to another. Some are convinced that an opportunity is a lead, an indication that someone may be interested in your product. Others say that the opportunity really doesn’t have any bite until there is concrete evidence that the customer is serious about buying something, such as when a request for a proposal arrives.

If the latter idea is taken to the extreme, opportunities are not recognized until late into the customer’s buying process–this is not a good way to sell against competition who know better.