In the sales profession, the primary driving factor that evaluates success is selling more product. This factor is at the core of measuring sales success and getting noticed within an organization. Based on this common-sense evaluation, an entire industry operates in the background to teach salespeople how to sell better. If an organization wants to improve sales it will try to steer its sales professionals into more sales education which is easily accessible. There are a large variety of sales experts out there with their own unique approaches to selling more efficiently. The is saturated with everything from books, videos, and programs to go along with sales education. In reality, only, a hand full of these “experts” have really come up with a truly ground-breaking method that changes the way people perceive and performing the act of selling.

There is one problem that plagues most sales education. The emphasis is getting the sales experience just right in a single opportunity. Some examples are: how to be a good listener, how to ask the right questions, effective price negotiation, and other elements which we consider ‘tactical selling’. Tactical selling strategies are very important – effective direct communication with a customer is at the heart of selling. However, a sales professional has numerous opportunities to sell. A salesperson can have many deals competing for focus and time. In our experience sales individual have as many as over a hundred open sales opportunities at once. Having so many opportunities prevents the facilitation of enough time for direct customer interface.

Depending on the market and the product, a sales professional could be working on anywhere between ten to over a hundred opportunities. The challenge is; which opportunity should be worked on first and how much time and focuses should be allocated? What is the priority of one opportunity over another? This is a challenge because any size sales portfolio has a wide variety of unique elements. Deals can vary in size, complexity, and potential to the individual’s chance to win or lose the opportunity.

This is the reason SalesWays has developed a course and a product to support sales professional with Sales Automation via Opportunity Portfolio Management.

OPM delivers sales professionals to engage into their opportunity portfolio like they would financial investments. There are many parallels between a sales portfolio and a financial investment portfolio. The goal is to tweak and improve the content of the portfolio to produce the greatest overall value in each opportunities’ sales cycle timeframe. Opportunity Portfolio Management shows a way to slice through the preconceived evaluating of a sales opportunity and states that there is an intrinsic value to the opportunity, not currently realized in the selling process. For example, using the analogy of a stock market analyst who follows fundamental analysis typically looks at both qualitative (business model, leadership, policy etc.) and quantitative (the hard numbers) aspects of a business to see if the business is currently out of favor with the market and is worth much more than its current valuation. In a similar way discovering the intrinsic value in sales and working the opportunity can uncover a potential that was previously unknown.

Placing emphasis on intrinsic value allows the opportunity portfolio to be prioritized in a way that a fundamental element can be realized. Now the focus and time can be properly distributed by the sales professional. Knowing that resources are efficiently allocated between opportunities. This increases the bottom line potential for more sales to go to completion. As mentioned earlier successful selling is the end goal for all sales teams everywhere.