CRM Software Support: Opportunities
My! my! my! Look at all those opportunities. If you are like many of our customers (and ourselves), you collect opportunities. One thing all sales people hate to do is close an opportunity. Unless they won it, that is.
‘But Boss, I just know they are going to come around one day. It’s only been open for six years! Surely that ^#$##% competitor’s brand has worn out by now!’
It’s time to make some hard decisions. When is an opportunity no longer an opportunity? When you win it, it closes. When they go with someone else, you probably close it. What about the no decisions or the deferred decisions? How long should you keep them open? It depends on what you sell. We recommend that you close the opportunity if it no longer qualifies as a new prospect. If your rules for creating an opportunity are 1) decision maker, 2) budget, 3) active project and 4) deadline for decision, then if any of these go away, close the opportunity. If they decide to defer a decision until sometime next year, close it and reopen it when they have a new deadline. If the decision maker vanishes, close the opportunity, put the account in your nurture campaign and reopen the opportunity when you have identified a new decision maker. Your sales people aren’t going to be happy because they will see their close percentage rate decrease. Remind them that keeping them open for a long time increase their average open time.
So the end of the year is a good time to clean out all those stale opportunities and start with a new, fresh pipeline.
Another thing to review is how you are using the opportunity type fields. Most all CRM systems have a way to grossly classify an opportunity. This is a field that gets out of hand. Take a look at all the values that you are using and make a policy – just like you did for Account Types. Then make sure that going forward you maintain the standard.