Why do so many CRM implementations behave as if every sales opportunity was created equal? If your organisation is involved in B2B or transactional B2C sales, a “one size fits all” approach might possibly work.
But if you are involved in complex B2B sales, and if you are selling to a mixture of new business and existing customers, you’ll almost certainly have a variety of different opportunity types.
These opportunity types will inevitably have different critical success factors, different degrees of difficulty, different average sales cycles, different average win rates and so on.
And if your opportunity management strategies fail to reflect these differences, coming up with accurate forecasts will be nigh-on impossible…
Four common opportunity types
It is striking (and unfortunate) how many CRM implementations still fail to properly reflect the distinctive differences that exist between key B2B opportunity types, which typically include most or all of the following:
