OPTIMIZING SALES

OPPORTUNITY
MANAGEMENT
12 Critical Questions Sales Leaders Must Ask
by Mike Schultz & John Doerr

Build a consistent, repeatable process for managing

important sales opportunities and improving win rates.
Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

“In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they
won was over themselves…self-discipline with all of them came first.”
Harry S. Truman

If you’ve spent any time in complex, business-
to-business sales, you know there's been
a significant shift in how you create sales
opportunities, win sales opportunities, and
grow accounts. More sellers are missing
quota, sales cycles are extending, buyers
are more sophisticated and informed, more
buyers are involved in every purchase, and the
competition isn’t exactly standing aside to make
your life easy.
You know how tough it is.
Yet, while some are struggling to keep up,
others are finding consistent success. We’ve
researched and published extensively about
how sales conversations need to change if
sellers want to find themselves winning sales
and beating their goals (Fig. 1). While many
organizations are finding increased success by
changing their approach to sales conversations,
few have yet to address serious issues with how
they manage sales opportunities.
two related initiatives—improving ability to
communicate value (41%) and optimizing sales
processes (32%)—these represented three of the
top four priorities altogether.
These are good priorities, because selling isn't
getting any easier. Here are some observations
gleaned from our client work and through the
RAIN Group Center for Sales Research:
+ Buyers are less patient. If sellers don’t
impress buyers immediately with their
professional approach and competence,
and continue to do so throughout all
interactions, they get dismissed.
+ With more sales happening over the
phone and Internet, and with purchasing
organizations becoming more
sophisticated, it’s more difficult to build
relationships with buyers.

Sales leaders are now starting to take notice.

In The Top-Performing Sales Organization
study, 40% of respondents said “Improving
sales opportunity approach and planning” is
a top priority for the next year.1 Along with
1. Mike Schultz, John Doerr, and Mary Flaherty, The
Top-Performing Sales Organization (RAIN Group, 2015).
Forthcoming.
2. Mike Schultz and John Doerr, What Sales Winners
Do Differently (RAIN Group, 2013).

Figure 1. What Buyers Want from Sellers

The RAIN Group Center for Sales Research studied 731 business-to-business purchases from buyers who represent $3.1 billion in purchasing
power, and published the results in the What Sales Winners Do Differently report.2 We asked the decision makers for these purchases to compare
the seller to whom they awarded their business with the seller who came in second place.

Sales winners are more likely to:

+ Connect the dots: they understand buyers' needs and craft compelling solutions
Connect
+ Connect with people: they listen to buyers and connect with them personally
+ Persuade buyers they will achieve worthwhile results
Convince + Minimize the perception of risk by demonstrating experience, building trust, and inspiring confidence
+ Persuade buyers they are the best choice
+ Collaborate with buyers by being proactive and responsive
Collaborate
+ Collaborate with buyers to educate them with new ideas and perspectives and bring value to the table themselves

This is what sales winners do differently than the rest. What we don’t often see is good planning to make sure sellers connect, convince, and
collaborate as powerfully as possible. We’re working on changing that.

© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com | 1

Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

+ Now that more people are involved in
the decision-making process, sales cycles
are lengthening and sellers are struggling
to gain agreement among the full group of
buyers. This leads to stalled sales and
losing to ‘no decision.’
+ Buyers have a heightened awareness of
and aversion to risk, often looking to run
pilots, start small, and otherwise figure out
how to test vendors before committing to
larger agreements.
If sellers want to win in this environment, they
must plan to win from the start. Anything short
of this and they set themselves up for failure.
Furthermore, many sellers who are planning to
win now have to change how they plan, or they
will find themselves with more losses, outfoxed
by savvier competitors.
Even with all the difficulties in the selling
environment, there are still sellers and sales
organizations who are winning consistently
and who get sales opportunity management and
planning right. They:
+ Develop a consistent, repeatable process
for collaborating internally and with
buyers to win sales
+ Gain agreement among multiple buyers
+ Build and communicate maximum value
to each buyer
+ Speed up the sales process and minimize
losses to no decision
In this report, we pose 12 critical questions
sales leaders must ask about how they approach
sales opportunity management. As they say, if
you want to find the right answers, you have
to ask the right questions. Those who consider
these questions, and then install the discipline
to approach sales opportunity management the
right way, will find themselves on the path to
greatly increased sales wins.

+ Focus maximum energy on the most

important opportunities

+ Develop winning strategies for each

opportunity to improve win rates

© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com | 2

Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management
12 CRITICAL QUESTIONS SALES LEADERS MUST ASK
Win Labbing as an overall
concept, along with the
term itself, has a very
important effect on
culture. If a seller says,
“Let’s build an opportunity
plan,” it feels flat. Like
a chore. No energy. But
when a seller says, “Let’s
Win Lab it,” you get
the opposite: energy,
enthusiasm, and focus.
© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com
1. Does your team pursue
your most important sales
opportunities with high intensity
and rigor?
Sales leaders often complain that:
+ Sellers are not proactive, failing to drive
their most important sales opportunities
forward with dogged determination
+ Even when sellers are proactive, they
don’t follow a consistent process to
leverage the resources at their disposal,
and take all the right actions, to put
themselves in the best position to win
the sale
Much of this is cultural. Changing this requires
that people literally change the way they talk
about sales opportunity planning.
Enter the concept of the “Win Lab.”
A Win Lab is a collaborative, rigorous process
to generate the best ideas, strategies, and action
plans to win a sales opportunity.
The definition of a Win Lab includes a number
of characteristics, each one a significant
ingredient for achieving the best outcomes.
Win Labbing is collaborative. When sellers
work together with the right resources at their
companies, and collaborate directly with their
buyers, they are much more successful than
when they work alone.
Win Labbing is a rigorous process. Without
a standard approach to sales opportunity
management, including an effective planning
tool, a collaboration process, and the right job
aids and checklists to aid thinking, they often
forget important steps, lose focus, and fail.
Win Labbing inspires ideas and strategies.
When performing win/loss analyses on major
opportunities, we’ve heard countless times,
“The competition did something bold and
creative that we didn’t think of, and they won.”
A fundamental tenet of Win Labbing is that
it creates the platform for coming up with
the ideas and strategies that will leave the
competition scratching their heads and losing
to you.
Win Labbing results in an action plan. The act
of planning done right almost inevitably creates
energy, enthusiasm, and confidence in pursuing
a sale. What often lacks afterward is execution.
With a written action plan, sellers know what
to do now, next, and for the rest of the sales
process. A written action plan also provides
sales managers with the opportunity to help
sellers make the plan as strong as possible, and
hold sellers accountable for getting everything
done and done right.
Takeaway: Introduce the concept of Win
Labbing to your sales teams.
2. Is the opportunity planning
process collaborative?
When sellers create opportunity plans, they
tend to do them alone. The problem is that
sellers (and people) are almost universally good
at some things and not others. When they work
alone, sellers often either make critical mistakes,
or completely miss opportunities to:
+ Investigate buyers and their situations,
challenges, and strategic agendas
+ Discover both explicit and hidden needs
+ Build components of the solution that
could make a difference for the buyer
+ Create and communicate the return on
investment (impact) case
+ Define the most compelling value and
sales messaging for a particular sale
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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

+ Prepare and respond to objections and
minimize vulnerabilities
+ Strategize ideas and creative tactics to give
them every advantage to win
+ Create the action plan that will best move
the sale forward
The real magic happens when the right
players on the team work together in the Win
Lab to cover these various areas and build a
compelling opportunity plan.
Our research bears this out. In our Benchmark
Report on High Performance in Strategic Account
Management,3 we analyzed the factors that
set the companies with the strongest revenue,
profit, and client satisfaction growth in their
existing accounts apart from the rest. One of the
greatest differences between high performers
and the rest was their internal, collaborative
process to discover ways they could be of most
value to their accounts (Fig. 2).
This is one reason why the concept of Win
Labbing is so important. It implies and drives
collaboration, which drives more wins.
Takeaway: Encourage collaborative Win
Labbing for important sales opportunities.
3. How strong is your sales process?
The purpose of sales opportunity management
is to drive opportunities through the sales
process and win—which begs the questions
of how well defined your sales process is, and
how much guidance you embed in the process
to help sellers move opportunities forward. It’s
challenging to build a plan to move a buyer
through a sales process if a seller doesn't know
the process, or if it’s not very good.
Recently, there’s been backlash against sales
leaders focusing on improving their sales
processes. For example, the following was
published in the Harvard Business Review:

Sales leaders have long fixated on process

Figure 2. Process to internally assess and evaluate discipline...But recently sales has been
additional value that can be brought to strategic caught off guard by a dramatic shift in
accounts customers’ buying behavior. Even as
leadership has tightened compliance with
60%
the processes that have served so well, sales
performance has grown increasingly
erratic…The sales machine is stalling….
10% Leaders must abandon their fixation on
% of Respondents

40%
High Performers process compliance and embrace a flexible
are 2.8x more
effective approach to selling driven by sales reps’
reliance on insight and judgment.4
20% 1%
38%
Based on our research and experience, advice to
abandon the sales and opportunity management
16%
processes is terribly misguided. We have
0%
found the opposite to be true: a focus on sales
High Avg. / Below Avg.
Performers Performers
process, good process management techniques
(including guides and checklists), and the
Very Effective Effective

The same holds true for sales opportunity

management. Those companies that work
collaboratively to plan for ways to maximize the
value they can offer, and how to communicate
that value with buyers, win the most sales across
the board.
3. Mike Schultz, John Doerr, and Mary Flaherty,
Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account
Management (RAIN Group, 2012).
4. Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas
Toman, "Dismantling the Sales Machine," Harvard Business
Review (Nov. 2013).

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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management
discipline to follow the process doesn’t hamper
insight and judgment, it unleashes them.
As Atul Gawande, bestselling author of The
Checklist Manifesto wrote, “…Under conditions
of complexity, not only are checklists a help,
they are required for success. There must always
be room for judgment, but judgment aided—
and even enhanced—by procedure.”5
He goes on to say:
The fear people have about the idea of
adherence to a protocol is rigidity. They
imagine mindless automatons, heads down
in a checklist, incapable of looking out their
windshield and coping with the real world
in front of them. But what you find, when a
checklist is well made, is exactly the
opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff
out of the way.
A well-designed sales process—one that
includes smartly-placed checklists, templates,
and tools—guides sellers and enhances
judgment (and insight), and gets the dumb stuff
out of the way. These are outcomes craved by
many a sales leader.
Improving Your Sales Process
Let’s assume for a minute you are like the
majority of sales leaders who have prioritized
sales process improvement. What you do
depends on where you start. In The Top-
Performing Sales Organization study, we define
five levels of sales process maturity:
1. Ad Hoc (Chaos): No consistent process
or framework for planning to win
opportunities.
2. Emerging: Some consistency and
planning framework, but still work to do
to standardize it and make it complete.
3. Defined: Our opportunity management
process is defined and we have a tool to
guide us to win opportunities.
© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com
4. Managed (Adoptive): Number 3, plus
it’s easy to use, includes specific details
and guidance for selling, the process is
managed well and helpful to sellers.
5. World-Class (Adaptive): Number 4,
plus it’s always being measured and
improved, it includes best practices for
strategies and tactics across the sales
cycle, and the process and planning
tools are embedded in sellers' workflow
and technology.
If you want to improve your process, first ask
yourself where you are. Then…
+ Get to level 3: Define your process. If
you haven’t defined your process, do so.
You can’t raise the bar on sales success
across the board until everyone has a
shared roadmap.
+ Get to level 4: Create playbooks,
checklists, and job aids in critical areas.
Playbooks, checklists, and job aids make
it so sellers don’t have to keep reinventing
the wheel, and don’t have to remember
long lists off the tops of their heads.
Take away that stress, and sellers can focus
on unleashing creativity and judgment.
+ Get to level 5: Commit to continuous
improvement. The difference between
a process at level 4 versus level 5 is that
the process is “continuously improved,
supports maximum value for buyers, and
consistently helps sellers win sales and
develop deep relationships with buyers.”
This is the pinnacle of the pinnacle. Only
8% of all organizations get here. But
when they do, the results are impressive
(Fig. 3).
Takeaway: A strong sales process enhances
seller judgement and insight, and drives
compelling return on investment.
5. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get
Things Right (Picador, 2011).
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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

Figure 3. The ROI of Improving Your Sales Process

According to our The Top-Performing Sales Organization research, 51% of respondents have not formally defined their sales process. Here
are some eye-opening metrics from the 49% of those who have, comparing level 3 “Defined,” level 4 “Managed,” and level 5 “World-class.”

60%
Level 5: World-class
57%
52% Level 4: Managed
Avg. Win/Loss Rate

Level 3: Defined
44%

30% 30%
25% 26%
22% 22% 23%

0%
Proposals Won Proposals Lost to Proposals Lost to
Competitors No Decision

60%
% of Respondents

We also found that the more mature the sales process, the less likely and less
deeply companies were to discount their prices and the more likely they were
to grow revenue by 20% or more.
30%
31%
So not only did they win more with stronger prices, but they also grew more.
18%
14% Along with pipeline and pricing metrics, we compared the maturity of the sales process to other
factors, such as customer and value focus and seller time management.
0%
Grew revenue by
20% or more

The more mature the sales process, the more sellers focused on driving maximum value for the most important buyers, and have time to
do it.

100%

92%
% of Respondents

88%
82%
75% 74%

50% 57% 58%

50%

34%

0%
Our sales organization Our sales process is People in selling roles
focuses on driving customer-focused and maps manage their time and
maximum value to the buyer’s buying process day effectively

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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management
4. Is your opportunity management opportunities get the full court press and which
process customer-centric? do not.
Everyone says their company is customer-
focused, but consider the following from The
Top-Performing Sales Organization study:
+ 35% of respondents did not agree that
their sales organization focuses on driving
maximum value for the customer6
+ 53% of respondents did not agree that
their sales process was customer-focused
Companies like to say they are customer-
focused, but what they say and what’s true
often aren’t the same. For example, popular
opportunity plan templates contain prompts
for capturing information about seller mission,
seller sales objectives, seller positioning and
standing, and so forth. What about the mission
for the customer? Value proposition for the
customer? Buyer objectives? Maximizing and
communicating buyer impact? New Reality you
can help the customer to achieve?7
It’s difficult to have a customer-focused sales
organization when the planning tools and
prompts are overly seller-focused. Certainly,
sellers need to analyze their own situation,
pursue the right opportunities, and build an
action plan to win, but this should accompany
similar analysis on value for the customer.
Unfortunately for many companies, they’re
using the wrong tool, which guides sellers to
unhelpful, overly seller-focused behaviors.
Takeaway: You can’t be customer-focused when
your tools and language are seller-focused.
5. Do sellers assign a pursuit
intensity rating to their
opportunities?
Regardless of size, we’ve never heard from an
organization, “We have a lot of resources, and
funds are unlimited, so we can pursue every
opportunity that comes across our radar screen
with high intensity.”
The fact is we all have limited resources and we
have to make difficult decisions about which
© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com
By assigning a pursuit intensity rating, you can
be analytical in how you assign resources. Core
factors that affect pursuit intensity include:
+ Decision timing
+ Current position
+ Competitive positioning
+ Financial attractiveness of opportunity
+ Current importance of account
+ Account growth potential
+ Relationship strength
+ Effort and investment required to win
+ Attractiveness of logo
+ Likelihood of opportunity cancellation
+ Win probability
Define the right factors for your organization
and analyze your opportunities, and you’ll
know which opportunities to pursue with high
intensity and resources, which to pursue with
your typical win process, and which not to
pursue at all.
When we work with organizations to analyze
their opportunity pursuit intensity, we find that
they are wasting resources chasing business
that is not worth their time. Once they stop
doing this, they find that not pursuing these
frees up resources to pursue the rest of their
opportunities with the right rigor and resources.
Takeaway: You can only pursue the right
opportunities with the appropriate intensity if
you know which ones they are.
6. Do sellers leverage the right
people and resources on your team?
Sellers systematically miss opportunities to
bring in the best people and resources to help
6. Respondents answered either neutral, disagree, or
strongly disagree.
7. Mike Schultz, "RAIN Selling: How to Lead Masterful
Sales Conversations," RAIN Selling Blog (blog), http://
www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/rain-selling-how-to-lead-
masterful-sales-conversations/.
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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management
them win important sales. Sellers often think
too parochially. Leaders tell us they think this
is because of an underlying protectiveness of
their clients, unwillingness to collaborate, or
thinking that they must reinvent the wheel
every time they sell. We often find these not
to be true, and that sellers don’t leverage their
team and resources because they forget these
resources exist.
There are typically people at any organization
who can help sellers because these people have:
+ Deep industry expertise
+ Deep functional expertise
+ Executive-level connections
+ Strengths the seller doesn’t have, such as
needs analysis, solution crafting,
negotiation and agreement making,
presentation, group facilitation, etc.
+ Inside knowledge of the buyer’s company
+ The right personality, background, and
gravitas
Imagine the difference if a) these resources
existed,8 and b) sellers remembered to use them.
It gets the dumb stuff out of the way, aids
judgment, and unleashes creativity for winning
the sale.
SALES RESOURCES
When it comes to resources, sellers forget they have at their
disposal:
+ Intellectual capital
+ Case studies
+ Presentation material
+ Product and service information
+ Buyer-interaction opportunities
+ Needs discovery resources and tools
+ Sales conversation, opportunity planning, account
planning, objection handling, and solution crafting guides
+ Industry and functional experience guides
+ Proposal checklists
+ Strategies for winning against competitors
+ Sales messaging resources
© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com
Takeaway: Build helpful tools, make resources
available to sellers, and don't let them forget
these resources exist.
7. Are your opportunity
management processes and tools
customized to suit the dynamics of
your sale?
There are many diet and exercise plans that say,
“A lot of people try to modify our process. Do
so at your own risk. Those who have modified
our process don’t achieve the results of those
who do it exactly as we prescribe.”
Some sales opportunity management purveyors
live by the same philosophy: our way or the
highway. They don’t allow for language changes
in their method, changes in data capture and
analysis frameworks, or changes in length and
depth of the planning tools.
This is a mistake.
Some companies have individual sales in the tens
and hundreds of millions of dollars. Analysis of
these opportunities should be more in depth and
robust than those that are $50k. Some companies
sell in teams, with each person playing specific
roles, but the planning framework doesn’t
allow for multiple sellers to be named. Some
companies have their own language around
customers, their needs, company offerings, value
propositions, sales messaging, and so on. These
need to be in the tools they use or sellers will get
confused and frustrated.
For some companies, especially those
just getting started with sales opportunity
management, off-the-shelf planning frameworks
are helpful. However, as a company matures, it
should customize sales opportunity planning
tools for the unique dynamics of its sale.
Takeaway: Customize your sales process and
opportunity management tools.
8. It’s the addition of these tools and resources that
represent the jump from a sales process at ‘level 3’ and one
at ‘level 4’. See "get to level 4" on page 5.
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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

8. Are sellers satisfying the buying 2. The Approver, whose primary interest is
criteria of multiple buyers? allocation and best use of funds.

There’s no question that buying cycles are
lengthening and more buyers are getting
involved with the sale. In many business-to-
business sales, there are five or more buyers
involved in the purchase decision.9
Unfortunately, many sales opportunity planning
processes and tools don’t account for satisfying
the buying criteria of multiple buyers. They
should. (Well, at least the one you use should.)
It’s no secret that the more buyers there are in
the sale, the more likely the decision itself will
take longer than usual, or stall out altogether.
We’ve found the sellers who succeed most with
decision making groups:
+ Identify buyers and categorize them into
five decision roles
+ Facilitate buyer alignment
Each sale can have up to five kinds of decision
makers:10
1. The Business Driver, whose primary
interest is return on investment.
3. The Evaluator, whose primary interest
is evaluating the purchase as both
operational (“Will this work here?”)
and personal (“Will this work for me?”).
4. The Champion, whose primary interest
is getting the project approved or helping
you succeed personally.
5. The Domino, whose primary interest is
influencing the action and direction of
their teams.
The best sellers identify each, and make sure
they cater to their specific needs.
The fifth decision role, The Domino, is critically
important, yet rarely discussed, and thus
deserves special attention (see call out).
Takeaway: Analyze and satisfy the buying
criteria of the 5 decision roles.
9. Kelly Liyakasa, "B2B Tech Buying Cycle Is 20 Percent
Longer," CRM Magazine (Sept. 2012).
10. Mike Schultz, "5 Decision Roles in Every Sale," RAIN
Selling Blog (blog), http://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/5-
decision-roles-in-every-sale/.

THE DOMINO EFFECT

The Domino is the person (or two) in the sale who, should they bless the opportunity or the seller, increases the odds of the sale closing
because others will follow their lead. In many complex sales, if there’s one person who says, “We should do this,” or “We should do this with
you,” everything else falls into place.

In one sale, for example, there were three buyers in a staff function advocating for a purchase. They were Champions and Evaluators. The
business leaders they were supporting were Business Drivers looking to achieve great ROI. A big challenge for the seller, though, was that
several of the Business Drivers had a preference for another provider.

One other senior executive was loosely involved in the process. She was a tangential Evaluator, who trusted her team to make decisions.
In general, however, when she expressed a preference to make something a priority, or preference for a particular provider, everyone else
tended to follow.

The sellers identified this person as The Domino. They worked tirelessly to arrange schedules and build a case for The Domino to attend
an experience the seller had created for the buyers around their offering. After several weeks of effort, they got confirmation The Domino
would attend.

At the end of the session, The Domino said to the core buying team, “This was great. Looking forward to seeing it all get underway and
working with these folks.” What had been a nine month process up to this point quickly turned to contracting. Two weeks later, the seller
won the opportunity.

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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management
9. Do sellers facilitate agreement
among buyers so the sale can move
forward?
Sellers who succeed at selling to multiple buyers:
+ Talk to buyers individually to uncover
their concerns, needs, and decision-
making criteria
+ Facilitate discussions and the sales process
to connect buyers to gain mutual
agreement on their needs, the
intervention, and the action plan
+ Tailor and customize their solutions
carefully to make sure the ultimate
offering will work for all
+ Make sure the offering is easy to buy
The best sellers also motivate buyers to advocate
for them and their solution. These sellers
create internal Champions who not only want
the seller to win, but who are also willing to
advocate publicly for the seller. For multiple-
buyer sales, at least one influential buyer must
be inspired to put a stake in the ground and
make a stand for moving forward. When they
do, they are not simply Champions, they are
Change Champions.
The larger the buyer group, the more resistant
they will be to change. The energy and effort
of insiders to break through the inertia and
get something underway helps tremendously.
Having a Change Champion in your corner can
make all the difference.
One of the best ways to develop Change
Champions is to create shared experiences
for buyers, much like what our seller did in
the example to reach The Domino and gain
momentum across all buyers for moving
forward. These kinds of experiences can be
instrumental for increasing momentum,
building trust, reducing the perception of risk,
and getting multiple buyers on the same page.
Once sellers have made their value case (see
question 10) and created a Change Champion,
© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com
they should equip their Change Champion with
resources to help them spread the message and
persuade internally.
Provide Change Champions with examples,
case studies, messaging, research, custom built
presentations, ROI cases, and so on, that they
can use to socialize the ideas, and win advocates.
Takeaway: Create Change Champions willing
to advocate for you proactively.
10. Do sellers craft and
communicate a compelling value
case?
In our What Sales Winners Do Differently
research, we learned that the winner of a sale
was more than twice as likely as the second-
place finisher to make the case for why they
offer overall superior value.
It’s confounding to us that some of the most
common and widely used sales opportunity
management planning tools do not include
prompts for the seller to craft and communicate
their value case. It's also missed in the
corresponding training that accompanies
these tools. This is a huge mistake for many
companies and sellers, and a significant
opportunity for those proactive about making
the value case rock solid.
To make a compelling value case (and create
Change Champions), you must build the most
compelling value proposition to win each
important opportunity.11 A value proposition
has 3 components:
1. Resonate: Maximize perception of
reward because people will be motivated
to buy, and advocate for your solution
with their colleagues, when their
imaginations are captured and their
desire is maximized.
11. Mike Schultz and John Doerr, Insight Selling:
Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently
(Wiley, 2014). See chapter 3.
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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management
2. Substantiate: Minimize perceived risk
because most buyers won’t act if they
think it’s too risky.12 13 They must believe
you can achieve what you say you can.
And they must believe they won’t look
bad by hitching themselves to your wagon.
3. Differentiate: Position yourself as the
best choice so when the buyers buy, they
buy from you and not your competitor.
A good way to check if your value case is rock
solid is to ask the following four questions:
1. Why Act? The initiative must be seen by
the buyer as important.
2. Why Now? The initiative must be seen
by the buyer as urgent or other issues will
take precedence.
3. Why Us? Without a compelling answer
to this question, the buyer will pressure
price or select another provider or option.
Buyers Are Skeptical—Make the 4. Why Trust? Buyers are risk averse.
Without a compelling answer to this
“Why Trust” Case
question, fear of failure will block the
initiative from moving forward.
In a study by Bain & Company,
375 companies were asked if
For every important opportunity in your
they believed they delivered a
pipeline, the answers to these questions must be
“superior value proposition” to
compelling or your sale is in jeopardy.
clients.14 Eighty percent said yes.
Bain then asked the clients of
Takeaway: Make your value case rock solid for
these companies if they agreed
each important opportunity.
that the specific company from
which they bought delivered a
superior value proposition. Only
11. Do sellers plan in advance to
8% agreed.
inspire buyers with insights?
Buyers don’t believe they get what
The number one greatest difference between
they expected or were promised
sellers who win and those who come in second
by sellers. They’ve been burned
place is that winners educate buyers with new
in the past and are skeptical of
ideas and perspectives. Few sellers, however,
sellers and their claims.
plan in advance to create insights for buyers.
With a little structure, support, and discipline,
they can.
Think for a minute about your buyers. Where
does their thinking typically need to change?
Are they approaching certain problems the
wrong way? Have they tried and failed to achieve
a goal in ways that you could have predicted?
© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com
What concepts or offerings are your competitors
selling that are not the best for buyers?
Assuming you can answer these questions, ask,
“How should they be thinking about these areas
that would allow them to make better decisions
and achieve better results?” Then prepare:
+ Questions to uncover their perceptions in
these areas
+ Questions to disrupt their thinking about
those perceptions
+ Questions and message points to reframe
their thinking
+ Questions and message points to direct
their thinking down a different path
+ Message points to build belief in the
new path
Will sellers remember to do this? Will they
(can they?) do it themselves with no support?
Unaided and unprompted, typically not. If,
however, it’s in your sales conversation planning
template and process, and your sellers are
provided ideas for what to ask and say, they will.
Sellers spark ideas with buyers when they ask
these kinds of questions. They guide buyer
thinking down new paths. Not only do they
sell like winners, they create differentiation and
add value over-and-above whatever product or
service they are selling.
Only the most sophisticated and natural sellers
do this organically. Everyone else needs support
and planning.
Takeaway: Plan to inspire buyers with insight.
12. In What Sales Winners Do Differently, we found
that sales winners attend much more to reducing buyer’s
perception of risk than second-place finishers.
13. Mike Schultz, "Risky Business: 4 Areas Buyers
Achieve Risk in Sales," RAIN Selling Blog (blog), http://
www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/risky-business-4-areas-
buyers-perceive-risk-in-sales/.
14. James Allen et al., Closing the Delivery Gap (Bain &
Company, 2005).
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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

12. Are sales opportunity plans persuasive unless you can put yourself in the
written, compelling, and built to position of the buyer, and ask yourself if you
would be persuaded.
win the sale?
After Win Labbing, a plan should be great.
Creating sales opportunity plans is too often
When it is, and it’s reviewed by leadership,
viewed by sellers as a chore: something to fill
their positive feedback and support will give
out quickly so they can check the I-filled-it-
sellers confidence in executing, support positive
out box. If a plan is worth creating, it’s worth
seller attitudes, and inspire motivation to drive
creating properly or you put the sale at risk.
opportunities forward.
Not all opportunities warrant the same rigor
and resources for either planning or pursuit,
Takeaway: Make sure sales opportunity plans
but when the stakes are high, plans should be
are written, compelling, and built to win the
rigorous and impressive.
sale.
Once a plan is written, it increases the
likelihood the seller will execute it,15 and allows
sales managers and others to challenge the plan,
vet it, and improve it.
15. Commitments that are verbal, written, and
It’s in the vetting and improving where the real made public are much more likely to be acted upon
than those that only meet one or two of the criteria.
value comes. The first draft of a plan may be
Written plans that are reviewed by managers or others
terrible, okay, or good. However it is, you can’t then meet all the criteria. Source: Robert B. Cialdini,
make it better unless you can review it and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, rev. ed. (New York:
provide feedback. You won’t know if a plan is HarperBusiness, 2006).

PLAYS AND BIG PLAYS

The action plan component of a sales opportunity plan spells out the plays a seller will run to win the sale. Plays are actions sellers take
during the sales process to move the sale forward and maximize the probability of winning. Not all plays, however, are built equally.

There are plays, and there are Big Plays. A Big Play is a bold, atypical action a seller might take to change buyer thinking, inspire buyer
action, and set themselves apart from the competition. Big Plays require investment by the seller and seller organization. Sellers should
employ Big Plays when pursuit intensity is high, and the value of winning a sale is significant.

Examples of big plays include:

+ Flying a buyer and their team to another customer site to allow them to experience what it’s like to work with you and see your
offering in action

+ Offering a money-back guarantee for a pilot project to prove to the customer your solution will succeed

+ Putting some, or all, of your fees contingent on achieving success milestones for the customer

+ Performing a significant amount of work ‘on spec’ that no other seller would be willing to do, that puts you in the lead position to
win the work

+ Creating a surprise-and-delight moment with anything you might do in your selling process that makes the buyer might say, “Wow,
that must have taken a lot of effort. Nobody else did that for us.”

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Optimizing Sales Opportunity Management

BONUS Question: How are we + Build tools and resources to support

going to win this sale?
It’s a natural question that every leader should
ask about important opportunities. It’s the point
of this whole report. Divining the answer to this
question is the crux of opportunity planning.
When leaders ask this question, what they don’t
want to hear is half-baked conjecture about if
and how they will win.
Important opportunities need plans. Plans that
are compelling, persuasive, and defensible.
To get here, it’s leaders who need discipline.
Discipline to:
sellers’ intense pursuit of major
opportunities
+ Inspire, train, and require sellers to
build plans for major opportunities
+ Review and improve plans collaboratively
so they become persuasive and compelling
Sales leaders who have the discipline to
implement these tend to be quite happy with
their sellers' answers to the "How are we going
to win this sale?" question.

+ Change how selling is done at their

organization to adapt to the new world of
buying and selling

+ Optimize their sales process

© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com | 13

RAIN Group Can Help You Master Sales
Opportunity Management

40% of sales leaders made improving their sales opportunity approach and
planning a top priority for the year ahead. Are you among them?
Thinking about the 12 questions in this report and how your sales opportunity
management approach stacks up is a great start—it creates the framework for strong WINNERS SELL RADICALLY
opportunity management processes. DIFFERENTLY THAN SECOND-
PLACE FINISHERS
Now what you need is the engine: a systematic, repeatable process for maximizing the
In our groundbreaking What Sales Winners
value you bring to buyers, differentiating yourself from the competition, and consistently
Do Differently research, we studied what
winning more sales.
separates sales winners from second-place
finishers. According to buyers, among the
In RAIN Group's Mastering the Sales Opportunity training, your team will learn to build
top differences were:
and execute strategies to win opportunities of all sizes—from the everyday to the most
important—to hone in on value, speed up the sales cycle, and minimize losses. + Educated me with new ideas or
perspectives
In Mastering the Sales Opportunity, your team will learn how to: + Collaborated with me

1. Lead the Win Lab process and build strategies to win the most important sales + Persuaded me we would achieve
opportunities consistently results
+ Listened to me
2. Succeed with multiple decision makers and satisfy their decision-making criteria
+ Understood my needs
3. Create action plans to capture opportunities of various priority levels + Crafted a compelling solution
+ Connected with me personally
4. Identify the best opportunities, and use the necessary resources to win them
+ Overall value was superior
5. Maximize value for the buyer and focus on winning on it over price
Many sellers leave these to chance. With
Your team will also be introduced to the Sales Opportunity Planner , an easy-to-use tool
SM Mastering the Sales Opportunity, yours
to create a rigorous opportunity plan. The opportunity plan framework has been used won’t. They’ll plan to win.
successfully across industries to help our clients consistently win sales of all sizes.

Don't leave the most important part of your business to chance.

CONTACT US
info@raingroup.com
Contact us to learn how we can help you optimize your opportunity management http://www.raingroup.com
processes and get everyone on your team consistently winning the most important
sales.
LOCATIONS
AMERICAS • EMEA • APAC

© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com | 14

About RAIN Group

UNLEASH THE SALES POTENTIAL OF YOUR TEAM WITH RAIN GROUP

RAIN Group is a sales training, assessment, and performance improvement company that helps leading organizations improve sales
results. We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of salespeople, managers, and professionals in more than 62 countries increase their sales
significantly with our RAIN SellingSM methodology.

We can help you:

IMPLEMENT SALES TRAINING THAT DELIVERS
REAL RESULTS
RAIN Group’s sales training system inspires real change and
delivers real results that last. Our rigorous approach includes
sales team evaluation, customized training programs, robust
reinforcement, and coaching to help you and your team
develop sales and negotiation skills, and maximize your results.
IDENTIFY WHO CAN AND WILL SELL WITH
GREAT SUCCESS
Our assessments measure sales attributes and skills,
identifying the factors that really make a difference in sales
performance. Whether you’re looking to hire someone who
can and will sell, or looking to improve sales performance,
we’ll help you build the most successful sales team.

GROW YOUR KEY ACCOUNTS IMPLEMENT WORLD-CLASS SALES

At most companies, there’s a huge, untapped opportunity to
add more value—and thus sell more—to existing accounts.
We help our clients capitalize on these revenue growth
opportunities. Whether it’s simply increasing cross-selling
and up-selling or implementing a major strategic account
management program, we can help.
COACHING
We coach sellers, professionals, and leaders individually
and in groups to achieve the greatest and fastest increase in
sales results. And we train and certify leaders and managers
in our RAIN Sales Coaching system. Often, it’s RAIN Sales
Coaching that truly unlocks the team’s potential, and keeps
them motivated to produce the best results consistently.

Find out more about how RAIN Group can help you unleash the sales potential of your team by visiting
RAINGroup.com or calling (508) 405-0438.

RAIN GROUP’S CLIENTS

LOCATIONS
AMERICAS • EMEA • ASIA-PACIFIC

CONNECT WITH US

© RAIN Group | RAINGroup.com | 15