Opportunity Management With Zoho CRM (Opportunities and How To Maintain Them)

You should think of any opportunity as a potential source of revenue for your business. In other words, it’s a chance for you to offer your product or service to others. Opportunities occur exclusively in a CRM because sales opportunities are not the same as sales transactions. Not surprisingly, leads and opportunities are inextricably linked. Assume a marketing specialist is approached by a department store that needs assistance with their social media strategy. The consultant has a new lead (the store) as well as a new opportunity (to consult on social media strategy).

What should you learn about opportunities and how does a customer relationship manager (CRM) like Zoho help your opportunities management? Read on to discover more about this SaaS.

Where Does An Opportunity Come From?

Depending on how you produce leads, you will be able to gain sales opportunities concurrently or later. If you buy a list of leads, you won’t know if they’re interested in your product or service right away. You’ll need to contact each one to see if an opportunity exists. When you use a CRM to lead form on your website, each submission automatically generates a new lead and an opportunity.

Lead management is a subject that both marketing and sales practitioners are interested in. Your marketing team needs to know who your leads are and where they come from so that they can create successful email campaigns and invest in high-return marketing activities. Meanwhile, the sales staff must link those leads with opportunity management in order to locate future sales, build partnerships, and produce revenue. Opportunities in the pipeline are also very valuable to sales managers because they use pipeline management data to predict future results.

What Is The Aim Of An Opportunity Management Tool?

Opportunities are valuable to your business, and if managed correctly, they will certainly improve your bottom line. You must ensure that you are efficiently managing your opportunities and that your teams are equipped with the necessary tools to make the most of each and every one of them. Using data-driven forecasts, a successful opportunity management tool will help you prioritise your prospects and concentrate on the ones with a higher propensity to convert. 

Business owners must consider the past of a given opportunity as well as the next steps required to win it. This entails taking a 360-degree view of anything relevant to a specific opportunity. You can see every interaction, operation, and stakeholder involved in this way, allowing you to make informed decisions.

How To Begin With Opportunity Management

Create your pipeline

A well-defined, usable sales pipeline is the foundation of all sales opportunity management. However, deciding what yours would look like can be a difficult process to manage. There is no one-size-fits-all model that will function for any company by default. In certain instances, the efficiency of your pipeline is determined by its ability to be neatly partitioned and readily visible. CRMs are among the tools available to ensure that this is the case. Many CRMs have pipeline design and maintenance software, allowing you to create your own stages to act as reference points for the maturity and viability of deals as they advance.

Do Your Research On The Resources Available To You

Understanding each person’s habits and market potential is critical to successful opportunity management. Contacts can respond at varying rates, have varying budgets, and wield varying levels of decision-making authority. These considerations, among others, will influence your assessment of the feasibility of a specific contract. They will also assist you in assigning future dollar sums to the deals you’re following.

The argument here is that research is critical to opportunity management performance. It enables you to prioritise more lucrative, feasible offers while also improving your ability to understand and communicate with contacts.

Keep In Touch With Your Prospects And Keep Track Of Their Progress

Keep an eye on your prospects’ interest in doing business with you. That entails keeping in touch with them on a regular basis. Follow up on any questions they might have in a timely and competent manner. Contact them at each point of the sales process.

By specifying the pipeline, you’re ensuring that the time it takes to go from stage to stage is not arbitrary. There are concrete acts that suggest where an opportunity is in your pipeline. You won’t know if they’re able to make those moves unless you stay in touch with them.

It’s also important to keep track of the experiences you have. Many CRMs have tools for recording any contact between your business and its opportunities. This is made possible by features such as automated sales activity reports, shared inboxes, and email monitoring.

Maintain A Comprehensive View Of The Sales Pipeline In Order To Find Areas For Growth

One advantage of building a sales pipeline model in a CRM is being able to recognise where you’re missing out on opportunities. This type of perspective helps you to identify gaps in your sales process that need to be filled. Sales opportunity management entails more than just keeping track of individual deals. On an organisational level, it can reveal a lot about the sales activities.

For example, you may discover that you are losing a disproportionate amount of business between the initial sales presentation and obtaining decision-makers’ buy-in. If that’s the case, you’ll know you need to change the way your salespeople deliver presentations. This could involve rethinking their teaching, reorganising demonstrations, or redesigning the presentation materials.

A well-executed opportunity management strategy is almost mandatory for maintaining effective sales processes. You must be able to monitor and appreciate your deals before they close in order to know how to handle them most effectively.

Final Thoughts

The process of monitoring future sales as they pass through your pipeline is known as sales opportunity management (or sales pipeline management). CRMs make the task of managing sales opportunities much simpler. Many would let you create your own funnel to track your prospects, their potential as customers, and the best and most suitable ways to win their company. Proper sales opportunity management necessitates time and effort, but the benefits are well worth it. If your company is having difficulty managing sales opportunities outside of ZohoCRM, it might be time to consider using Zoho CRM for upscaling your business.