The sales process from lead generation to opportunity management has always been a difficult one to enforce, as sales reps are not people who tend to be process-oriented. Thus, many reps do not bother to do more with a CRM system than to use it as a digital Rolodex – schedule activities, write notes about meetings, and maybe once in a while, update a status. Getting a rep to fill out opportunity information and supply probabilities is like pulling teeth. In many organizations, the practice falls into disuse after an initial enthusiastic surge. In others, the rep will fill in the information immediately before a sales meeting when those numbers are due. Thus, the opportunity data becomes either meaningless or inflated. Sales numbers rarely match opportunity expectations, and the whole CRM process from the Sales point of view becomes suspect.
Making the opportunity process flow more organic is one way to tackle this problem. Rather than having reps fill in opportunity data, the opportunity data and weightings should be based on objective criteria on what the Rep actually fills in. Since activities are a highly-used portion of the CRM system, it makes a lot of sense to use activities to drive opportunities.
Using this approach, activities should contain an enforced categorization to identify the stage of the sales process that a user is in. They should also contain a rating system, in which the rep will give his or her personal feeling on the outcome of the activity just completed. The opportunity is then generated as the aggregate result of the rep’s ratings over various stages of the sales cycle, with different weights being applied to different stages. Over time, the weightings can be tweaked based on the experience of the organization (or the rep in general with a rep confidence rating), giving the sales manager and upper management a good forecast of the sales pipeline. Although not perfect for all organizations and certainly not the only viable opportunity management solution, an organic approach should be considered by every sales organization when implementing a new CRM system.
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