Jun 11, 2014 By Thomas Oriol

5 Conditions For Accepting a Sales Option Into Your Pipeline

in Sales

I recently came across an unusual sales opportunity for my company: thousands of potential seats (when our current average is around one hundred per client) from an industrial company (when our clients typically come from tech and professional services), and requirements combining software, analytics and sales training (when SaaS is our main activity).

I thought we couldn’t address this opportunity properly on our own and so I contacted a few potential partners for the sales training part of the project. One of them declined because such a large corporation didn’t match his definition of the ideal prospect.

I found that striking because we happen to share that definition: agile companies with 50 to 300 sales people. Plus, I am a strong believer in qualifying prospects out of the sales funnel to increase sales.

So why did I choose to pursue that freak opportunity nonetheless?

Financial Leverage

I see that opportunity as a sales call option adding leverage to my pipeline, like a financial call option would add leverage to a portfolio.

With a call option you can benefit from the increase in a stock price while limiting your investment to a fraction of that stock’s value. So the upside is high, with two downsides:

The call option is more volatile that the underlying stock.
If the stock price decreases the entire call option is lost.

A few carefully chosen call options can add bang to an asset portfolio at an acceptable cost. How does such a strategy translate to sales management?

Prudent Gambler

I see five conditions for accepting a sales call option in your pipeline:

1. Large upside

No need taking unusual risks if the returns are not unusually high. For sales, that could mean a giant opportunity amount, but also cracking a high-profile account, penetrating a fast-growing market or kick-starting a promising partnership.

2. Relevant needs

The opportunity may not correspond to the definition of your ideal prospect, but your products or services must match the challenges that specific prospect is facing. It would be foolish - and hopeless - to twist your value proposition according to whom you are talking to.

3. Access to deciders

That is a key condition, since protracted buying processes are a common trait of large prospects. Don’t launch your call option project before you have identified the decision makers and made sure they know what you are doing.

4. Restricted proposal

You should go in with a targeted proposal, that may not address the complete needs of the prospect right away but lets you show your best profile and limits the number of people involved in the buying process. That targeted proposal could be a pilot limited to one business unit for example.

5. Limited investment

No RFP, no technical documentation, no endless slide show. Prepare a punchy ten to 15 slide presentation and ask for a meeting with the deciders on that basis. If that doesn’t work you know you have just lost your call option, but your limited investment makes the loss acceptable compared to the potential gains.

Looking at a sales pipeline like an asset manager would look at a financial portfolio, always brings interesting insights. After all, sales reps and managers are also after the optimal risk/return combination. Keep that perspective in mind when assessing an unusual opportunity.

For more from Thomas Oriol, join us for the free live webinar Back to Basics: Smarter Sales Forecasting, Monday, June 16th at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST. Oriol will discuss how sales pipeline management and sales forecasting are intimately linked for B2B companies. Click here to register.