A “Market Opportunity Profile” Insures Your Sales Team Hits Quota
A “Market Opportunity Profile” Insures Your Sales Team Hits Quota
By Mark Allen Roberts
How prepared are your salespeople to “hit their sales numbers“ this year? Studies indicate as high as 70% of salespeople will fail to make sales quota this year. One leading reason is they do not adequately understand, identify, and prioritize potential sales and new opportunity accounts in their territory. One “old school” tool I provide my salespeople is a Market Opportunity Profile that takes the guess work out of sales achievement.
A Market Opportunity Profile is a living sales road map that insures your team meets and exceeds sales quota and creates sales velocity in the future.
Market leading sales organizations provide sales territory plans that include Market Opportunity Profiles.
What does a good Market Opportunity Profile include?
- sales by current customers, ideally over the past three years segmented by product groups
- current customer list segmented by A, B and C customers with sales history
- identify elephants, rabbits and squirrels in each territory
- targeted A accounts positioned for growth, with growth strategy and tactics
- list of potential new customers in territory
- new potentials ranked by dollar opportunity and probability of having problems your product or service solves
- list of known market influencers (influencers your clients turn to)
- list of new products that will be introduced , and when
- new product sales targets by current customer
- new product sales targets by net new customers
- current and targeted new clients by physical location
- sales goal by current customers
- sales goal for net new clients
- sales goal new products or services
- activity profile based on known product sales cycles
- activity profile based on new product launch(s)
- salesperson input in each category
This sounds like a lot of work, however once you create this tool it will create a profile of the market your salesperson serves, and will build a living document to create meaningful discussions with your salespeople. Your sales by current customers /current products, current customer/ new products, new customers/current products, and new customers / new products must exceed your territory goals. You can create Market Opportunity Profiles with the help of your salespeople to make sales less of an art and more of a science.
Or…
You can take the goal given to you, divided by the number of salespeople you manage, possibly weighted by sales history, and throw it at your sales team and tell them to “make it happen” like most companies did last year and had 70% of their salespeople fail to achieve sales goals.
What does your team provide salespeople to create a roadmap to insure sales goals are met and exceeded?
Does your team provide a Market Opportunity Profile? What does it include?
What % of your sales team achieved or surpassed sales goals last year?
What % of your sales team is at 50% ( or greater) of their sales objectives mid year?
They say if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Market Opportunity Profiles create a snap shot of how to achieve and surpass sales goals based on your market knowledge when created. As your team executes their plans, you will create additional learning’s by salesperson, account and territory. Who knows, after a few years of blowing your goals away corporate may just ask what you have been doing, and once you are promoted, you can use this process to create market driven sales goals instead of boardroom extrapolated goals pushed down.
