I believe McKesson developed The Dynamic Opportunity Scorecard and socialized by the Marketing Executive Council in the late 1990s. Since then, we’ve seen variations across many companies and industries.
I’ve found The Opportunity Scorecard to be a powerful tool for sales organizations that are struggling with Opportunity qualification and unacceptable win rates.
The Opportunity Scorecard is not a substitute for insight and judgment, but it can help the sales leadership, the sales support organization, and salespeople see things more objectively.
Combining the Opportunity Scorecard with the question “Did the customer tell you that?” can’t help but improve Opportunity qualification an organization’s win rate. To that end, my post from last week, Improving B2B Sales Organization Performance 1% At A Time, prompted me to share the Opportunity Scorecard.
Why use Dynamic Opportunity Scorecard?: It enforces a winning sales approach, formalizes an essential step of a sales process, and, identifies opportunities that are positively aligned to helping you win.
What is the Opportunity Scorecard?:
- A Scorecard of customer attributes that influence deal success enables evaluation (and reassessment) of deal potential as the sales cycle progresses
- Clarified instinct about an Opportunity versus information about an Opportunity
- A useful tool when viewed within the context of a portfolio of Opportunities
- Understanding the Opportunity score relative to other potential Opportunities in the pipeline allows for intelligent decision-making regarding the use of scarce sales resources
What are the Outcomes of the Opportunity Scorecard?:
- The first step in prescreening Opportunities for potential fit
- Provides a guide for the sales team of the critical information that must be obtained from the customer or prospect to get the score to improve
- As sales progress through the pipeline, you can make decisions about how best to allocate resources
- Opportunities with low scores despite the existence of a great deal of customer information can be abandoned or back-burner, while high-scoring opportunities can be pursued more aggressively
- This approach is intended to improve outcomes based on proven success factors.
What does the Opportunity Scorecard look like?: The image below is an “old school” spreadsheet version, although most companies we work with have the Opportunity Scorecard embedded into their CRM. The score changes as the sales team can validate more information about the customer and Opportunity.
Building the Opportunity Scorecard questions, score parameters and weighting are typically developed in a day-long workshop with sales and sales support teams. At that point, the Scorecard is straight-forward to deploy as a pilot, and then eventually to the entire sales team.
If your sales organization is struggling with Opportunity qualification and low win rates, the Opportunity Scorecard can help.