Research Brief: Assessment of Sales Opportunities

5 April 2016

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Accurately assessing opportunity is an essential competency for sales organizations. It underpins critical resource allocation decisions, such as how and where to deploy salespeople, and it determines how essential work is prioritized within the sales force. Opportunity assessment involves a continuum of activities, from identifying and qualifying leads, to sizing active sales opportunities in prospects or customer accounts, to forecasting sales.

This research focuses on two activities in this continuum – lead scoring and sales forecasting. Lead scoring is chiefly focused on prioritizing which opportunities to target in a portfolio of leads, whereas sales forecasting is more concerned with assigning a value and probability to qualified opportunities. In this survey we use the term “sales opportunity assessment” to collectively include lead scoring and sales forecasts.

The research sought to answer several questions related to how sales organizations practice sales opportunity assessments. These questions include the following: What forms of opportunity assessment are being implemented effectively? How accurate are sales forecasts and what can be done to improve them? Do sales people have a bias to overinflate or underinflate sales opportunity assessments? Finally, what metrics are used in sales opportunity assessment and which are most valuable

An initial review of findings was also featured in a webcast, which may be viewed here:

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