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Ben Sims
Enterprise Account Executive @ GoCardless

3 Point Guide: Managing priority opportunities

To manage the opportunities in my pipeline with the highest priority, I will take time to write an Opportunity Plan.

I start by creating a new document in G-Drive and splitting it into 3 different sections:

  1. Overview: High level information about the company (usually available from public sources)
  2. Business Case: Specific information about the company
  3. Close plan: How I intend to close the deal

Overview

The overview should simply provide high level information about the company and any aspects of their business model that makes them a good fit as a customer. As a minimum, I find out the following (Duedil and Companies House are really useful):

Business description | Industry vertical | HQ location | Parent company | Website | Turnover | No. of employees | Company type (public/private etc)

I will then delve a little deeper. I use different resources online (Crunchbase, the company website, google news, annual reports etc) to answer the following questions:

  1. Where are they positioned in their vertical? E.g. Highest revenue, fastest growing, best customer experience etc.
  2. How do they differentiate themselves from their competition?
  3. What is their business strategy? E.g. What is their priority for the next year? What do they focus on as a business?

Business Case

The business case is the most important part of the plan and will justify the reason for the opportunity existing in the first place. I split the section into 3 parts:

  1. Pain
    - What pain is the company experiencing? 
    - What is the affect of these pains? 
    - Who is affected?
  2. Value
    -     What value can I add?
    - What is the cost of not using us (cost of opportunity)? 
    - What is the return of investment?
  3. Timeline
    - How urgent is a fix to the pain (top priority or minor nuisance)?
    - Is there a budget to fix it?
    - Are there any other priority projects?

Obviously there will be more specific questions depending on the industry but the questions above should provide a solid foundation

Close Plan

The close plan is my personal to-do list to get this deal closed! Again, I split the section into 3 parts:

  1. People
    - Who is my champion (main point of contact who will sell the product internally)?
    - Who are the decision makers?
    - Which teams will need to approve the purchase? E.g. Finance, Engineering, Marketing etc.
  2. Live date
    - When does the opportunity want to start using the product?
    - What event has determined this date? E.g. new product launch, current issue is crippling the business etc.
    - Is there anything that could stop this happening? E.g. other priority projects, holidays, Brexit 😑 etc.
  3. Individual steps
    - Working backwards from the estimated live date; what needs to happen in order to get there?
    - The champion should help me understand what these steps are. A good question to ask might be “how does a purchase such as this typically happen at your company?”
    - Add dates and stakeholders for each step and confirm these with your champion. E.g:
    1. Sign contract — Fred from legal — Jan 1st
    2. Complete info security questionnaire — Clare from IT — Jan 15th
    3. Scope out development requirements — John from Engineering — Feb 1st
    Etc…

In Conclusion

Large companies often have multiple stakeholders and it’s difficult to keep track of who needs to do what and when they need to do it. By spending 30 minutes creating a plan I gain a better understanding of the company, the reasons behind the opportunity and potential blockers that may prevent a sale.

Again, if you have any tips on the same topic, I’d be interested in hearing your suggestions in the comments section.

In my next blog, I will write a 3 point guide on creating a repeatable operating system.

Ben 👍