To Pursue or Not

To pursue or not to pursue, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to commit resources to this deal or that deal.

Enough, enough, before Shakespeare comes back from the grave and sues.

OK, I’ll concede that invoking the Bard’s most famous soliloquy to apply to selling is a stretch. However, if I invoke something about "outrageous fortune," well, now we’re talking turkey (apologies to the master for the cliché).

As sales leaders, you know that one of your top priorities should be to help your sales team commit company resources according to potential return; because you know that doing so makes the difference between outrageously good fortunes or outrageously bad fortunes.

In the past, we have talked about assessing an opportunity’s winnability, and we’ve identified several criteria for doing just that. This month, let’s talk about the other half of the pursue-or-not-to-pursue question: the opportunity’s potential value.

A few weeks ago I was in Boston working with the RVP of sales for the eastern region for a client company. Kris and I met for the better part of a day to work on integrating Stapleton Resources’ BRASS process (Business Resource Analysis of Sales Situations) into her team’s everyday thinking and language.
BRASS has two parts:

1. Assessing an opportunity’s potential value.
2. Assessing an opportunity’s winnability.

After about half an hour, Kris said, "You know Jerry, my entire team’s target account list is only 200 companies, we don’t need to spend time assessing an opportunity’s potential value-they’re all high."
With that, I suggested that we drill down on a few deals that Kris was familiar with. There it was, on deal number three, an "opportunity" whose warranty requirements were so demanding and measurable payback requirements so aggressive that, well, let’s just say that this was one deal we’d just love to see Kris’ competitor land.

Assessing a deal’s potential value can certainly help us throw out an "opportunity" that really isn’t, such as the case with Kris’ deal. However, it’s used just as often – if not more so – to justify pursuing a deal that, on the surface, appears to not yield sufficient potential return to make it a worthwhile pursuit.
Here are five criteria to use next time you sit down with your salespeople to work on a deal. Remember, these won’t help you determine how winnable the deal is, but they’ll tell you whether you even want to win it in the first place, and how badly.

1. What is the short/long term revenue potential? This is the most obvious criterion and, frankly, where too many potential-value analyses stop. Making matters worse, the analysis of potential revenue often doesn’t go far enough. In particuar, many deals are deemed not worth the chase because the dollars aren’t big enough. I’ll never forget – and this example dates me – a client salesperson for a very large technology company back in the late ’80s who was going to take a pass on pursuing business with a little company in Silicon Valley by the name of Cisco. After rolling up our sleeves and peeling back a few more onion layers by asking the right questions it became apparent that this little start-up seemed poised to grow in a big way over the coming years. The potential revenue, as we all now know, to selling to this little nobody company was quite obviously (again, in retrospect) huge.
2. How profitable is the business likely to be? One of the great advancements in thinking of the last 10 years by sales leadership is the wisdom of compensating salespeople according to the profitability of the business they bring in. Predicting profitability is among the more difficult tasks we can ask salespeople to do. However, if we arm them with the right ammunition, such as assessing an account’s philosophical fit with the selling company, the task becomes more doable.
3. What, if any, strategic marketing value is there? Sometimes, there’s a deal, or an account, that, despite its being less than attractive on other aspects of its potential value (e.g. doesn’t look terribly profitable), is attractive to win for other reasons. If, for example, the company is the most highly respected firm in an industry that your company is trying to break into, then you might compromise profitability on this deal for the opportunity to get your foot in the door in that industry.
4. What, if any, unusual risks do we assume by pursuing or winning this opportunity? This was the showstopper for Kris. She realized that, despite the apparent attractiveness of the deal, the risks were way too high. So, she directed her salesperson to deploy his time on other opportunities. There’s a list of six questions in our BRASS process on this criterion. Kris was giving me the impatient nod on all of them until we hit the question about demanding warranty/ dangerous measurable payback requirements, which stopped her in her tracks. The operative word in this criterion is "unusual."
5. What level of internal company resources will be required to pursue this sales situation? Note that this question is about resources to pursue the opportunity. Resources required to fulfill it come under the potential profitability heading. Jack, the sales VP for one client, a major player in the RFT space, had to tell a top rep to forego the pursuit of a deal that, if successful, would have taken this company into a new and very large market for an established product. However, the pre-sales support to make this happen was starting to consume way too much of the technical team’s time, rendering the deal, unfortunately, not worth the chase.

Committing company resources according to potential return is one of the most important tasks of today’s sales professional. As sales leaders, I urge you to help your sales teams become better at it. Outrageous fortunes hang in the balance.