The Complete Guide to B2B Opportunity Planning

What Is Opportunity Planning?

Opportunity plans are coordinated action plans, built on a value-based strategy for a specific customer or prospect opportunity, that create more revenue per customer over a longer period of time.

Put another way, an opportunity plan finds and farms potential. They not only help you find more relevant stakeholders; they also help you up-sell and cross-sell within that account.

The goal is to basically say, “We are going to give this customer what they need based on a deep understanding of their pain and priorities, and this is how we are going to make it happen for each given opportunity – not just this quarter, but for each quarter to come.”

Opportunity planning overlaps a lot with account planning, but differs in that it also helps map a pathway from first contact to final close for each potential deal.

Ideally, with an opportunity plan, there are no surprises during the process. You can chart a smooth course that increases the chance of finding and landing potential every step of the sales cycle.

In short, the process for opportunity planning can be broken down into 3 simple steps:

We’ll talk more on how to put together a solid opportunity plan later. For now, we’ll explain more about why opportunity planning is not only worth doing, but essential to success in today’s environment.

The Benefits of Opportunity Planning

Opportunity planning is a powerful B2B sales process because of the results it delivers for high-performing sales teams that incorporate this process into their everyday selling.

Here are a few great things that can happen to sales orgs who take opportunity planning to heart.

Faster Sales Cycles

In competitive B2B sales, speed isn’t everything, but it counts for a lot.

The faster a sales team can move through its sales cycle with an opportunity, the more revenue they can close in a quarter. Given how new customers can easily become repeat customers with opportunity planning (we talk about that more in just a moment), a faster sales cycle this quarter leads to more revenue in subsequent quarters.

Opportunity planning (especially in conjunction with a CRM like Salesforce) has shortened the sales cycle for B2B sellers by an average of 25%.

More Collaboration Across Your Company

B2B sales is a team effort. The company that sells together wins together – and that means a concerted and coordinated campaign involving sales, marketing, ops, customer success, the C-suite, and more.

This kind of total team approach pays dividends. The majority of sales professionals report that collaborative selling across their entire organization boosts productivity and pipeline growth by an average of 25%.

More Success with Scaling Current Customers

One of the best ways for sales teams to consistently hit their quotas is by scaling their current accounts.

Obtaining a new customer is a lot of work. Sales teams spend an awful amount of energy and resources to research, pursue, and close deals with new customers. Sales reps also report that prospecting is among the toughest parts of their job.

It’s much easier to find new opportunities and drive growth within an account you already have developed a relationship and trust with. You already have connections; the amount of research you need to perform is lessened; you have a deeper knowledge of a company’s needs and priorities; and total time spent inputting new prospect data is cut drastically.

Case in point: one study found that landing a new account is five times more expensive than nurturing a current one. Customers also report that they’re much more likely to buy when a seller has a deep understanding of their company.

In short, the average lifetime customer value (LCV) increases substantially when a sales org uses opportunity planning for cross-selling and up-selling than when it doesn’t.

Better Selling Into the Enterprise

Opportunity planning is a perfect method for organizing a plan of attack for enterprise accounts, which are larger and offer more total deals (with a bigger average deal size) than smaller accounts.

Why? Enterprise accounts are more complex. They have more moving parts. Enterprise sales reps will need to speak to more people, make more connections, and pull together solutions that are more complicated and impact more divisions and BUs than in smaller accounts.

For these big prizes, superior organization is a must.

How Is Opportunity Planning Being Done Today?

Unfortunately, no matter how potent opportunity planning can be, sales reps today are long on the opportunity, short on the planning.

Sales teams are being held back by:

• Siloed selling (every rep for themselves)
• Little to no coordination with other departments
• The wrong sales tech stack
• Sales tools that don’t work well with one another
• A lack of shared account data
• Inefficiencies with communication
• No clear paths to close deals
• No dedicated plan for cross-selling and up-selling

Even sales orgs that use account plans usually don’t meet their growth targets. Why? Because there’s no plan in place for bringing everything together under one roof, and one effort, to grow holistically over the long term.

Companies that do find success, however, use opportunity plans as a core sales function. They use their CRM to collect and analyze data, pinpoint opportunities, coordinate efforts to pursue and develop them, and create clear paths to close that don’t leave anything out and take nothing for granted.

Considering how the closing stage is where many deals fall apart (due to last-minute negotiation, legal hang-ups, procurement issues, or something as simple as a key stakeholder not being involved until late in the process), this type of coordination is essential.

How to Build a Successful Sales Opportunity Plan

So, how does a sales team go about creating an opportunity plan?

It starts by learning everything you can about the customer using whatever customer intelligence tools and processes you have access to.

This includes:

• Any company changes over the past 12 months, such as new hires or promotions, product/service launches, funding,  acquisitions, and any other key developments
• Your ideal contacts and what they care the most about (especially the issues that keep them up at night)
• Competitors that may already be associated with the account (or have done so in the past)
• Financial details that can inform the sale, such as revenue and sales figures
• How the company is structured internally among business units, teams, buying groups, etc.
• Anything online that shines light on the company (including customer reviews)
• Goals, KPI’s, and other details that the stakeholders are measured on
• The desired outcome of implementing your product or service (What does success look like)?

Not everything you find will be useful, but you’ll never know until you get that deep level of understanding that drives success.

Don’t go into an opportunity blind. Not only will you miss out on crucial insights for this deal; you’ll also miss out on potential deals down the road.

The next step is building a solid business value case. This means planning out the best way your company can meet the needs and priorities of the customer.

The best way to get a solid idea of what their needs are is to talk with contacts who can help highlight issues. Note that priorities differ from BU to BU, division to division, team to team, and even person to person within the same team. The sales team’s job is to find common ground among all key stakeholders and put together a compelling solution that hits on the customer’s key success metrics and solves their most pressing issues (even ones they may not be aware of).

Of course, it helps to nail down your company’s value prop and messaging before you go in, even if that message will change as the sale develops.

But the crucial part of this process is building the value case focused on the customer, not your company. You want to lay out the most relevant benefits in a concise manner, from the key stakeholders’ perspectives.

A lack of a solid business case, focused on value from before the first contact, is why many opportunities fall apart. Fortunately, opportunity planning is a superior way to really understand an individual customer and tailor solutions to them – not everyone all at once.

The final step is moving from contact to close.

Start by planning out the multi-channel approach that works best for your organization. Answer these questions:

1. What are your main channels/approaches you’ll use?
2. Who are you contacting? Why them?
3. What personal/professional details can help you jumpstart a conversation?
4. Who are the key decision-makers and most influential contacts you will need to talk to eventually?

Once you know who you need to reach and how you’ll reach them, you can prepare by aligning resources you’ll need – especially from marketing, customer success, and leadership – and plan activities that’ll get you into the account (or into a new opportunity within the same account).

Along the way, you’ll need to find those key success metrics that your solution will have to hit. You can then plan how your demo and proof of concept (if applicable) can focus on those KPIs and highlight real ROI potential.

Note that customers aren’t always the best at forecasting ROI themselves, let alone with a vendor’s products. That’s one big responsibility a sales team has that – if met – drives success like nothing else.

To prep, you’ll want to know:

• Your minimum profit margin and any other internal metric you need to hit
• What your product/service can and cannot do
• Any internal pricing or logistical constraints
• The customer’s budget and who has the authority over it
• Typical approval timelines and your company’s typical delivery/implementation timeline
• Any previous deals the customer has made with you, and which contacts were responsible for them
• How much an opportunity is worth based on the resources you think you’ll need to land it
• Case studies, testimonials, and other relevant customer results you can use

Finally, you’ll need to figure out who all has to sign off on a deal and any procedures, processes, or red tape you’ll have to navigate before the opportunity officially closes and the solution can be implemented.

Next, we’ll go more into the specific action steps you can take by exploring why deals close and how you can influence those factors.