Score your largest B2B sales prospects with seven elements

- [Instructor] Picture this, you've uncovered a very large new prospect opportunity. If you closed, it would be worth more than five times your average contract size. You may feel optimistic and uncertain at the same time. You're also not clear about how to get started because you know that really big prospects require higher level plays. Thankfully, you have an experienced sales manager who advises you to pull together the opportunity team to score the prospect. Scoring is used to compare and prioritize big prospects. Scoring lets you know if the opportunity has a high likelihood of success. Scoring ensures that the team applies critical thought to each of the seven scoring elements. Large opportunities are complex and messy and require the entire opportunity team to think and act strategically over time. Gaps should be identified and discussed upfront. The scoring process unites and energizes the team to focus on the opportunity ahead. Download the opportunity scoring worksheet, which can be found in the exercise files, to follow along. The first scoring element is assessing the estimated financial value of the opportunity. Is it significant and worthy of the time and effort of the selling team? The team scored their prospect with a five rating, meaning that the estimated financial value is at the highest end of the scale. The second element is strategic value. In other words, does the opportunity represent a strategic value for your company? An example of strategic value is a prospect with a marque name in a recognized industry, which would attract other prospects. A productive method for opportunity teams to score each element is the discuss, debate, decide model. Using this approach, the teams score the strategic value of their big prospect as a five. The third element is fit. The opportunity team discusses whether the prospect is a good match for your products and services. Fit is like the qualify stage of your regular sales process, but may not be as straightforward for whale-size prospects. For example, complex opportunities often fall outside of normal deal timelines. The team score the opportunity as a four for fit as part of the solution would mean implementation into a new geography for your company. The fourth scoring element is access. Does the selling team have access to the buying committee, including key decision makers, executive sponsors, and stakeholders? In other words, can the selling team secure meetings with these people? After much discussion and debate, the selling team decided to score this element as a three on a scale of one to five. They have access to some of the key people, but not all. The fifth element is complexity. Complexity factors include the number of people involved with the sales process on the seller side and prospect side, anticipated length of the sales process, number and intensity of competitors, and prospect perceived risk in making a change. The higher the complexity, the higher the rating. Complex opportunities benefit from focused strategy work over a long period of time. The team rated complexity as a four. The sixth element is prospect commitment. The team must wrestle with the question about the prospect's commitment to solve their problem and go through the buyer's journey all the way to closure. In this case, the prospect has stated that they are committed to solving their problem. Therefore, the selling team scored this element as a four. The seventh and final element is opportunity team commitment. The team must honestly assess their long-term dedication to focus on all the plays that will be required to develop and close this extremely complex deal. The team rated their commitment as a five. The score was tallied, and the opportunity will now proceed with the next set of strategic plays to advance their large prospect. I highly recommend using the scoring worksheet for all your top prospects. It's a tool I've developed and refined for my clients. It's led to millions of dollars of revenue for them. Set a time now to pull together the opportunity team to score your largest prospect. If you're not familiar with who should be on your opportunity team, I'll cover that later in the course.