I am not sure exactly how to start this posting but I had to write something after having the same type of discussion 3 or 4 times over the past couple of weeks.  The issues I had been discussing with several senior sales people and sales leadership at a few accounts centered around the concept of an Opportunity and a Lead.  After jumping up and down over the "technical" definition of a Lead versus an Opportunity I decided to take out something from my old bag of tricks.

Many years ago I was working for a consulting firm and the firm had evolved primarily from the roots of an accounting technology organization.  As such, the company had developed a formal methodology when deploying its internal CRM system.  When marketing started to work with the sales organization there was all kinds of chaos trying to develop who was responsible for what and where the ultimate ownership of the opportunity fell.  Since the company had evolved into a company selling everything from e-commerce to human resource solutions in addition to accounting and CRM the question of ownership had stalled several times because no one could agree.

Since our CRM practice was consulting on our client engagements and helping customers with many of these same issues we were asked to help give some guidance that would help us deploy a system that would work when selling to small companies or very large complex clients.  What we came up with and the process that we worked through I found to be very helpful for anyone who reads this blog and has run into this issue in the past.

First, lets discuss the concept of a Lead.  If you ask most marketing people they would tell you that a Lead is a nothing more than a name on a list.  If you ask a sales person they would probably tell you that a Lead is something that is qualified that came from something that probably started on a list.  There is truth in both answers but we need to talk about when things change and the impact to the users within an organization.

The marketing team will decide to move forward on a target list of some kind and this is done in a one-to-many format.  It really won't matter whether it is an existing client or a prospect but when there is a response the inquiry is still unqualified and in the Lead category.  Once people start to get involved that is where the concept of ownership will come into play.  There are two types of people interaction to concern yourself with.  One type of interaction is the qualification process and the other will be the activities that will proceed to work a qualified deal through the Opportunity process.

Our CEO at the time had a great spin on this and the focal point that you should have when it relates to ownership of the Opportunity.  Once a deal is qualified the "owner" of the deal should be your internal advocate that will coordinate all resources and spearhead activity with the client/prospect to bring the deal to a conclusion.  He called it being "CEO of the Deal".  That person will do whatever it takes in order to reach a conclusion and work diligently to make things happen.

Since many organizations work on teams or have multiple sales people selling different products and services within the same account this is where the confusion comes into play.  I constantly hear about the owner of a Lead or Opportunity being the owner of the account and this may or may not be the case.  The owner of an Account should only be the owner of an Opportunity if they have the authorization, skills and resources to bring a deal to closure.

How the deals finally reach a conclusion is a totally different story.  Opportunities are like goals. They need to be attainable, measurable, and have some expectation of time period.  IF you run Opportunities open ended or you don't have specified sales processes then it is likely that you are trying to manage Leads mixed in with Opportunities and susceptible to lots of inefficiency and frustration.