Managing deals and working sales opportunities has been a part of CRM basics since the beginning of time.  Well, maybe not the very beginning (like when my dad was selling), but close to it.  And, I constantly see the way teams are utliizing the opportunities and managing rather poorly the positive outcomes they are looking for in these opportunities.   In fact, the more and more that I look at Opportunities of most CRM products I don't get a warm and fuzzy on the structure of  Sales Force Automation (SFA) of most products in the marketplace.

So what's the big deal?  The big deal is that the concept of an Opportunity/Project/Job in most organizations is that the elements of the deal are very dynamic and the structure of Opportunities in most software packages is very rigid.  I will give you an example (without naming a product):

I know this is a simplified look at Opportunities but think about the way Opportunity develops in reality and then analyze if your deals and the systems that you use to track them.  If you know your market well and your forecasting is somewhat suspect the system may be the problem.  In more recent times I have started to diverge in my opinion of rigid structures of Opportunity management.  Most of my customers who have shifted the way they structure their systems to handle the variance in the way their deals go down are seeing much better results.

The question asked in the title of this article relates to the fact that the world of sales and business development is part art and part science.  We would all love to have a world of automation and predictability in making business happen but if it were that easy sales people wouldn't be among the most highly paid people in the world.  It's not about just working hard but often times more important to work smart.  Using the concept of a construction project to manage an Opportunity is much more realistic.

If you are contracted to build something you have a plan and a blue print and resources to make it happen (starting to sound familiar?).  When you start a project life gets in the way and things rarely play out according to the plan.  The weather impacts delivery (competitors), raw materials don't always show up on time (gaps in your solution), and getting the job completed and still making money often mens negotiating (price).  So, if you have a system that handles the variances of your Opportunities and the workflow to keep things on track you will find that success will be more predictable and repetitive.