Sales Professionals regularly review their deals and take a hard look at the opportunity. They don’t want a prospect list full of people who aren’t going to buy. They want to spend their time on deals they can get, and they want to get the biggest bang from their cost of sale buck.

We recently conducted a survey of entrepreneurs and asked them to pick one of their opportunities and review it with these questions.

• Do you understand the business imperative?
• Is this an existing happy customer?
• How much is the committed budget
• Who holds the budget?
• Have you met with the decision maker?
• Do you understand the decision process?
• Does your offer fit the requirement 100%?
• Are any incumbent suppliers excluded?
• Is there a start/end date planned
• Does the customer deliver on agreed dates?
• Do you have an internal Coach?

Everybody we asked said they’d found this a valuable exercise. They’d identified risks they hadn’t previously understood and planned new actions to address the issues.

This didn’t surprise us of course, but it did encourage us, because we are building it into Front Office Box.