What's an Opportunity?

On the topic of sales and getting into the order process, I want to first describe what an opportunity is.

An opportunity is simply this: It is a chance for you to do business with someone else.

It could be a transactional sale. It can be the beginning of a relationship that may lead to a very large sale.

Just because there is an opportunity, that does not presuppose any time or dollar amount. It doesn’t presuppose how many people are going to be involved in it.

What you are looking for is simply a “yes” to this question: Will this company do business with my company? After that, all you have to do is determine whether you want that business, because if the answer for the opportunity is yes – so, “Yes, we have an opportunity”, at that point, we decide how we are going to go about getting that business.

If we go about getting that business in a way that is professional and we are helping someone, then we are doing it the right way. If we are going about it in such a way where we’re trying to make a sale; where we’re trying to make sure that we make a commission or that we achieve certain profit by the end of the quarter and we’ve only got our needs in mind, two things will happen: 1. That will eventually come out. It’s almost like lying, where you’ve got some pressure and some anxiety that you’ve put on yourself because you know morally that it’s not the best thing you do. 2. The client may be able to pick that up as well. We don’t want that. We want to make sure that when we say there is an opportunity, both the we and the client decide, yes, we’d like to do business together. Once we have an opportunity, then we’ll start to move forward and ask some clarifying questions.