I just love it when cool gets cooler and I'm not talking about the winter weather in New England.  About a month ago, I wrote this article on Targeting and shared a generic model for scoring opportunities.  George Bronten and Henrik Oquist, CEO and COO of Membrain, took note and already developed the concept as a new feature for their world-class CRM application, Membrain.  You have to see how we integrated this new feature into the Baseline Selling version of Membrain.  In the image below, you can see that we added a scoreboard milestone at two stages of the sales process.

This allows us to purposefully rescore an opportunity as we learn more about it.  The next image has a little more of the scoring detail.

As you can see from our own instance of Membrain, we score the size, title, urgency, timeline and amount of competition for a particular opportunity.  This opportunity would have received a much higher score if there it was a smaller company, there was greater urgency and the timeline were this month instead of this quarter.  You might be questioning why the score would be higher if the company was smaller...A bigger company has 10 times the number of things that could delay or prevent a sale from closing and while all of those things could also occur with a mid-market or smaller business, they are far less likely at this stage in the sales cycle.  Don't believe me?  Then you don't have enough experience with enterprise size accounts!

Finally, in this listing we can rank opportunities by their scores (right-hand column).

Some CRM applications have the ability to rate the likelihood of closing based on assigned weights to various milestones or stages.  While that is better than when salespeople enter an arbitrary percentage, it's not nearly as good as when you have created specific criteria and values.  Neither man nor machine can skew those things!

In just a few days, this scoring system has had a tremendous impact on our company.  We are able to look at opportunities through a different and more accurate lens, allowing us to make better decisions about sales forecasts, resource allocations, and specific opportunities.

Thanks, Membrain!