At what point do you assign a value to an opportunity?
When you’re talking to a new buyer, and you’re in the sales process… when does that opportunity actually become a deal?
As in: an actual opportunity for a sale, a deal in the making, with a Dollar-amount attached to it?
It feels great to have a first chat with a buyer, about an offer listed at $10.000 on your website, and then think that you have a 10K opportunity, but do you?
That one conversation might give you hopefulness, but that’s not the same thing as your buyer wanting to pay to be a client.
And if you’re sloppy or too easy with putting numbers against candidates in your world, you can easily set yourself up for all kinds of problems and frustrations, or worse.
And it’s surprisingly common to just basically make up deal values and stick them into the CRM, where they then propagate into dashboards and spreadsheets and executive decisions. It literally happens all the time.
For instance, I’ve seen professional salespeople add a number and add it to the forecast, based on just one initial call and on "Tell you what, I'll send you a proposal!"
(Of course if you’re a sales pro and you have a boss who wants to see a solid pipeline, then it’s great. You come up with a number, you stick it in the CRM, and: "Look, boss! I’m generating pipeline!" Related: If you’re the owner and you have sales people make sure you don't inadvertently send them off to have beers with their leads.)
On the surface it might seem sensible: to make a business work you have to have an idea of what you can expect the future to bring.
But whether you’re a business owner or a sales rep: when you behave like that, when you’re effectively inventing a future and projected revenue, and if you assign deal values too soon, you might actually be eroding your earning potential.
Because if your pipeline is filled with great numbers but they are made-up numbers, and they’re not based on an actual deal and an actual value that you have discussed with your buyer, that Million-dollar pipeline you’re looking at will give you a false sense of security.
You’re looking at your Millions in pipeline value, thinking that 50% of that will come off in the next 6 months, and your lead gen efforts go slack. You focus on delivery more than pipeline, because "Hey look at everything that we’ll have coming in soon!"
It’s worse than counting your chickens before they are hatched:
It’s inventing eggs that don’t even exist yet.
Because next up you see people going ghost and others going "Probably next year", and you realise that you actually don’t have enough value in the pipeline, and now you get stressed because you have bills to pay, you have to keep doing delivery but you also have to double-down on pipeline, and those lovely Millions you were banking on turn out to have been a phantom, a pipeline-dream (ha), and the cause of stress that you didn’t need.
Stress that you wouldn’t have had if you had not invented numbers.
Because when your projections and estimations are conservative and realistic, you’ll be confronted not with a great imaginary future, but instead with the need to keep on working your people-garden.
I don’t add deal values to an opportunity, if I haven’t at least spoken to my buyer about an actual number. No matter how keen someone is, or how highly recommended I came in to their world, or how badly I would want this person to be my client: If my buyer and I haven’t discussed pricing, it’s not a deal yet and my CRM doesn’t show any $ amount.