How To Sales Manage Upside and Unlikely Deals

If your sales organization is like most, you classify sales opportunities in about four categories, such as:

• Commit, which are 90% likely to close
• Forecast, which are 70% likely to close
• Upside, which are 33% likely to close
• Unlikely, which are 5% likely to close

And then, provided you have sufficient pipeline, your sales management team basically puts all of its effort into and attention on the commit and forecast deals.  They’re the ones that get deal reviews.  They’re the ones where the team does multiple dry runs before big demos and presentations.  They’re the deals that get discussed every week on the forecast call.

The others ones?  No such much.  Sure, the salesreps who own them will continue to toil away.  But they won’t get much, if any, management attention.  You’ll probably lose 75% of them and it won’t actually matter much, provided you have enough high-probability deals to make your forecast and plan.

But, what a waste.  Those opportunities probably each cost the company $2500 to $5000 to generate and many multiples of that to pursue.  But they’re basically ignored by most sales management teams.

The classical solution to this problem is to tell the sales managers to focus on everything.  But it doesn’t work.   A smart sales manager knows the only thing that really matters is making his/her number and doing that typically involves closing almost all the committed and most of the forecast deals.  So that is where their energy goes.

The better way to handle these deals is to recognize they’re more likely to be lost than won (e.g., calling them jump-balls, 50/50 balls, or face-offs, depending on your favorite sport), find the most creative non-quota-carrying manager in the sales organization (e.g., VP of salesops) and have him/her manage these low-probability, high-risk deals in the last month of the quarter using non-traditional (i.e., Crazy Ivan) tactics.

This only works if you have happen to have a VP of salesops, enablement, alliances, etc., who has the experience, passion, and creativity to pull it off, but if you do it’s a simply fantastic way to allow core sales management to focus on the core deals that will make or break the quarter while still applying attention and creativity to the lower probability deals that can drive you well over your targets.

This is not as crazy as it might sound, because those in sales ops or productivity positions typically do have prior sales management experience.  Thus, this becomes a great way to keep their saw sharp and keep them close/relevant to the reality of the field in performing their regular job.  What could be better than a VP of sales productivity who works on closing deals 4 months/year?

If your VP of sales ops or sales enablement doesn’t have the background or interest to do this, maybe they should.  If not, and/or you are operating at bigger scale, why not promote a salesperson with management potential into jump-ball, overlay deal management as their first move into sales management?