Opportunity

There was a time when "how many deals are we working right now?" got a different answer every week. One rep counted every business card collected at a conference. Another counted only the companies that had received a quote. The same meeting would produce both fifteen and four, and neither number could be used to plan next month's revenue.

The trouble wasn't the counting. It was that nobody had defined what counts. A company that swapped business cards sat on the same list as a company with money set aside and a stated decision date. The first one can go quiet tomorrow without anything being wrong. The second one lands directly on this quarter's revenue. Add the two together and the total always comes out larger than reality. Teams that hired against an inflated total kept finishing the quarter at less than half of it.

An opportunity is the word for pulling the deals worth managing out of that pile. Instead of counting every contact, a team names only the deals that clear an agreed bar and puts those on the sales pipeline, where they move through stages. The list gets shorter, and the numbers on it become usable.

Turning a contact into an opportunity means a rep checks a few things and writes down what they found. The checklist usually goes by the name BANT, for budget, authority, need and timing.

1. Budget — is money actually set aside? "Nice, we'll call you when we have budget" means there is none.
2. Authority — is the person in the room the one who decides, or someone who has to sell it internally afterward?
3. Need — is the problem this company has today one this product actually solves?
4. Timing — by when do they intend to decide? No answer usually means it won't be decided this year either.

A team doesn't have to fill in all four. It has to pick a bar and write it down. Pagedeck promotes a deal once budget and timing are confirmed and fills in the other two afterward. Without that sentence on paper, every rep applies a different standard and the list starts inflating again.

A promoted deal carries four values: expected amount, expected close date, the deal stage it has reached, and an owner. Those four are what let dozens of deals sit on one screen and be added up or divided. An opportunity with no amount can't join a total. One with no close date can't be sorted into this quarter or the next, so it drops out of any forecast.

An opportunity moves forward through stages until it closes in one of two directions: closed won if the contract is signed, closed lost if it falls apart. Reps put off closing things, and a deal that went silent six months ago keeps padding the pipeline total while its loss reason never gets recorded. Log reasons as price, timing or competitor, and at quarter's end you can see that twelve of thirty losses shared one cause.

The unit earns its keep not when someone works a single deal but when someone reads many of them at once.

1. The weekly pipeline review — open deals are laid out by stage and checked for movement since last week. Anything sitting in the same stage for three weeks gets a question on the spot.
2. Sales forecast — each stage gets multiplied by its historical close rate and the results are summed. Ten opportunities worth $15,000 each in the proposal stage, at a 40 percent close rate for that stage, come to $60,000 expected.
3. Pipeline coverage — the sum of open opportunity amounts divided by the target. A $150,000 target against $450,000 of open deals is 3x, and for a team closing around 30 percent of what it works, 3x is thin.
4. The handoff from marketing — how many sales qualified leads (SQLs) became opportunities. A low rate says the bar for handing them over is too loose.

All four read the sum, not the individual deal. That's why one rep applying the bar loosely bends the whole company's numbers. It's also why sales tools put the button that creates an opportunity somewhere obvious: the record has to exist before a total does, and the total is what the next quarter gets planned against.

"I haven't promoted that one to an opportunity yet. Budget isn't confirmed."

There's interest, but it hasn't cleared the bar, so keep it out of this quarter's total.

"That opportunity was created in June and it's still in first-call stage. I'd close it out."

Three months without movement — mark it lost and clear it off the list.

"We have $450,000 in open opportunities against a $150,000 target, so coverage is 3x."

A report on whether what's already on the list can cover the number.

At Pagedeck, Sofia and Grace go through the opportunity list together every Monday. Sofia walks through what she added last week and what changed stage, and Grace puts the total next to the quarterly target and asks where the gap gets filled. The sentence that comes up most often in that meeting isn't about creating more deals. It's about closing the ones that stopped moving.

That's why deciding to shrink the list matters as much as deciding to grow it. Leave ten stale opportunities in place and Sofia's plan for next quarter is built on revenue that was never coming.

The most common misreading is that more opportunities is better. A bigger count looks like more work done. But the unit was invented to count only what clears a bar, so lowering the bar to raise the count destroys the unit. Run a forecast off an inflated list and it misses every quarter, and after a few misses nobody reads the number at all.

The second misreading is hearing "opportunity" as a deal that's nearly signed. The word sounds optimistic. In practice it means the conversation has earned the right to continue, and depending on the market only three or four in ten end as wins. Report opportunity amounts as though they were revenue and the quarter ends with a hole nobody can explain.