I'm sure that we have all been there. The opportunity that won't close! No matter what you do, how many meetings you have, the customer just does not want to move forwards. You presented your technology, they liked it but they are just not buying.

Studies show that it takes longer to lose a deal than to win one. We keep chasing the unobtainable because we desperately want this deal. Whether it is the size, the prestige or just because we won't let it go.

This doesn't do any of us any good. We keep chasing a customer who doesn't want to buy; we spend time on non-revenue generating activity and our sales manager sees opportunities not progressing.

There are a few reasons why we get into this situation:

· we took customer interest/engagement as a sign that they wanted to buy

· we never bothered to establish a need that our product helped to solve

· we don't review whether the opportunity matches what a good opportunity looks like.

In our desire to please both our customer and to impress our manager, the first two reasons are somewhat understandable, particularly for any ambitious, optimistic sales person. However, there really should be to reason why we are not reviewing our opportunities critically to see if they really are as good as we first thought.

To determine what a good opportunity looks like, we need some established, consistent criteria. These might be things like:

· How big is the deal?

· When will it close?

· Has the customer bought from us before?

· Do we understand their needs?

· Have they got the money to pay for it?

Some of the criteria you use will be standard but some might be specific to your company and your products.

Some criteria are more important than others so you need to balance your criteria with a simple scoring system so that you can rank all opportunities. From this ordering, you can then focus on the opportunities most likely to close and ignore those that are never going to close.