The difference between companies that merely succeed and companies that thrive and flourish is as simple as Sales Opportunity Management.

A sales opportunity is created whenever a potential client shows signs of being interested in closing a deal or purchasing a product.

This may involve requests for further details about the product, pricing requests, or even offers. Effective product marketing involves more than creating sales opportunities. It hinges on converting these opportunities into sales. This is where Sales Opportunity Management comes in. Sales Opportunity Management is the process of tracking each potential sale from lead to closure and finally results. Not all opportunities become sales of course, but if all of them are tracked, your company will be able to better gauge its sales processes. The reasons sales opportunities are not converted being the most valuable information of all. Tracking the sales process is an indispensable part of product marketing, because it allows companies to identify the selling features of its product, as well as the aspects of the product might hinder its sale. This can result in savings of enormous proportions in future versions of the product, as well as improvements to the Sales Opportunity Management process. In this article we’ll take a brief look at four Sales Opportunity Management solutions that can help your company’s product marketing team achieve further success. 1) Aplicor – The Heart of Business Growth Aplicor’s range of services offers full support for all CRM-related needs, including product marketing, sales opportunity management, and customer service. Aplicor helps you categorize all of your clients and their accounts, including a complete history of all sales and transactions. Aplicor also includes a Competitor Library, so that you can improve your Sales Opportunity Management by weighing your company’s services and prices against that of your competitors. The suite of products does not cater to small businesses, but is ideal for mid-market organizations with the room and ambition to grow. 2) Pipeliner CRM – Is Your Sales Management Under Control? The unique approach taken by Pipeliner CRM is to allow you to use its software to implement your methodology, rather than simply forcing a methodology on you. As you begin to work with Pipeliner, you will record the steps of each sale you make, and the software will help you visualize the data so that you can set and meet goals, see sales come together as they happen, and continue to improve your product marketing and sales techniques. By dragging and dropping opportunities, and by attaching documents and images along the pipeline, you can constantly guide and edit your sales opportunities as they happen. Pipeliner’s Sales Archive also keeps a record of all your past sales opportunities, whether or not they resulted in a sale. 3) Maximizer CRM – Flexible CRM to Fit Your Business As its name suggests, Maximizer CRM focuses on helping you to increase your opportunity close rate. It does so by organizing your data for each sale and potential sale so that you can more accurately forecast the results of a given sales opportunity. In addition to being intuitive and easy to use, one of the unique benefits of Maximizer CRM is that it can create automated email campaigns. Once you’ve inputted the specifications of a given campaign, Maximizer will launch and track the campaign from leads to opportunities to sales. 4) Aptean – Where Software Works Aptean’s Pivotal CRM integrates with a range of Microsoft Office applications and includes built-in opportunity milestones to help you track the success of each sale. Meanwhile, Aptean’s Onyx CRM software is designed for larger organizations and agencies. Its emphasis is specialization: by bringing specific data to specific employees, Onyx helps companies provide their customers with personalized service. It also allows for improved product marketing by automating workflows and streamlining the sales process. Among many others, these companies offer an array of services that will help any company improve its Sales Opportunity Management. In the arena of product marketing, the window of opportunity for sales can be a small one. Services such as those mentioned above can widen that window for you, enabling you to reach not only sales targets, but potential new customers.