Opportunity Management: Managing Complexity and Ambiguity

Interactions between buyers and sellers have become so complex in companies’ highly networked business ecosystems that vendors increasingly fail to cope with the manifold challenges of opportunity management. Individuals performing a diverse range of functions in the vendor’s business community need to function as a team. Corporate silos must be eliminated. Vendors often fail to realize what customers really need in their buying journeys. This chapter describes a Scrum approach that fully aligns sales activities with the challenges that customers must overcome internally and externally. It provides a detailed account of buying and selling tasks in modern opportunity management as well as numerous User Stories that can be implemented by sales teams right away. Various examples show how gamification can be used to find creative solutions and overcome common obstacles in the customer’s buying journey. Scrumban is presented as an alternative approach for dealing with short-term changes in requirements during the opportunity management process.