Progressive Sales Opportunity Stages Can Keep You Honest

From the time it is identified, a sales opportunity goes through maturity stages. These stages depend really on how close the customer is to making a purchase decision. This in turn depends on how “in sync” you are, as a sales person, with the customer.

Assuming you are, and we have the B.A.N.T method to help you (and to keep you honest 🙂 ), Saleswah lets you know at a glance the sales opportunity stages you are in your deals. It has three benefits:

  • You can get a one shot “quality check” of deals by the sales opportunity stages. So, if a Deal is in the “Investigate” stage, you know that you need to know a lot more about the customers and his purchase milestones. Whereas, if the Deal is in “Presentation” stage, then it is at the stage where you need to move towards a “Closure”. It is the final proposal or presentation or negotiation stage in the sales process- which will get you a decision.
  • You can align your internal sales/ marketing processes to the sales opportunity stages. If a deal is in the Opportunity stage- your internal processes might dictate primary handling by marketing. Whereas, if a deal is in Presentation or Close, then it is very definitely driven by Sales.
  • Finally, by aggregating the deals by sales opportunity stages, Saleswah can show the health of the funnel in the dashboard.


The Sales Funnel is a fairly mature concept and a Google search would turn up with hundreds of terms and variations. One thing everyone agrees on is the shape- wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Don’t get stuck on the semantics; follow the funnel and you will do well in closing business.

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[This post originally appeared on the Saleswah blog and is reposted with permission.]

Anindya Chatterjee: I turned entrepreneur after spending a couple of decades in Sales and Marketing in leading MNCs. Ran large international sales and marketing teams in Asia and managed budgets and targets. Created game changing processes and internet enabled IT tools for customer facing activities. Proficient in creating large interdisciplinary processes and leading distributed teams. Electronics Engineer from one of the IITs with an MBA from IIM Calcutta.