Qualifying to Invest Your Time Wisely

Time is money. We’ve all heard that.

As a salesperson, you invest your time to make money; since time is limited, you need to put yourself on a budget and spend wisely.

When you’re budgeted on time, qualifying your sales leads is like careful shopping. Remember the days when you had less than $20 to spend on groceries? You didn’t just throw anything in the cart. You set parameters on what qualified as a “good buy” and what didn’t qualify. When you qualify your sales leads, you are choosing what to spend your time on.

The best salespeople focus on qualifying. They know it won’t do any good to apply their best sales efforts to a prospect that does not have a need, cannot purchase, or cannot make a buying decision. The best salespeople have a clear definition for what leads “qualify” for their precious time.

The most important concept to understand about qualifying is that whatever time you are wasting speaking to the wrong prospect is time that could have been spent talking to the right prospect. Furthermore, while you’re talking the wrong prospect, someone else is already beginning to close the sale with the right one.

You need to develop a system for qualifying leads and document it. Your system should have three parts:

• A concrete definition of a qualifying prospect
• What specific information you need to gather
• What questions you will ask to gather this information

Write down a concrete definition of a qualifying prospect. What is the profile of your target customer? (You may have more than one target customer profile depending upon the types of product/services you sell.)

For example, “The target customer for our XYZ service is a small to medium sized business that currently does a little print advertising to a localized market but would like to tap into a larger market area.”

Next, identify what information you need to acquire about the lead to know if it fits your target customer profile. For the example target customer profile above, some of the following information might be gathered:

• number of employees the company has
• the size of the city or area they market to
• the number of customers/accounts they currently serve
• the kinds of advertising do they currently do
• who designs their advertising—outsourced, in-house, competitor
• need or desire to expand

And finally, you need to write down what questions you will ask each prospect. For example, “Mr. Owner, do you currently outsource the designing of your print ads, or does someone in-house handle it?” or “Mr. Owner, I’ve seen a couple of your ads in the Smithville Times, can I ask who designs those for you?”

Writing out qualifying questions can be challenging in that you don’t want to sound like you are putting your potential prospect through the gauntlet. You don’t want to just fire through a list of questions—how many employees do you have? How many customers do you have? You want to sound conversational and yet still gather the information you need. For example, “Do you run the ads only in the Smithville Times?” is a way to find out the area that the prospect currently markets to.

Now that you have the information you need, you have to evaluate the prospect. Your qualifying system will give you information, but evaluating what you know about a lead for it to be considered a qualified prospect is the difficult part. Your goal is obviously the sale. You certainly don’t want to throw away a lead that is potentially valuable, but you also don’t want to waste your time talking to a prospect that will not or cannot result in a sale. Use your sales philosophy to guide you.

A core part of need-based selling is determining needs. Part of your qualifying should be to determine if the prospect does have a need. You are not trying to determine whether the prospect is aware of his/her need, you are merely trying to determine if this business/consumer might have a need that can be met with your product or service. Whether the prospect is aware of the exact need is not important right now—part of your job as a salesperson later is to help them define and recognize their need.

If the prospect does have a need, you then have to ask yourself if your product/service is something that can meet that need and truly help the business.

If you continue to waste your time talking to a prospect that does not have a need or if your product/service cannot be a potential solution to their need, then you will at some point hit a wall in trying to sell to this customer. It will seem as if you are constantly trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.

Good qualifying can also help you to customize your sales process and presentation to fit the prospect.

Is the prospect already using a competitor’s product/service? The business may be an ideal company that can benefit from your product/service, but if they are using a similar product/service offered by a competitor, their need may already be met. As a result, you may need to cater your presentation to focus on differences between you and your competitor or to sell your service as an additional vendor/supplier.

Are you talking to the right person? You need to know if the person you are speaking to is the one who can actually make a purchasing decision or who is at least the person who has the most influence over the purchasing decision in this particular area. Purchasing decisions are sometimes made by two or more people, but often there is one person who acts as the “point man”. Can the point man actually “write the check” or is that only done on approval of someone else?

You might need to customize your sales process to fit the decision-making process of your prospect. While you can discuss the technical aspects of your product/service with the point man, you need to know who the final approving authority is for the purchase. The point man might be primarily interested in the technical information while the person who makes final buying decisions will be interested mostly in the value that you can show them.

Is the business ready for your product/service now? There may be a need and you may be talking to the right person, but there might be other mitigating factors that keep this company from being able to purchase right now. They might not have the budget right now. Or they need to hire additional employees before they can consider implementing your product/service. You need to be able to identify the time frame in which this prospect will make a purchasing decision. Yes, a part of your job as a salesperson is to establish the urgency of buying right now, but again, you need to also recognize when it might be best to put this lead on the back burner until it is ready.

Qualifying helps determine which leads to present to as well as how best to present to them. As you might have already realized, qualifying isn’t always so black and white. Consider using a rating system—A, B, C—so that you can tag those prospects where all criteria are in line vs. those leads who have a need but might not have a budget. This way you won’t waste too much time on a C lead and concentrate on an A lead. Find some way to prioritize your leads and prospects.

Many salespeople are lucky to work for a company that does much of the lead generating for them. Even though leads are fed to you though, you still need to qualify. The best lead generating tools are still not going to give you a fool-proof list of ready-to-sell, hot leads. Lead generation tools and good marketing can bring the orchard to you, but you still need to choose which fruit to pick and when to pick it.

If you don’t have a company fed lead pool, then you’ll have to go out and find the orchards—qualifying will take up much more of your time. However, working smart by identifying in what industries your best leads can typically be found and using your existing customer base to generate a pool of referrals can help you spend your qualifying time wisely.

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