Chasing unqualified prospects who will never close is one of the biggest wastes of your sales team’s time and effort.
For this reason, it’s important to help your sales professionals quickly assess whether a prospect is qualified—so they can move on to the next if necessary.
Having a well-defined lead qualification process will improve your forecasting accuracy, decrease wasted time and resources, and allow your sales professionals to focus their attention where it has the greatest impact.
5 Tips for Sales Prospecting
Use these sales training tips to teach your team how to qualify sales prospects the right way.
1. Follow a Formal Sales Process
Effective sales teams follow a sales process. Research shows that 95% of successful teams closely adhere to their sales process—while only 69% of underperforming teams do.
The sales process typically starts with an “investigate” phase, during which sellers research prospects and prepare for a first meeting.
This stage should define when and how to qualify sales prospects and when and how to move them into the pipeline—on to the next stage.
Your sellers should understand that it’s essential to qualify a lead before moving on to the next step of the sales process.
2. Identify Your Ideal Customer
Make sure your sales professionals know exactly what your ideal customer looks like. You can identify the characteristics of your target buyer persona by looking at your current customers and determining who is the best fit for the solutions you offer.
Take into consideration these criteria:
- Demographics
- Industry
- Size of company
- Pain points
- Job role
You may have multiple buyer personas, and that’s okay. Just keep it to a few (and get as detailed as possible) so your sales professionals can easily target prospects and recognize those who may not be a great fit.
Not every qualified prospect will match your ideal customer profile 100%, but they should all meet basic criteria you define in advance.
3. Eliminate Unqualified Prospects Quickly
Make sure your sales professionals have the right sales prospecting skills and tools to identify good leads. Spending time with unqualified leads is like throwing money in the trash.
Train your sellers to ask open-ended questions that quickly eliminate poor leads before investing too much time in them. Then train them to let go and move on to the next prospect.
4. Define the Characteristics of a Qualified Prospect
A qualified prospect should match your internally defined criteria and exhibit these five characteristics:
- Awareness of Need: Your qualified prospect may not know about your solution, but they should be aware that they have a problem.
- Ability to Buy: Before you invest time and energy in a prospect, make sure you’ve reached a decision-maker who can commit to or influence the decision-making process.
- Sense of Urgency: A prospect without a timeline is a prospect who will waste time. Train your sales professionals to create a sense of urgency if the prospect doesn’t display one.
- Trust: A hesitant prospect is likely to drag their feet and delay the purchasing decision. Train your sales professionals to develop and maintain trust throughout the sales process.
- Willingness to Listen: The prospect should be open to hearing what your seller has to say and to engaging in a two-way communication about potential solutions.
5. Treat Qualification as an Ongoing Process
Qualifying leads before they enter the pipeline as opportunities is critical for saving time and increasing forecast accuracy. But don’t stop there.
Train your sales professionals to use a consultative selling strategy throughout the sales process to maintain alignment with prospects and confirm they are still qualified and worthy of your sellers’ time.
Just because you can sell to someone doesn’t always mean you should. Consider alignment with the buyer relative to the value of your offerings to determine whether you can sell and service the account profitably.
Sales Training for Effective Prospecting
Time is your team’s most valuable resource. Streamline your team’s daily workflow by training them on a straightforward sales process that makes it clear who your most profitable customers are. When you train your team with a proven process, you set them up to achieve consistent, predictable results.
Find out how The Brooks Group IMPACT Selling® gives sales professionals a straightforward process to qualify the best prospects for your solution.
