Qualifying Potential Clients or Customers

In order to increase sales results and ultimately reach their business goals, sales professionals must qualify potential clients or customers. One of the things that separate salespeople with high achievement from those without is that everyone is a “suspect” until you qualify. Only then do they turn into a “prospect”.

Qualifying is different than prejudging someone as not being a buyer because of the way they look or speak. To qualify as a prospect, look for key elements:

• The party must have a need for your services or products
• They must have the means and the desire to purchase what you are selling
• They must be able and willing to pay for it
• They must have the authority or ability to make the buying decision

If these factors don’t exist, the people you are talking to are only suspects.

There are suspects who at a later time may become real prospects. This happens when you find out they can’t commit to a deal before the next quarter or fiscal year. So during qualification, you need to know if the timing of their purchase is important, too.

Time is money to a salesperson. You need to qualify your leads so that suspects do not devour your time and then leave you hanging. They will ask for more and more information without ever actually committing to a deal.

If, after reviewing your business strategy and the key elements of qualifying, you believe the chances are low that the prospect is going to pan out, you need to move on. Too many underachieving salespeople hold on for too long to the belief that the prospect can be convinced to buy what they want to sell.

The time and energy (and sometimes financial resources) you devote to selling to an unqualified suspect is time you could be spending with a real prospect.

How do you recognize that you are nursing the false expectation of new business from too many suspects? Signs include a longer selling cycle and a low conversion rate — the number of prospects that actually turn into customers, compared to others in your sales organization.

If you do your job well in qualifying prospects, you’ve already addressed some of the excuses and obstacles that prospective customers commonly use to put off salespeople and you will not be wasting the time on suspects that you could be spending with prospects. Once you’ve qualified a party as a prospect, you focus your time and energy to make the sale happen knowing the chances are real.