6 Tips in Mastering the Art of Qualifying Sales: a blog about the most effective ways to qualify sales leads.

When you're in the midst of working a full pipeline, generating revenue, and managing your business, you certainly don't have time to spend on low-quality leads. If you're anything like me, then you've probably struggled at some point or another with qualifying leads in a way that works for your business.

So how do we get ourselves to focus on quality rather than quantity? How can we make sure that we're spending our time on the right prospects? These are questions that every business owner has had to ask themselves at some point or another, which is why I've written 6 tips in mastering the art of qualifying sales.

1. Define what a Qualified Lead means for your Business.
2. Create Your Ideal Customer Avatar
3. Understand Your Customer Journey.
4. Ask Open-Ended Questions to get Perspectives.
5. Let Your Prospects Talk.
6. Follow up quickly with those Who Don’t Qualify.

Qualifying is not just about finding out if a lead is a good fit, it's also about a systematic approach, establishing trust, and building rapport with your leads.

Define what a Qualified Lead means for your Business.

First let’s define the difference between Leads, Prospects and Customers.

• Lead – The names of people you feel could be viable customers.
• Prospect – Qualified people that will become customers at some point.
• Customers – People that have bought from you.

To make sales, you must have leads, and leads need to be qualified before they become sales. The challenge is that there are many ways to qualify leads, and some methods are better than others.

Just because someone expresses interest in your product or service doesn’t mean they’re a good fit for it. If someone calls up your business and asks about buying something, that doesn’t mean they want it enough to actually buy it — especially if there is no urgency and no incentive for them to make a purchase now rather than later.

To ensure you’re only talking to people who are likely to buy from you, you need to define what qualifies as a “qualified lead” in your business.

This definition should include discovering the answers to questions like:

• Are they genuinely interested in my product or service?
• Can you tell from their questions that they understand what you offer?
• Are they asking about pricing or delivery?
• Are you talking to the decision maker? If not, who is/are the decision maker(s)?
• What problem are they trying to solve? Why are they solving this problem now?
• What have they tried in the past?
• Is doing nothing an option?
• What’s the best way to communicate with them moving forward?
• What could prevent them from working with you?
• What other solutions are they looking at?
• When do they plan to make a decision?

You don’t have to ask all these questions to qualify a lead (and it's definitely not an exclusive list), but they should guide you until you qualify or dis-qualify your lead based on a high-level of confidence either way.

Create Your Ideal Customer Avatar.

Whether you're selling to other businesses or individual consumers, a key to success is understanding who your ideal customer is. Without this information, you are likely to waste time and effort on leads that do not produce sales, leaving you with fewer sales than you could have had.

It's easy to assume that everyone is an ideal customer for your product or service. But if you want to get rid of your bad apples and find more good ones, it's important to identify who exactly is and isn't a good fit for what you're offering.

This can be done by creating an ideal customer avatar, a visualisation of your ideal client in terms of demographics and psychographics (interests). This will help you determine if the company fits into your target market.

[you can download our free video guide and template on “How to Win Over Your Ideal Customers” Here]

Understand Your Customer Journey.

The customer value journey is a framework for understanding the steps that your customers go through as they interact with your business. It's used for identifying and qualifying leads, segmenting them into marketing campaigns, ensuring your message is correct at each stage, and measuring campaign success.

The customer value journey concept we use is - Awareness, Engage, Subscribe, Convert, Excite, Ascend, Advocate, and Promote. We've found that our target customers move through these 8 stages before becoming paying customers. Customer Value Journeys are unique to each business, E-commerce as an example could be a lot quick and shorter journey, only touching a few of these stages.

These eight stages are also known as the buyer's journey or the sales funnel. When you're trying to sell something, it's important that you understand where your potential customers are in their buying process so you can target them accordingly with the right messaging at each stage. Another great view on this is Eugene Schwartz’s 5 Levels of Customer Awareness.

As an example:

New visitors to your website may be interested in what you offer but unsure whether they should buy from you or not. This is an awareness/engage stage person — someone who doesn't yet know who you are or what you do but may be curious enough to check out your homepage or blog post.

Ask Open-Ended Questions to get Perspectives.

As I've previously covered, it’s important to ask questions that will help you qualify your leads, because not every lead is worth pursuing.

You can only sell to those who have a need for your product or service and are willing to pay for it.

Asking open-ended questions give prospects a chance to tell their story and share their needs with you. These types of questions encourage people to talk more freely and reveal more information than closed-ended ones do. You should always try to use open-ended questions whenever possible, instead of yes/no questions or simple fill-in-the-blank statements like “What colour would you prefer?” or “Are you interested in following up?"

Here are some additional open-ended questions from the ones mentioned previously, you can see the difference it will make in understanding the perspectives of your potential customer

Examples:

• What do you need help with?
• What's stopping you from moving forward?
• Why do you want to work with us?
• How much money have you budgeted for this project?
• When do you anticipate making a purchase?
• What are your objectives with this project?

Let Your Prospects Talk.

There's a common misconception that the best salespeople are good talkers. They're not—they're great listeners, who know how to get their prospects talking about what they want, so that the salesperson can offer it and make the sale.

If you're trying to sell something, odds are that your customer has been thinking about it for a while. They've probably even done some research on their own, so they know what's available and what they need. So instead of jumping in and pitching them on your product or service, give them an opportunity to tell you what they're looking for—and then let them do the talking!

People don't buy products or services; they buy solutions to problems. So, if you want your prospect to feel like they've gotten the solution they need, you have to give them time to talk about their problems—not just listen for an opportunity to make another pitch.

When you let your prospects talk about their problems and concerns, it will help them feel more comfortable about buying from you. And when they feel more comfortable, they'll be more willing to spend money with you!

Follow-Up Quickly with those Who Don’t Qualify.

You need to follow up quickly with your prospects, because that's how you'll get them to remember you and give you a chance. A lot of business is lost through-out the customer value journey because of the lack of follow-up.

If they're still interested in what you have to say they'll respond to your communications. But if they don't get back to you right away, it's easy for them to forget who you are and move on with their lives—especially if they're busy. Additionally so many emails get caught by spam filters these days.

So, if you've had no response after sending your first follow-up communication, ensure you send another one in the next day or two to make sure it arrived, then phone a week or so after the first email was sent. If they don't respond, it's probably time to move on and find someone else who wants what you're selling. You're wasting your valuable time and theirs.

Keep in mind: You can't force people into responding to your emails. It might feel like "just one more" will do the trick, but it won't if someone really doesn't want what you're offering at all or isn't willing or able to make an immediate decision about whether or not they want it. You should always respect people's wishes—even if means letting go of potential business opportunities at times—and always be respectful.

While it's important to follow up quickly with prospects that don't qualify, it's equally crucial to have a solid follow-up strategy for those who are still potential customers. Explore our blog post about How to Maximise Sales Opportunities with Effective Follow-Up Strategies to ensure you make the most of every sales opportunity.

Summary

The qualification stage of the sales process is an integral part of the overall sales process. It occurs early on in the customer value journey, so that you can determine or judge whether you should proceed with a prospect before taking on the time-consuming and costly prospect of selling your product or service. The key to successful qualification is to set criteria for what various levels of closeness to a sale mean. Setting such criteria allows you to maintain control over which prospects ultimately make a decision about buying your product or service.