Filling the Funnel: Qualifying Prospects

In the last two issues of our newsletter, TsuluNews, we explored the first two stages of the sales cycle: Building Awareness and Turning Suspects into Prospects. If you've been practicing these two steps diligently, your phone should be ringing with prospects looking for solutions. But how do you know if your prospect is qualified?

1. Ask questions that uncover key concerns. Good salespeople know to ask much more that "what can I sell you?" Your qualifying questions should be thought-provoking, open-ended to uncover the true concerns of a customer. For example, ask your prospect questions such as "What is the key challenge that you are facing in your goal to achieve X?" and "What is it that keeps you up at night?"
2. Explore how your company can address those concerns.Make it easy for your sales team to discuss how they can address potential customer concerns. Work with your customer service and account management team to anticipate customer concerns. Your executive and marketing teams should be keeping an eye on market trends to anticipate new concerns that might arise. With your entire team seeking insight into the key concerns of your customers, it will be easier to develop key talking points and scripts so that everyone is on message.
3. Develop a system to capture detailed information. A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is one of the three invaluable tools for a sales team. It should do more than just capture contact information. It should detail preferences about prospects, allow for easy conversion of a prospect through the different phases of the sales cycle, integrate with how your sales team works, and connect easily with customer service, marketing, and financial reporting systems. The key letter in CRM is the "R" — the CRM solution should be designed to facilitate the relationship with the customers and with management. It can be a single software package or a grouping of systems, depending on how your company is structured.
4. Identify which concerns your company cannot address. This is really important. If your company cannot deliver on a particular concern or if your company would like to keep focused on particular opportunities, let your sales team know! Otherwise, you will be bogged down with a load of projects that you don't have the resources to deliver on or that are loss-leaders for your company. The goal of your sales team should be to build customer relationships, not fill sales quotas.

The purpose of qualifying a prospect is to determine if it truly a good fit for your company. Work with your sales and marketing team to prepare scripts and thought-provoking, open-ended questions to identify the target audience, key concerns, and potential solutions to qualify incoming inquiries and leads. And NEVER turn the prospect away without a recommendation. A true relationship-focused sales organization will be prepared with a list of referral partners or alternatives. It might sound counterproductive to commission-focused folks, but a dash of honesty and relationship building means that the prospect will come back to when they have a concern that you can address. If your sales team is asking the right questions and sharing the right solutions, everyone who does business with you — now and in the future — will have a better understanding of what qualified really means.