Do You Know How To Separate Good Prospects From Dead Ends?

A guest post by Craig Klein of SalesNexus.com in our series called “The One Thing You Did in 2007 to Impact Your Success“. More posts in this series here, here and here.

Prior to 2007, we had struggled to sell profitably. We generated revenue – but we felt we could do much better. Our assessment was that we spent an awful lot of time on sales opportunities that never went anywhere.

We spent time and money traveling, on conference calls and web seminars. We had plenty of activity – but sales just didn’t follow suit. We simply spent too much time on deals that never closed.

Our challenge was to figure out how to know a good prospect from a dead end. And as I am sure you can imagine, that’s no small trick.

What did we do?

We developed a sales process – step by step instructions for what happens to every lead that we could stick to - that would help ensure that each lead would get exactly what he/she needed from our company, no more and no less.

We implemented a system to better qualify our prospects. If we were going to reduce the amount of time spent with unqualified prospects – prospects that are not likely to buy in the near term – we would have to figure out who’s qualified upfront, not half way through our sales dance.

Here’s how we did it…

We established two main sales processes – one for qualified leads and one for unqualified leads.

We decided upon 3 questions we could ask a prospect in the first conversation to determine if they’re qualified. Some basic selling 101 stuff and a few things specific to our world:

• Are you a decision maker? If not, are you a member of the decision making committee?
• What’s going wrong in your business that makes you want to spend money on a product like ours to fix it?
• When do you need to have the solution to this problem in place?

So, if you have the right answers (in our opinion, anyway) to these questions, you get our full sales attention. If you don’t, you go into a process that is more about us educating you about the problems our product addresses, sharing customer case studies with you, etc., mostly via email in our case and making much less frequent sales calls.

Important note: I’m not suggesting you should disregard leads that were not perfectly qualified. In fact, if you qualify well up front, you can put unqualified leads into a different process that gives them what they need now without consuming so much of your time. Everybody wins!

The process now allows a single rep to manage a greater number of leads, increasing their odds of success, and focuses the available sales time on the most valuable prospects.

It worked great for us in 2007 - here’s to a HUGE 2008!

This post was written by Craig Klein. You can leave a comment and share your thoughts and feedback below this post. For more information about Craig Klein, visit this link.