Sales Qualification - Why and How to Qualify Sales Opportunities

Turn Prospects Into Customers and Opportunities Into Sales.

Sales Qualification – Why and How to Qualify Sales Opportunities

Proper qualification not only tells us our chances of winning. It also tells us how to win. It helps us plan the ground we’ll compete on, and move the prospect in our direction. It helps us choose contingency plans for when things don’t go the way we want. Best of all it puts us on at least an equal footing with the prospect.

Sales Qualification – the Pros Secret

The absolute fundamental requirement of sales process is Qualification. Anybody who learns to employ Qualification is on the road to becoming a professional sales guy. Anybody who doesn’t is consigned to amateur status, and always will be.

Proper and consistent qualification increases our win rate, reduces our cost of sale, protects our margins and makes our business more predictable. Failure to qualify, and keep doing it, sends everything in the opposite direction.

So if you close every deal at the price you want, at the time you want, with control over the process and a clear definition of the “bulls eye” you need to “hit” in delivery, please stop reading. On the other hand if, like the rest of us, you struggle to get and maintain control over the sales process, the next few minutes could genuinely help raise your game.

Lets start with the fact not everybody we pitch is going to buy from us.

The old fashioned “numbers game” and “frog kissing” philosophies try to persuade us the more we have in our pipeline, the higher the chances one of them will. To be fair there is some validity in this thinking, but it’s hardly a business proposition. It’s like backing a single horse in more races. If we back enough, one of them will come in first. Trouble is we’ll go broke in the process.

The numbers game ignores our cost of sale. Cost of sale isn’t limited to phone calls, travel and proposals. It extends to opportunity cost – what else could we do with our time. Worse still it extends through to our ability to forecast and plan what will happen in our business.

“Hopefully” isn’t good enough in the sales game.

Professionals want to preserve cost of sale budgets for spending on projects they know, not hope, they’re going to win. Qualification is the technique they use to decide which opportunities to go after, and which ones they don’t.

But making the “bid – no bid” decision is only part of the picture.

With proper qualification the customer isn’t always right. In fact he’ll understand he’s usually wrong, and we’re there to help avoid a costly mistake.

Quite how sales professionals employ the qualification concept is a subject worthy of an entire book.

In future posts we’ll try to distill that book into a few articles.

Meanwhile watch our short video to see how we use Front Office Box to make qualification part of our sales management process.

Check out these short articles to find out more about sales qualification, and how to do it.

Improving the Bottom Line

Sales Qualification Checklist

Understand the Process

Understand the Competition

Understand the Threats

Five Questions About Money

Recruit a Coach

Like these ideas and want to try them out?

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