Qualification is the fundamental step in the sales process. At some point every sales guy has to decide whether the deal can be won, and whether the winning will be worth the cost. This isn’t personal – it’s business. Expert sales guys don’t chase every deal. They’ll only go after sales they can win. They won’t waste time and expense on opportunities that can’t be won.
Professionals call this Qualification, meaning does it pass a set of tests. They know qualifying a sale involves some tough questions, and the easiest time to ask them is as early in the process as possible. If they’re going to walk away from the sale – qualify out – the sooner the better.
You can find a detailed explanation of why and how to qualify sales opportunities in our coaching tutorial Sales Qualification the Secret Sauce in Selling
This might seem counter intuitive. Most sales coaches ignore qualification, recommending concentrating on why prospects SHOULD buy, as opposed to why they WON’T. That’s why they’re selling books and training courses and not products and services.
Qualification is focused on whether and how prospects will buy. It helps us avoid chasing deals we can’t win, and also tells us how to win.
Whether or not we should bid is the subject of another article.
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Hi Michel thanks for taking the time to read my post and comment. I'm very familiar with the problem you describe. To my mind price is the one thing we should spend time training people to cope with, and from what I see, the coaches and authors never do.
I have written a couple of pieces on price here, but you've inspired to make a bigger project out of it. f you'd like to help me focus my pricing articles on some real life challenges please suggest some. Direction is always more useful than inspiration when it comes to writing stuff others might want to read
In the software business price gets to be enormously complex, because there's no marginal cost so the answer gets to be whatever the customer will pay is acceptable. But of course the professional will always get a better price than the amateur, from the same customer and for the same deal.
I've always encouraged sales guys to talk money as early as possible in the sales process, if possible establishing at the first call what the cost expectations are, where the money's coming from, and what will justify the spend e.g ROI.
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Yes…the questions….you are bang on again, but how often have I heard members of my sales team, after the 7 th time I asked why, figure out that they were “not sure” about the MONEY>>> that is such a key category. Everyone wants to solve everything, everyone can sign…until you follow the money! Such an important yet difficult question to ask for new sales reps.
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