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How to Qualify Your Leads
No matter how fantastic your product or service is, it will not add value to everyone at all times. There are those companies your offer is perfect for, and those that fall outside your sweet spot.
To ensure that you as a salesperson spend your time most efficiently, you should spend time qualifying your leads at an early stage of the sales process. Qualification is about gathering information that helps you understand whether or not you should spend time continuing to process a prospect.
You can qualify companies during a so-called discovery call or by using open data insights. In this blog post, we will walk you through how to qualify leads most effectively.
Qualification is about gathering enough insights to make a decision on whether it is worth it for you as a seller to spend time trying to sell to a company or not.
Avoid unwanted surprises during the sales process
You know the sellers who say something like: “I will close a deal worth 10K next week!”. Then it gets quiet. X is deducted from the price or the deal is postponed due to a complicated legal process of the potential customer that the seller did not know about. Or the client backs out. This barely does not happen to sellers who have qualified a lead properly.
It is your job to get know the company or person you are trying to sell to. You should also know if they have enough money at the bank to be able to buy or not.
Why you should qualify leads
Spending time on the companies that can buy your product or service
You find out which companies can get great value from your product or service and which ones are ready to buy now and have the means to enter into an agreement with you. You don’t have to waste time on companies that won’t buy.
Pitch the right company more successfully
By understanding why a customer is a qualified lead, you understand their pain points and how you can help them solve their problems. It helps you tailor your contact with the company to highlight its profits by partnering with you.
You can make a qualified estimate of when you will close the deal and how big it will be. By qualifying leads, you can eradicate – or at least reduce – the risk of unwanted surprises occurring at the end of the sales process. With more knowledge of a company, you can better predict the buying process.
Understand your company and your potential customers
You need to understand both your company and the companies that match your ideal customer profile in order to determine which clients match your organization
Many sellers hate to disqualify prospects and reduce their pipeline. It is better that you focus on a smaller number of quality leads than trying to bump an unreasonably large number of low-quality leads at the same time.
Qualifying leads is not just about making sure a company matches your client of your ideal customer. No matter how similar a company is to your image of the ultimate customer, it is not worthwhile if the decision-makers are not ready to make a decision now, if they cannot pay the invoice from you or if they just signed an agreement with one of your competitors.
What questions to ask during a discovery call / when you qualify for a lead depends on both your and your potential customer’s business. However, there are four things every seller should understand about a lead in order to qualify, or disqualify it.
What you Need To Know To Qualify A Lead
- Budget. Does the company have enough money in the account to pay a potential invoice from you?
- Mandate. Does your contact person have a mandate to make a decision about a purchase?
- Needs. Does the company have a problem that you can solve? Do the decision-makers understand the problem and are they willing to spend time and money to solve it now?
- Timeframe. What does the company’s buying process look like? How soon can they decide on a deal?
How to qualify leads
Let’s make one thing clear, it’s not about questioning the potential customer.
You can’t just hail questions over your prospect. Be a little agile. Weave the questions into a conversation where you show that you have a genuine interest in the potential customer’s business. And remember, you don’t need to know everything, just enough to understand if the company can become your customer soon and how you can lead them to a buying decision.
It’s not about knowing everything but about having the right information about your potential customer.
Use insights from open data to qualify/disqualify leads
Some information is difficult to find on the Internet, a company’s model for the buying process, for example. But most of it is there, accessible to you thanks to the ever-growing amount of open data.
A so-called discovery call is a call you give to your prospect after your first contact so that you can form an idea of if the company would get the right value from what you offer and if you are ready to buy soon
