One of the best ways to become a better closer is to ask the right qualifying questions when meeting with prospects. These are questions that screen the prospect to see how good of a fit your product is and how likely the prospect is to move forward with the purchase.

Here is a short video that outlines four categories of qualifying questions.

Need vs. Want Qualifying Questions
One type of question is need vs. want question and these try to determine whether the prospect truly needs what you are selling or if the interest that they have is more of a “want”. Determining whether the prospect needs or wants can help you to get a feeling about how likely the prospect is to move forward.

 

Availability of Funding Qualifying Questions
A big factor in whether or not the prospect will go through with purchasing from you is whether or not they have the money or funding available in order to move forward with a purchase.

Directly asking about money might either not be received well or get you to the key information that you want. In the video are some good questions that probe in a very diplomatic way and get to the type of information that you need to know how able the prospect would be to spend money on what you are selling.

 

Decision-Making Authority Qualifying Questions
The prospect can love what you sell, truly need it, and have the money to spend, but if they do not have the authority to make the purchasing decision, they are not a qualified prospect.

Similarly to how you don’t want to directly ask about money, you may not want to directly ask if the prospect is the decision maker. There are some good probing questions that help to identify how much decision-making authority the prospect has.

 

Level of Intent Qualifying Questions
Taking all of this one step further, the prospect may need what you have, may have the money to spend, and may have the authority to make the decision to move forward, but they may still lack the genuine intent to purchase from you.

An example of this is when a prospect contacts you for a quote but they are just doing a price comparison and have already been in deep discussions with another vendor. In other words, they have strong intentions to purchase, but they do not intend to purchase from you.

There are some very simple qualifying questions that you can ask to identify when this is the case.