In this training video, we talk about how to screen and qualify sales prospects in order to separate good prospects from bad prospects. This is extremely important because your time is one of your most valuable assets and in order to maximize sales, you need to protect that time by maximizing time spent with good prospects and minimizing time spent with poor quality prospects.

That might sound simple but if you don’t know what is truly going on with the prospect, it can be easy to get sucked into spending valuable time with a prospect that has a low probability of purchasing anything. And when you do that, you are giving up all of the lead generation and sales activities you could have done in that time that might end up getting wasted by not leading to any sales or revenue.

To prevent this from happening, we recommend a process to qualify sales prospects that is simply asking key questions at different steps of the sales process. The qualifying questions are designed to get a clear picture of what is going on with the prospect. This clarity will improve your ability to make better decisions about which prospects to spend your valuable time with and which ones you need to be more cautious with.

Our process on how to qualify sales prospects and customers is divided into two steps.

 

Step 1: Pre-Qualify

In our qualification process, to pre-qualify the prospect is simply to determine if it makes sense to simply continue talking. At this point, we do not care if the prospect has the money or power to purchase your product, as we will figure that out as we move on to the next step of the sales process, which is the conversation, meeting, or appointment.

The questions that you can ask to pre-qualify the prospect are pain questions and current state questions. These questions will do a very good job of determining if it even makes sense to keep talking. And the main point where you want to ask these questions is the first time you speak with the prospect, which could be the cold call, meeting at a networking event, email or online chat exchange, etc.

 

Step 2: Qualify

Once you have progressed to talking in more detail with the prospect, you should start to try to qualify the prospect by asking questions in four different areas:

  • Need to purchase
  • Ability to purchase
  • Authority to purchase
  • Intent to purchase

There are different questions that you can ask in each of those areas, and those questions should help you to have clarity as to how strong or weak the prospect is in each area. In order to fully qualify the sales prospect, they should be strong in all four areas. If they are weak in as few as one area, you should proceed with caution in terms of how much of your valuable time you spend with them.

This is the recording from week 11 of our 15-week webinar series on the SMART Sales System. In this session, we review Chapter 23, and we discuss a process for qualifying prospects.

If you would like to purchase a copy of The SMART Sales System book, you can do that here.