One of the biggest things that can hurt your sales is wasting time talking to poor-quality sales prospects. Your time is extremely valuable and every hour spent on a sales prospect that has a low probability of purchasing should be avoided if possible.

We Sometimes Try to Sell to Everybody
The challenge is that we have a lot of pressure to sell. Not only do we want to make more money and commissions, but we usually will have some sort of targets or quota looming over our heads. With that often being the state of mind that we have, we can end up trying to sell to everybody.

This is not to say that we try to sell to every single human being that we see. More so that we see everybody that we end up in business conversations with as sales prospects and try to sell our products and services to them.

Why Should We Not Try to Sell to Everybody
And just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with having a lot of business conversations or talking with a lot of sales prospects. Sales is definitely a numbers game and having high activity levels is very key to being consistently successful.

But as we mentioned, your time is extremely valuable so you need to protect it. Having a quick conversation with every sales prospect that you encounter is OK. The problem occurs when salespeople try to pursue and invest valuable time into every sales prospect that they can. This can lead to time wasted on poor-quality prospects.

Most Sales Prospects Don’t Fit
If you grouped together all of the prospects that you were going to talk to within the next 30 days and put them all in a circle, the majority of the group would not fit with what you have to offer. This means that they would never need or use what you have due to reasons like:

  • They don’t use and need what you have
  • They are too small or too large in terms of size
  • They are a totally different type of business, individual, or organization than you thought

For these prospects, every minute or hour spent with them is a complete waste of time and you want to identify these as early as possible to protect your time.

An example of how we can handle this wrong is to schedule a meeting or appointment with a prospect before trying to identify if they may fit or not. Yes, we have a meeting with a sales prospect on our calendar but this turns into valuable time being wasted and that time could have been repurposed toward finding better-qualified prospects.

Focus on the Prospects that May Fit
If we go back to the circle with all of the prospects, there will be a group that we could classify as “May Fit”. These are prospects that use or could possibly need what we are selling.

We don’t know if they have budget or power to purchase yet. We just know that they may fit. Now that we know this, we know that these are the sales prospects that we can begin to spend our valuable time with.