CHAPTER 30

The Bulletproof Qualification Process

I believe that every sale you lose is not, in fact, a qualified sales opportunity.

Why?

When you lose a deal, the customer is saying to you that your product or service was not an exact match or even the best fit for their requirements. Someone else’s product was. Depending on how many competitors were in on the deal, you might not have even been in second place. In which case, you have to question why you were even competing for this business.

How well are you qualifying your new customer sales opportunities? On the deals you lost, did you first qualify the prospects by determining whether they were interested in a product that was sort of like yours? Or mostly like yours? Or did they need exactly what you have to offer?

Wait, wait. I can hear you say, “What about the competition? What if they have a product just like mine? The customer was going to choose one of us. We just happened to lose this deal.”

Well, let me ask you a question: Is there not at least one point of significant differentiation between your product or service and the competition’s? Are your value propositions identical in every aspect? Even in competitive markets with highly commoditized products, there are differentiators. In which case, on lost deals, did you specifically qualify the customer on those unique aspects of your offering and value proposition?

When salespeople are prospecting for new leads, they tend to limit their search to customers who want to buy a product or service that is generally like theirs. But that approach can be a problem. It requires less work than searching and prospecting for customers whose requirements align exactly with what they have to sell. These two distinct approaches to business development and qualification yield two very different sets of sales opportunities. And results.

Salespeople are their own worst enemies in this regard. They have a fear of being too specific in their value proposition because they are afraid that it will limit the size of the pool of potential sales opportunities that they can develop.

However, as you learned in the previous chapter, your chances of success will increase if you do just the opposite. You don’t want to broaden the field of prospects you have to comb through to find a qualified customer. You want to narrow it. You want to be relentless in your prospecting and qualification to find sales opportunities that are suited for precisely what you’re selling. The outcome will be a much higher conversion rate, less competitive sales situations, and more stable pricing.

I want you to develop a bulletproof process for qualifying new sales opportunities. The stakes are high. Qualify correctly, and you’ll wisely spend your selling time working with the right customers. Approach qualification casually, and you’ll wonder why you are busy chasing down leads that turn out to be unqualified.

Bulletproofing qualification is a multistep process. This chapter covers the first step and the one major pitfall to avoid. In the next chapter, I’ll cover qualifying on price and value.

Much like every topic that I have coached you on in this book—whether it is responsiveness or delivering value in your sales process—when you qualify sales opportunities, you have to focus on the specifics versus generalities. The more specific you are with the customer about your value, features, benefits, pricing, and support, the more likely you are to find a prospect who will be qualified to buy exactly what you are selling.

The first step of qualification is the most critical. Make a mistake at this stage, and you’ll find yourself chasing after too many unqualified sales opportunities.

The first step of qualification offers two paths: category qualification and product qualification.

Category qualification is the default strategy for most salespeople. It means qualifying a customer who wants to buy a product or service that is similar to theirs. They are qualifying their leads as prospects not for their product per se but for the category of product or service they are selling.

Most companies provide their salespeople with what I call mother-hood-and-apple-pie qualifying questions. They are designed to cast a broad net and snare as many potential sales opportunities as possible.

I had a client that sold test equipment. The company had four main competitors in its core market. One of the company’s salespeople had a good nose for digging up sales opportunities that were being worked by his competitors. He thought that if one or more competitors were trying to capture a customer’s business, then this must also be a prospect for him. So he would jump in with both feet, irrespective of whether the customer’s needs were precisely aligned with his value proposition.

If you pursue a category qualification approach, it means you are more focused on a classic sales-is-a-numbers-game approach to selling. “Let’s fill up the funnel and see how many pop out at the bottom.” This has been the primary method for salespeople since the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s a brute-force approach to sales that may yield some results but wastes both the seller’s and prospect’s time.

I worked with the CEO of a company that sold a somewhat commoditized product. A key differentiator was that the company possessed a unique capability to mass-customize the product it sold that the competition couldn’t match. But it took extra sales work to find customers who could purchase the product in the requisite volume to justify the customization. Absent that, the company was just another face in the crowd, no better than any other seller in the market. The CEO’s salespeople were trained to sell the customization service, but they never were comfortable with limiting themselves to prospecting for these specific prospects. They were more comfortable with broad category qualification—even though it was ultimately unproductive.

Category qualification is passive. That’s why salespeople gravitate toward it. The bar is set pretty low, and it’s easy to defend to your manager.

The alternative to category qualification is product qualification. A disciplined product qualification approach dictates that you are prospecting for customers that need exactly what you have to offer. They specifically need the unique value that your product and services provides and that differentiates you from your competitor.

To product-qualify a sales opportunity means to reach a preliminary agreement with the customer that the unique value you offer will be an essential criterion in the customer’s decision making. This requires that you don’t just run through your list of standard qualifying questions and check off enough boxes on a qualification checklist to show your boss that yours is a qualified sales opportunity.

I remember attending my first sales training class where I learned a reductive method of product qualification. We were trained to ask a series of A/B questions. The answer to each led to another A/B question in a long chain of questions designed to winnow down the available options and identify the features that the customer just couldn’t live without. The increasingly specific A/B pairs were cleverly designed to have the customer choose between two options that we supported.

Product qualification requires that you simultaneously educate while you question. This is what should be happening during the discovery phase of your sales process. Discovery is not just about uncovering customers’ requirements. It’s also about winnowing down their requirements from the “wants” to the “must-haves” and educating them about how the must-haves correlate to the features and value provided by your product or service.

As a precursor to qualification, your primary sales task should be to identify sales opportunities whose key decision criteria precisely align with your unique value. This takes more work up front. It also requires the self-discipline to “catch and release” prospects who don’t measure up to your qualification standards. If the closest you can get to a customer is category qualification, then you have to honestly assess how far off the mark are you. If another vendor has nailed product qualification with a prospect, then you need to determine whether this is an opportunity worth pursuing. It’s always better to save your ammo (i.e., your selling time) for an opportunity to positively influence the outcome.

Take a moment to imagine what will happen to your sales results when your pipeline is composed primarily of prospects who are qualified to buy your specific product or service, as opposed to your category of product or service. Provided that you are a responsive and maximum value seller, the result will be compressed buying cycles, improved sales productivity, and more money in your pocket.