Recipe: Qualifying Your Prospects

One of the common barriers to having sales conversations is pursuing the wrong prospects. You may have done a good job at defining your target market, but not everyone in your market needs your service now or can afford to pay. When you approach prospects who aren’t qualified buyers, your requests to explore their needs and your services may fall on deaf ears, and your efforts will be wasted. Qualifying questions are intended to determine whether a prospect is hot, warm, or cold, so you can gauge your level of effort accordingly. Typical qualifiers are:

Asking if they have a particular problem your service solves or a goal it aids

Finding out how much they are expecting to pay or have paid in the past

Determining if they have a budget set aside to get the work done

Asking how soon they are expecting to get started or have their project completed

Discovering what priority they have attached to addressing their issues

Knowing if the person you are talking to is a decision maker

Learning how far along they are in making a decision

When you speak to a prospect by phone or in person, you can ask questions like these directly. If you receive inquiries by e-mail, encourage prospects to tell you more when they write. The “contact us” page on your website might suggest a few questions you’d like them to answer, or you can provide a contact form for them to complete.

If you find that once you start asking these questions, your prospect list starts looking pretty chilly, you need some higher-quality leads and referrals. What is the profile of the client most likely to buy? Where can you get more leads that fit that profile? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you may need to do more research on your target market. (See the next section for some suggestions.)

Another solution is getting more referral-based leads, rather than working from prospect lists or relying on tips from your networking contacts. A client who is personally referred to you by someone they trust will almost always move forward to the sales conversation stage immediately because they have pre-qualified you.