Don’t Be Afraid To Disqualify Bad Prospects
As a salesperson, your most valuable asset is your time. ⏰
Because there is only so much time in a day, and it takes time to contact prospects.
Therefore, you can only contact so many prospects in a day, and as a result, you can only have so many prospects in your pipeline at any given time.
Still, salespeople since the beginning of time have been trying to bend this rule.
“Work harder” seems to be the default approach and “holding onto” accounts is a common symptom among salespeople with a fear of pipeline shrinkage.
The inevitable result is that the pipeline gets too big and there’s no longer enough time in the day to put the appropriate touch points on all the prospects in the pipe.
This defeats the whole point of having a pipeline and a sales cadence in the first place.
Prospects start to fall through the cracks and touch-point opportunities are missed that would have resulted in easy closes.
Kick out prospects that are bad fits or time-wasters.
Qualifying should be a fork in the road for prospects that are traveling through your sales funnel.
If the prospect doesn’t meet the minimum threshold defined by your sales team for a “potential buyer,” then kick them out and don’t look back.
Otherwise, having them in your pipeline will be a tax on your time. The real tragedy is that this time could have been spent on other prospects with real potential to become buyers.
Focus your sales energy on prospects with the highest potential to become customers.
Not every prospect deserves to be in your pipeline.
“It’s far better to spend [time] on a handful of your best prospects than spreading yourself thin across dozens of leads. Trying to close every deal that comes along is only going to result in dead ends with poor fit prospects, while you neglect prospects likely to buy.”
Remember this when you’re qualifying and your prospect is “on the fence” about one of their answers to your qualifying questions.
You can even use an “up-front contract” to make sure the prospect is worth your time.
For example, if you ask your prospect:
“Do you have a deadline for when you need to get this started?”
And your prospect responds:
“We probably won’t want to get anything started until next year.”
Then you can use an “up-front contract” like this:
“We try to only walk through the demo with customers when they are less than three months away from their planned purchase date. Should we schedule a time for next year when you’re closer to being ready to get something started?”
Summary
- Your most valuable asset is your time.
- Kick out bad fits and time-wasters.
- Focus on prospects with the highest potential to buy.