How To Qualify Prospects In Sales
The ability to qualify prospects is one of the most underrated skills in sales.
Qualifying is the process of determining whether a prospect has the potential to become a customer.
And you do this by asking questions to identify certain “buying” characteristics in a prospect.
If the prospect’s answers to these questions indicate that they are NOT a potential buyer, then you shouldn’t waste your time. ❌
Not every prospect is a good fit for your product or service, and part of being a great salesperson is quickly differentiating between the buyers and the time-wasters. ⏰
How do you qualify prospects?
By asking questions!
But not just any questions.
You want to ask very specific questions in a very specific way so that you quickly learn what you need to know: is this prospect a good fit to buy my product or not?
In terms of what specific questions you should be asking, BANT is a popular acronym in sales to help with remembering qualifying questions:
- Budget: How much is the prospect willing to spend?
- Authority: Who makes the buying decision?
- Need: What is the prospect’s pain point?
- Timeline: When is the prospect planning to buy?
Click here to read more about BANT.
In terms of how to ask these questions, here are some tips for how to ask good qualifying questions:
- Ask questions that are clear and direct.
- Ask questions that are open-ended.
- Pause after you ask each question.
- Ask follow-up questions.
Click here to read more about asking better questions.
When do you qualify prospects?
After building rapport and before starting your pitch.
If you start qualifying before building rapport, your prospect might not trust you enough to give honest answers to your questions.
If you start qualifying after you’ve already started your pitch, you won’t have the information you need to tailor your pitch to your prospect’s specific needs.
It’s also a good idea to spread your questions throughout the sales conversation. Otherwise, your qualifying questions can feel like an interrogation for the prospect.
Here’s some advice from Gong:
“Top reps spread their questions out across the conversation, curating natural conversations. Conversely, average reps construct conversations that feel like interrogations. This is because they front load their questions in the beginning of the call.”
No matter what, make sure you’ve finished qualifying before you ask for the sale.
You won’t have the “ammo” you need to handle objections after asking for the sale if you haven’t already qualified.
Why do you qualify prospects?
Save time ⏰
By disqualifying non-buyers, tire-kickers, and bad fits, you’re saving all the extra time you would otherwise spend trying to sell to these prospects even though they’re never going to buy.
Click here to read more about why it’s a good thing to disqualify bad prospects.
Learn what the prospect cares about ❤️
Every prospect is different. You can’t just read the exact same script for every prospect. You have to ask qualifying questions to learn about why your prospect wants to buy your product, then you can tailor your pitch to show them the features that they care most about.
Anticipate objections
Handling objections starts with qualifying. If you’ve done a good job of qualifying, you shouldn’t be surprised by any objections. It should feel like everything is laid out in front of you like a chessboard.
Click here to read more about using qualifying to handle objections.
Gather “ammo”
The information you learn during qualifying will help you to handle objections. For example, if a prospect tells you that their problem is costing them $2 million per year and then they give you the objection that your solution is too expensive, you can say, “You told me this is costing you $2 million per year. Our solution is a fraction of that cost. You’ll be saving a ton of money.”
Conclusion
Without qualifying, you would be wasting your time on prospects who could never become customers, no matter how talented you are as a salesperson.
And even for the prospects who have buying potential, you wouldn’t be able to sell value and handle objections if you didn’t already discover valuable information during qualifying.
If you want to become a top seller, you have to learn to qualify.