Learn How To Discard Unqualified Prospects
Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2024 10:49 am
Like most salespeople, I made a lot of mistakes early in my career. But over time I learned a very useful principle, "70% of all sales in your funnel can be won."
Learning to identify which deals to let go from the earliest stages of your sales process will allow you to spend more time with high-quality prospects, make more sales, and have a healthier funnel.
Here are three tips to make identifying a low-value prospect much easier.
Turn your reactive losses into proactive losses : Stop wasting time and resources chasing low-value prospects and send them to the lost stage right from the start.
Codify and standardize : Every week, review all of your won deals as well as your lost deals. Identify the characteristics that each group has in common as to why you won or lost a deal (price, product features, service, etc.).
Identify your ideal client profile and discover how to get the most prospects that fit your profile. Your ideal client is the one that meets most of the strategic requirements in all fields.
Want your product
Has purchasing power.
Purchasing Authority.
There really is a need.
1. Identify lost deals early in your sales process.
Having low-value deals in our sales funnel fills it with “fake deals,” meaning they take up space in our funnel and give us false hopes of purchase and profit.
The winning element in a sales funnel is the speed at which you move a deal from one stage to the next until it reaches closure.
Having too many fake sales in your funnel causes the sales flow to slow down, causing these empty deals to only take up resources and time.
What usually happens when talking to these prospects are empty promises like the classic “we are planning it for next month, we will get back to you” or “we are waiting for the budget to be released for the project, but it should arrive soon.”
The reasons vary, but they all have one thing in common: These “potential sales” take up a lot of your time and attention, and above all, space in your funnel.
But then what should I do?
What you need to do is quite simple, just maintain direct communication and pay attention to the answers your prospect gives you.
You might ask, “Based on all the data I’ve given you about our solution, on a scale of 1-10 how interested are you in our solution?”
If their answer is a 7, ask if there’s anything you can do to turn that 7 into a 10.
This can range from addressing critical questions overseas chinese in worldwide data about your company, product, or service to exploring payment plans and financing, but simply asking will help you know what your prospect needs in order to be ready to move on to the next stage.
If their answer is less than a 7, evaluate all the information they’ve given you to see if you should continue with this prospect, or if there’s evidence that the sale isn’t going to happen and you should stop pursuing this opportunity and mark it as a lost deal.
2. Sales Manager: Know why you lose or win deals
Codify and standardize the reason why you close or don't close a sale. First, form a criterion of why you lost a deal and analyze it to have a future vision of how to identify patterns and know what type of prospects to have in your sales funnel and thus obtain better results.
Learning to identify which deals to let go from the earliest stages of your sales process will allow you to spend more time with high-quality prospects, make more sales, and have a healthier funnel.
Here are three tips to make identifying a low-value prospect much easier.
Turn your reactive losses into proactive losses : Stop wasting time and resources chasing low-value prospects and send them to the lost stage right from the start.
Codify and standardize : Every week, review all of your won deals as well as your lost deals. Identify the characteristics that each group has in common as to why you won or lost a deal (price, product features, service, etc.).
Identify your ideal client profile and discover how to get the most prospects that fit your profile. Your ideal client is the one that meets most of the strategic requirements in all fields.
Want your product
Has purchasing power.
Purchasing Authority.
There really is a need.
1. Identify lost deals early in your sales process.
Having low-value deals in our sales funnel fills it with “fake deals,” meaning they take up space in our funnel and give us false hopes of purchase and profit.
The winning element in a sales funnel is the speed at which you move a deal from one stage to the next until it reaches closure.
Having too many fake sales in your funnel causes the sales flow to slow down, causing these empty deals to only take up resources and time.
What usually happens when talking to these prospects are empty promises like the classic “we are planning it for next month, we will get back to you” or “we are waiting for the budget to be released for the project, but it should arrive soon.”
The reasons vary, but they all have one thing in common: These “potential sales” take up a lot of your time and attention, and above all, space in your funnel.
But then what should I do?
What you need to do is quite simple, just maintain direct communication and pay attention to the answers your prospect gives you.
You might ask, “Based on all the data I’ve given you about our solution, on a scale of 1-10 how interested are you in our solution?”
If their answer is a 7, ask if there’s anything you can do to turn that 7 into a 10.
This can range from addressing critical questions overseas chinese in worldwide data about your company, product, or service to exploring payment plans and financing, but simply asking will help you know what your prospect needs in order to be ready to move on to the next stage.
If their answer is less than a 7, evaluate all the information they’ve given you to see if you should continue with this prospect, or if there’s evidence that the sale isn’t going to happen and you should stop pursuing this opportunity and mark it as a lost deal.
2. Sales Manager: Know why you lose or win deals
Codify and standardize the reason why you close or don't close a sale. First, form a criterion of why you lost a deal and analyze it to have a future vision of how to identify patterns and know what type of prospects to have in your sales funnel and thus obtain better results.