Is Your Sales Team Qualifying Leads?

Salespeople are good talkers. If they weren’t, they probably wouldn’t be in sales. While this is a great quality to possess, there are times when a salesperson needs to listen.

Qualifying a sales lead is an essential part of the sales process. Despite this fact, it is often overlooked. This is unfortunate since failing to qualify a lead can literally be the difference between closing a sale and going away empty-handed.

In order to qualify a sales lead, you need to find out the answers to some important questions. While these questions may vary from prospect to prospect, the following list is a good starting point:

Where is the business headquartered?
How large is the business?
What are some of the issues the business needs to address?
What would prevent this business from buying what you are selling?
How does the business choose its vendors?
Who has the final say in any purchasing decision?
When must a purchasing decision be made by?
Who is the competition?
Does the business already use this product or service?
Are there budget constraints?

While the answers to these questions are necessary to qualify leads, the way they are asked is as important as the information itself. When asking a prospect questions, that prospect should never feel as if he or she is being interrogated. If a prospect does feel this way there is a good chance the sale will be lost before it has even been pitched. In such cases, it would be wise to find someone other than the sales team to qualify leads.

There are other reasons why moving salespeople out of the lead qualifying realm is often the best course of action. Salespeople who are required to qualify leads and make sales will always (understandably) go for the sale. Therefore, lead qualification will fall by the wayside, which means an empty sales funnel. Further, qualifying leads is a specialty that requires a particular skill set. Most salespeople simply do not possess this skill set.

Businesses who make the decision to split up the roles of qualifying sales leads and selling report higher sales numbers than those who require their salespeople to do both. For this reason alone, it is something to seriously consider. If you don’t feel you have the in-house resources to do this, you might want to consider outsource call center services.