Qualifying Sales Opportunities The Sales Way

Qualifying Sales Opportunities
Organizations with sales teams fall into one of two camps when it comes to qualifying sales opportunities or customer deals.
 
Either you have a qualification process in place, or you don’t.
 
When we talk about qualifying sales ops, what we mean is that you have a company recognised method of deciding whether a sales opportunity is valid or not – so for example, that could mean, the customer has the budget, the timescales are defined and there is an actual need for your product.
Unfortunately, qualifying sales ops is often seen by sales people as a waste of time – some people see it as an unnecessary admin task – but the truth is that properly qualifying your sales ops is as important to a sales rep as it is to the company’s reporting activities.
If you don’t have a sales qualification process in place, then we’re going to look at why you should. And if you already have one in place, we’re going to talk about why it’s important to check that everyone is on board with why they’re qualifying leads and to have a check in to make sure your sales qualification process is actually working for you.
 
So, firstly, let’s look at a few reasons why qualifying sales opportunities is so so important. We often create qualification processes for the sake of them, without thinking about why we’re doing it. This can mean we fall into the trap of having an out of date, irrelevant qualification process that no one follows.
 
So, number 1 – it focuses your efforts on customers who are actually going to buy.
 
Salespeople can waste a lot of time talking to people who are never going to buy. They’re just kicking the tyres, stringing you along, or perhaps they fully intend to purchase but the reality is they don’t have the budget or authority. They’d love to buy, but they’re just enthusiastic prospects without the means to actually go ahead and purchase your product or service.
Because we get excited when a customer shows some interest, it can blind us to some of the red flags that are missing, namely whether the customer has the authority, budget, business need or deadline by which they need to purchase.
A qualification process reminds us of these red flags and helps us to critically assess a sales situation so that we’re only spending time with customers who are actually going to buy.
 
Ok, reason number two why you need a qualification process: it helps us to focus on who we should be looking for when it comes to target customers.
Without a qualification process, we can end up with too broad a prospect base to concentrate our limited time and resources on.
With a clear qualification process in place, we can whittle down our prospect list to focus on customers who are more likely to have the budget, scale, authority or business requirement that fits our product or service.
 
Reason number 3 for having a good sales opportunity qualification process in place is that sometimes, everything can look right on paper, but something is missing in a customer deal. Something just feels off. Having a qualification process in place where you review deals with your manager or senior colleagues gives you a good check in opportunity to discuss and analyse the deals you’re working on.
It gives Sales Enablement and Sales Leaders a framework to discuss customer deals with sales teams – encouraging the sharing of information and insights across the sales department. This not only provides opportunities for coaching to take place, but helps to make sure CRM systems are accurately updated so that opportunities that aren’t properly qualified aren’t being left in CRM tools.
 
So now we’ve talked about the ‘why’s’ – let’s discuss what you should do if you already have a sales opportunity qualification process in place but are feeling like it’s just not delivering many benefits for your business.
 
So, step 1: Find out if people are actually using the qualification process