Qualifying Lead Tips
Lead generation tips
“Having a sales process that adds value to your customer is the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have” – Owen Wood”
Qualifying lead tips
How should your sales team qualify leads prior to meetings? When getting the meeting, you can give yourself a great chance of success by finding out:
Size of opportunity
Reason for changing
Emotional drive to change
What’s important to them
Budget
Timescale
Decision making process
Outline of our sales process
Are you hiring your first sales person? You’ll need to give them a minimum viable process on which to follow. Something which you know will get a profitable amount of sales, provided they follow it correctly. This sales process isn’t about specific sales techniques, it’s about helping the customer to see that your company ticks all the right boxes for them:
Find out – Asking the right questions to arm yourself with key bits of information
Match needs – Making it incredibly easy for them to know what they need to know about you
Be helpful – Being proactive and super helpful when it comes to helping the customer answer all of the questions they need to answer
Hold them to timescales – Structuring the conversation in such a way that you can get an answer from them sooner, rather than later
Nothing to it, eh? Like I said, we’re not here to tell you what to do, this is about showing you ways that we’ve found has worked for us. This will take you through what we do:
Before the meeting
Reviewing the information that we provide you with
During the meeting
Building rapport, matching needs and collecting information
Providing the quote
Providing a well-formatted, well-structured quote quickly
Following up and closing
Helping them answer all of their questions and holding them to specific timescales
Including FAQs
A key to closing more sales is answering all of your Prospect’s questions. They need to know that you’re the best company for the job on so many levels;
Can they trust you to do a good job?
Will you communicate with them in a way that makes their life easy?
Does your price reflect enough value? & Is the total price in line with their budget?
Can they be confident that you’ll be responsive to changing needs?
Do all the stakeholders agree on the above points?
You’re probably not going to get to speak to every influencer & Decision Maker
That’s a lot of questions to answer! Additionally, with high-value B2B sales, there is usually more than one decision-maker or influencer. You’re probably going to meet the main decision-makers at the meeting, but you might not meet all of them.
What if you’ve answered all of one person’s questions, but someone you never met has the exact same concerns? What if the decision-maker you met with doesn’t have the time to answer those concerns or at least tell them that you covered it at the meeting?
Well, you might lose the sale, that’s what. You need to know that everyone involved in decision making has all of their questions answered. That’s a surefire way to get ahead in selling.
Include an FAQ sheet
If you aren’t going to speak to everyone, then make sure that you have an answer for every problem faced by your potential client. Here’s a great bit of B2B sales advice, include this in your proposal along with:
Questions/Concerns specific to that client and how you’ll solve them
Common questions & concerns that your clients would have e.g. how long until you get started, what are payment terms like, what do to if there’s a problem, etc
Examples of great jobs you have done before
The last one is a bit of a curveball, but a commonly overlooked question is;
“Are these guys any good?”
If someone isn’t sure if you’ll actually be able to perform, they might stick with their current mediocre supplier. Better the devil you know and all that.
Example FAQs
To help you out, I recommend doing an idea generating session with your sales team, your customer service team and your ops team, where you ask them each the top 25 most commonly asked questions they get.
Asking them to do so many will really get ideas flowing. Of the 3 x 25 FAQs, you then combine these and take the top 25 of those 75 FAQs and include them in the Proposal. Common example FAQs we get are:
Is this campaign GDPR Compliant?
Do we need to provide the data?
Do we need to run marketing campaigns to the data prior to contact?
How long do the campaigns last?
Do we get call recordings?
What if the Prospect asks to reschedule a meeting?
Do you need a branded email address from us?
You see? Common questions which help ‘flesh out’ your proposal and give them a better sense of what working with you will be like. They want to know that you’ve thought of everything and they can trust you to do a good job. This will greatly increase your chances of converting sales.
Sales are won or lost after the sales meeting
The sales meeting, or quote meeting, is only about 60%-70% along the sales process. Successful sales is all in the follow up and helping your Prospect to see that you’re the best fit for them.
Why not check out a talk I did about how to help structure your sales process so your sales people close more sales.
