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One of the most difficult challenges in building your business is deciding where best to spend your selling time. Salespeople are natural relationship builders, but often those relationships consume lots of time and yield little results. Determining who your best prospects are will increase your chances for success.
Think of your monthly time as a precious commodity; you have only about 40 hours per week and four to five weeks each month to reach prospects and make sales. It is critical to allocate your time to the prospects that give you the best chance for success. An easy way to decide where to spend time is to develop an interview process to assess a prospect’s worthiness of your time. Start by defining what information is important for you to know. Over the years, we have discovered that every good prospect meets four key criteria. If your prospects meet these criteria, then they probably are worthy of your time and will increase the likelihood of your sales success.
Key Question No.1: Are you dealing with the decision maker? Most salespeople love an audience and are excited to tell almost anyone about their products and services. To make a sale, the audience needs to include the person or people with the authority to sign the order. Identifying the ultimate decision maker early in the process is critical. To find out for sure, use these questions:
- Who signed off on the paperwork the last time a decision was made for this service?
- Who do we need to involve in the process to be sure the person who needs to sign the contract is included from the beginning?
Key Question No.2: Does the prospect have a need for your products or services? Is it a real, tangible need or do you have to help create the need? There is no better prospect for your services than one that calls you and tells you they want to buy. But since that doesn’t happen often enough, we need to talk with prospects to determine their needs. A prospect that recently signed a contract or has a long-term deal in place probably is not qualified for your time. Probe with these questions:
- We have installed our products for businesses similar to yours, to address issues, solve problems and improve business processes. Let’s discuss the issues unique to your business so we can help you too.
- Our service is working successfully in several of your competitors’ businesses. Do you have the same issues as they did?
- If we could show you a solution to improve your business and give you a competitive advantage, would you spend the time to see whether it would work for your business?
Key Question No. 3: Does the prospect have money in the budget to pay for your solution? By now, you should have identified the decision maker and verified or developed the need for your products and services. Next, you need to know if the budget exists along with the ability to pay. Try asking these questions:
- Do you typically lease or purchase products such as these?
- Would you like us to assist with financing?
- Have you budgeted the funds? Are additional approvals needed?
Key Question No. 4: Are they in the market now and will they make a decision in your timeframe? That’s right, your timeframe. Most businesses operate on a budget and so do salespeople. The difference is a salesperson’s “budget” is their monthly sales quota. Using the above questions, you have identified the decision maker, determined their needs (and that you can meet or exceed them), and know they have the ability to pay. The last thing is to determine whether they are making a decision in time for you to make your quota. If they are, consider them a high priority and worth as much time as they need to help you close the order. But if not, put them on the back burner and wait until next month or next quarter when they will be in your timeframe. Ask questions such as:
- Presuming we satisfy all of your criteria demonstrating our solution as the best way to meet your requirements, can we expect to sign the contract and move forward this month?
- Is there any reason to delay a decision?
- We were planning to order your materials, which take several weeks; can we finalize your requirements this month?
Your monthly time is a diminishing resource that won’t replenish until the next month. Meeting or exceeding monthly quotas will be achieved best by learning to take the time to interview your prospects prior to expending your resources and will go a long way toward increasing your sales and revenues.
Bill Taylor is president of Corporate Ladders, a management, sales and business development consulting and coaching firm specializing in technology, telecom, Internet, health care and financial services companies. He can be reached at +1 201 825 8296 or wbtaylor@corporateladders.com.
