Sales qualification is the process of identifying and evaluating potential customers to determine if they are a good fit for a company’s products or services. It’s a crucial step in the sales process that helps sales teams prioritize their efforts and increase their chances of closing deals.
Why sales qualification?
Sales qualification can make or break your sales efforts. As you’ll see in the stories from real sales leaders below, it can be the secret to unlocking bigger and better deals, and the antidote to otherwise wasted precious time and resources.
The purpose of Sales Qualification focuses on four key areas: time and resource optimization, increasing conversion rates, improving customer satisfaction, and ultimately growing revenue.
- Time and Resource Optimization: By qualifying leads, sales teams can focus on prospects that are more likely to convert into customers, saving time and resources.
- Increased Conversion Rates: Qualified leads have a higher probability of making a purchase, leading to improved sales performance.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: When customers are well-qualified, they are more likely to be satisfied with the product or service they purchase, as it aligns with their needs.
By focusing on the customer relationship, you can exceed your buyer’s expectations, win the deals that matter, and grow revenue.
Sales Qualification 101 – the secret to bigger better deals
When it comes to sales qualification, what’s your philosophy? The more the merrier? Or do you take a rigorous approach to how you qualify your opportunities?
Your sellers’ time and resources are finite. There’s simply no way around it. This means that for every action a rep takes, there are many other possible actions they’re not taking. Consciously or not, every deal you chase is a decision to knock on one door at the expense of another.
Rigorous qualification is a foundational pillar of account planning because it’s the only way to focus your attention on building real, mutually beneficial relationships. It’s all about finding the deals that matter so you can have the maximum impact for both your business and your customer.
If you aren’t already heavily invested in a rigorous sales qualification discipline, this article will hopefully convince you of why you should be. We’ll be diving into stories from real sellers who have seen huge wins from heavily qualifying deals, and creating an environment where sellers feel safe saying “no” to a deal if it isn’t worth chasing.
Sarah Walker’s approach to sales qualification
The key heroine for our story is Sarah Walker, Former Director, Corporate & Public Sector BT Group in the United Kingdom. Featured in our book, Not Just Another Vendor, Sarah Walker learned firsthand the importance of better Sales Qualification. Achieving the seller’s dream of bigger, better deals rarely means more deals. Instead, it often means less deals – focusing on the opportunities and relationships that really matter.
The path forward seemed clear to Sarah. The biggest wins wouldn’t come from the lowest-hanging fruit. Deals with real teeth could only result from taking a more thoughtful interest in how they could make a real difference for their customers.
Sarah called her team together. She related the story of her success with a recent deal and how she’d taken a step back, thought bigger, and ultimately been handsomely rewarded for her efforts.
“Yes, you might be successful now, chipping away at the low-hanging fruit,” she told them. “But if we want to make a difference long-term, there are important extra things we can do.”
It’s difficult for sellers to turn down opportunities
Sarah figured that her win would have her team members lining up to follow in her footsteps. “I assumed that when I became a leader, I could just turn up and tell people how I’d been successful and then they’d all mirror that,” she says with a laugh. “But I very quickly learned that this just isn’t how leadership plays out.”
Her sellers might have appreciated that she had a point, but it didn’t mean they were convinced to change their approach. For those who were reliably hitting their quotas, the idea that they should start thinking more broadly and creatively seemed unnecessary at best and risky at worst.
Taking a more deliberate approach with one customer would mean passing on the chance to score faster wins elsewhere.
“It’s a very difficult thing for a salesperson to proactively walk away from a sale, particularly when they’re chasing targets,” Sarah says.
But she wasn’t willing to let the idea go. The way she saw it, sales effort couldn’t be measured in wins alone. After all, chasing deals isn’t free.
Pursuing opportunities always comes with a cost
“It’s easy to negate the fact that the cost-to-bid and cost-to-pursue are incredibly significant causes of burnt resources for any sales organization,” she explains. Thinking more critically about which deals they chased and how they chased them might do more than just get them bigger contracts, she reasoned: it might make them more efficient, too.
Her sellers might not have been jumping at her suggestion to be more intentional in the way they approached opportunities, but Sarah wasn’t deterred.
One of her biggest priorities wasn’t to force people to change their ways or come down hard on people who weren’t doing what she felt was best. Instead, she threw her energy behind creating an environment that would encourage the behavior she wanted them to embrace.
Creating an environment where sellers are free to say “no”
“I wanted my team to be a safe place where someone could come and tell me, ‘I don’t think we should pursue this bid’ without worrying that my reaction would be, ‘Well, you aren’t on target so if you aren’t going after this bid, what are you doing?’”
On the contrary, Sarah knew open conversations about whether or not pursuing a bid was the right move were crucial to achieving her vision.
“There is so much value in having conversations around the qualification process and understanding the seller’s decision not to bid,” she says.
The secret to effective deal management is sales qualification
Chasing a high number of smaller, transactional deals might help a seller hit their quota for the quarter, but it won’t create the kind of long-term partnerships that move you out of the status of being “just another vendor” and pay off in the long term.
When you select which deals to pursue carefully, however, you can hone in on the opportunities in which you’re best positioned to help your customers succeed. Then, you can go all-in on aligning the revenue team, building an extensive roster of relationships, and becoming a strategic partner to your customers.
In other words, you’ll have the time, resources, and focus to do real deal management and improve your chances of future sales to grow the account.
Selective investment is a winning strategy
Sarah isn’t alone in her beliefs. Alison Greenwood, Regional Vice President and General Manager at Lumen, says that selective investment is almost always a winning strategy. “When you reduce the number of opportunities you’re chasing, your win rate should increase,” she said.
“Sellers can get a little bit optimistic,” she adds. “We think that because we have all these features and because we have the right price, the customer will want our service. In reality, we need to be much more disciplined about getting deep into their business and deciding how to compete—and whether to compete at all. That, I think, is the foundation of account planning.”
Account planning, as we all know by now, is rooted above all in putting your customer first. It requires teams to consider where and with whom they can have the greatest impact over the long term rather than where they can score a quick win.
Great account planning and deal management only works when you invest real attention in your relationships, which can’t be done if you’re chasing every minor opportunity that comes your way. You have to take a bigger-picture, more thoughtful approach.
Sometimes, you have to say “No” to say “Yes.”
Outcomes of good sales qualification include:
- Higher win rate percentage
- Bigger deals
- Shortened sales cycles with better ROI for your team’s time and energy
- Better opportunities.
These outcomes come together in the ultimate success metric, called Sales Velocity, resulting in happier customers who get the attention and right-sized solutions that fit their strategic goals.
Put simply, when you only go after deals you can (and should) win, you can confidently invest your time, effort, and resources into winning them.
Ready to get started on your Sales Qualification journey?
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