Don’t waste your time with people who aren’t going to buy!
When you are responsible for sales, you have only one currency to spend — your time.
So, it’s incredibly painful to spend time with a prospect and then find out that they don’t have the money, or they don’t see the value in your services. It’s especially painful when you’ve invested time with a prospect, created a proposal, and then they ghost you .
If you are seeing deals stall out toward the end of the sales process, you might need to add two more questions to your qualification process.
Before investing time, I’m sure you confirm that they have a clear need, budget, and timeline. That’s common sales advice.
But these two questions have helped the clients I coach to close more deals by keeping deals from ghosting or going cold.
How are you going to make a decision?
This question is a game-changer!
If the prospect doesn’t have a pre-defined process for deciding who to work with, they are going to have a hard time evaluating your solution!
Some important things to listen to here,
- Who is going to be involved? Are you talking to the decision-maker?
- Who else are they considering?
- What are their criteria?
If they don’t have a process, see if you can build one with them! How’s that for stacking the deck?
What is going to happen if you don’t solve this problem?
If your prospect can’t articulate clear consequences that will occur if they do nothing, then that’s most likely what they are going to do! We need to find some terrible fate that will befall them if they fail to act.
The most comfortable choice for them is to decide to do nothing. Your main competition is the status quo. You need to cut that option off at the knees!
If you get this consequence it’s also a great lever late in the process. “I don’t want [insert terrible thing here] to happen, we talked about how that would impact you and your business. Let’s get on the phone and make a deal so that we can keep that from happening…”
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We need to invest our time in the leads that are most likely to buy by throwing the unqualified leads out of the boat right away! I know it can be painful to let go of a lead, but it’s better to put time into generating another one than trying to chase down business that isn’t likely to close.
What questions do you use when you qualify leads?
