This is by far the most important aspect of prospecting. We must make sure that we’re qualifying our prospects to improve our chances of providing value to them or their business.
In this stage of prospecting, we’re looking to accomplish a few goals:
– Decide if the prospect is workable
– Qualify and begin ranking prospects
– Find opportunities to develop a connection through personalization, rapport building, and trust development
Is the prospect’s business an organizational fit?
This type of qualification is based solely on demographics. Does the prospect fall within my territory? Do we sell in their industry? Does it fit our buyer persona?
Say our target market consists of small to medium-sized businesses with anywhere from 100 to 1,000 employees. We should eliminate any potential customers outside of these criteria.
Diving deeper, our product or service will naturally offer higher value to a particular profile within that target market. For example, medium-sized businesses consisting of a larger team. Those customers are also more likely to upgrade to a higher tier of our product, providing more lifetime value as a customer.
Have you identified key stakeholders?
There are two types of people involved on the other end of our sales process: Decision-makers and influencers.Influencers may not have the power to buy, but they’re often the ones that will be using the product and thus can become our biggest internal advocates. If we get them to rally around our offering, they can make a compelling case to decision-makers before we even speak with them.
Decision-makers are, of course, the ones that either approve or reject the buy. We can ask these questions to determine the decision-making process: Will anyone else be involved in this decision? Does this purchase come out of your immediate budget?
Do you have familiarity with the market?
We’re likely to be more familiar with certain types of companies, markets, or industries than others. Our pitch and sales techniques are also likely to be more refined with markets we feel comfortable talking about, so we should rank these prospects first.
Value-added prospects to whom we can offer more value are more likely to buy. For example, if we’re selling basic digital marketing services and we see that our prospect already has a robust web presence, the probability we can create tremendous added value is low.
Do they have an awareness of our offering?
Our prospects will likely have varying levels of knowledge about our product or services. The more awareness they have, the more likely they are to see the value in our offering and become customers. If a prospect has visited our website, subscribed to our blog, or posted content about something related to our offering, they probably know a lot about our company or service.
Based on our research, we should have a fine-tuned profile of our target customer, and every company or individual on our prospect list should meet those criteria.