Oct

How To Pre-qualify Leads

How To Pre-qualify Leads Like A Top Producer

There are many features which make somebody good in sales including personality, persistence, knowledge, trustworthiness, and negotiating skills.

This article is about the one commodity that stays the same for every sales person, right from the first day they start to the last day of their career. That commodity is time.

Every morning when you awake, there are 24 hours in a day, no more and no less. Learning how to manage your time effectively, so that you’re most productive in the least amount of hours is the most important key to becoming successful in anything.

In sales, the best time management tool you can master, is prequalifying your prospects. A more advanced time management tool is duplicating your efforts by teaching others how to do the exact same thing as you.

If you teach 4 people how to do exactly what you do, in an 8 hour work day, you would complete 40 hours of productivity. Another tool is paying people an hourly value less than your hourly value to complete work for you.

This is known as Outsourcing.

When prequalifying your prospects you want to know 4 things before you decide how much time you’re going to spend with them. Do they have money? How urgent is their decision to them? Are all the decision makers present?

Will they buy from me? Without knowing these 4 elements before you begin investing your time, it’s impossible to estimate the value of your time. Suppose I invited you over to my home to give me an estimate on building a flower bed next to my porch.

First we spend 30 minutes talking about what kind of flowers I like, then you spend another 2 hours driving me around to visit nurseries and gardens.

When we return to the house, there are 3 different scenarios that could occur. I can tell you I’m broke and in that case your hourly value was $0 per hour.

I can tell you that this flower bed project is something I’m considering 2 years from now, after I’ve ripped up the old grass, planted new seed, and completed 2 growth cycles.

In this case, your hourly value is still $0 per hour because the length of time before making a decision is too far away. I can tell you that I really enjoyed the 2.5 hours we spent, but this is actually my wife’s project and I’m just doing research for her.

You’ll have to come back next Saturday to repeat your presentation with her. In this case, you might get the business but you just cut your hourly value in half.

In the last scenario, I tell you that I was just curious about different flower types but my brother is in the landscaping business, so we’re just going to use him.

You could have prequalified your prospect to make sure that none of these 4 things would occur by asking the right questions and making the right statements.

The time you lost is known as opportunity cost, which is your time lost that could have spent with a more serious customer.

It would be bad for future business to tell a customer you will not work with them, so there is a delicate, strategic way of prequalifying your customers with an introduction.

Introduction

Prepare a list of questions and statements that you will use in your introduction dialogue to determine the amount of time you want to invest with this customer. Always set expectations for the customer.

Setting the expectations is like verbally providing an outline before giving a speech or seminar. It makes it easier for the listener to follow along when they can see the same big picture that you see, before you begin sharing the information.

To do this, simply group your presentation into 4 or 5 bullets and tell them what those bullets are at the very beginning. Tell them exactly what you’re about to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.

The questions and statements you verbalize should be carefully articulated in such a way that everything sentence that comes out of your mouth is “for the customers benefit.” “The reason I’m asking this question is for your benefit.”

“The reason I’m telling you this is for your benefit.” “I’m just here to help you.” “This information is important for me to be able to help you.”

As long as you’re speaking from a position of trying to help the customer for his benefit, you can say just about anything you want as long as it’s phrased correctly.

If you enjoyed this FREE Sales Training, then make sure you check out our National Agents Alliance team page at the link below.

National Agents Alliance Training

Your Selling Process – It’s Not Optional, It’s A Condition Of Continued Employment (thecustomercollective.com)
The Power of Follow Up (thecustomercollective.com)
Time Management Tip: Start Your Day with Your Most Important Task (creativeorganizing.typepad.com)

How To Pre-qualify Leads

How To Pre-qualify Leads Like A Top Producer

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