Some Lesser Known Aspects of "Qualifying"

Most salespeople know you need to qualify the company and the decision-maker but don’t realize there are other very important things you should qualify.

In this article I’d like to talk about a couple of other things you should always qualify during the sales process.

Objections

Objections should always be qualified, not that prospect’s lie or anything (They’d never do that, right?) but often there are other things involved in objections that make this very necessary.

The first is that frequently objections are the result of misunderstanding and not actual problems with the solution you’re offering. If you don’t carefully examine objections you my find that you are giving credit to an objection that is simply incorrect data on the prospect’s part.

Secondly, the objection you get is very often not the real objection by a symptom of it. You need to very carefully pin the prospect down as to what the objection really is. One of the best ways to do this is to ask how they believe the objection is going to effect the solution they are looking for. This takes the discussion away from you and puts it back on something the prospect is expert on — even if the original objection is miss stated or incorrect, the answer they give re the solution will be accurate.

One of the most common things that happens with objections is the salesperson gets it wrong. I was doing a training for a group years ago and we were listening to a tape of the call and an objection on price. The salesperson made an assumption about the objection and gave an answer which didn’t address the actual concern at hand. He lost the sale because of it.

Questions

One of the most commonly missed is that you need to qualify questions. Whenever the prospect asks a question you need to qualify that question. The qualification of a question is the discovery of the reason for the question. If you know why a question is asked you have the key data to answer properly. The prospect’s basis for any question is going to be a lot closer to the sale than anything you might assume or even believe about what appears to be an innocent question.

Transactions

Next, you should always qualify “transactions.” A transaction is an exchange that takes place with the prospect, you’re going to send him something, she’s going to send you something, you or the prospect needs to do something for the other, or you are setting up a meeting or follow up of some sort.

Setting up a demo is one of the best examples of this. If you don’t qualify all of the parts of the demo you can completely miss the boat with the prospect. You need to know why they want the demo, what they expect to see, what they will do based on the success of the demo and much more. Forget to do this qualification of the demo you and you could likely waste everyone’s time.

Summary

Qualifying is a lot more than making sure the company is a prospect and the person you’re talking to is actually a decision-maker. Qualifying is the process of selling.