Sales Qualification

Shedding Light on the Subject

By Jeffrey Hansler, CSP

If you were placed in a dark room filled with unknown objects, given a bag of marbles, and told to toss as many marbles as possible in a bucket placed somewhere in the room.  Unable to see where the bucket was, many of your tosses would be wasted just trying to locate it.  If you did happen to strike a marble on the bucket, you could at least try to repeat it, but you'd have no idea if your shot was directly at the bucket or a ricochet shot off some other object.  You'd be faced with a discouraging and frustrating task.

For many people sales is a similarly frustrating experience.  They suffer from a lack of understanding in the determination of a prospect's real chances of becoming a customer.  They cannot clearly see what necessary information needs to be qualified, when to qualify for that information, and how to ask for that information.  This leads to disappointment and robs self-confidence.  The emotional wear and tear from unpleasant surprises deplete the energy and motivation of such a salesperson.

Think of the wasted company resources chasing phantom prospects.  Think of the wasted time, the only true commodity a salesperson has to offer.  This waste is enough to make a healthy company anemic and a motivated salesperson despondent.

So rather than dwelling on the symptoms of poor qualification and trying to cure them, work on fixing the cause of demotivation.  Use this information to guide yourself to a state of skilled qualification.  Learn proper qualification and build justified self-confidence.  Feed the personal values of security through competence and the freedom of quantitative expectation.

What is qualification?  Qualification is determining whether you, as a salesperson, will spend more time guiding a prospect to a decision about your product or service.  This is done through a process, I call RADAR.

R = Rapport.  Have you established enough rapport to communicate with this person?  Can you gather the other elements of RADAR?  If you can't, then at this time, spending your time with this prospect is a big gamble in terms of your chances of gaining a sale.

A = Acknowledge interest in solving their "problem".  By having the prospect verbalize their interest, you get a comparable measurement of what they say verses their true intentions.  A prospect that has been walking around car lots all day and says he's just looking, is understating his true interest for some purpose.  You should find out that purpose.

D = Decision process and decision maker.  You need to ask who makes the decisions and what process they go through to do so.

A = Acknowledged Funds.  What money do they claim to have available for the purchase of their "interest".  More than a statement of fact, the answer provides you an indicator of their comfort with you at this point.

R = Risk Coefficient.  This is a measure of how much new territory will have to be covered before a prospect will make a decision.  A person who has made similar decisions in the past which yielded positive results has a much lower risk coefficient than a person traveling into unknown territory.

When should you qualify?  Usually, the qualification process begins 30 seconds to 2 minutes into a business conversation.  The information is reconfirmed throughout the sales or communication process.

The biggest mistake salespeople make is spending a great deal of time before getting to the important issues of qualification.  It's like digging in a mine for years before asking what you're digging for.

How do you qualify a prospect?  Qualification needs to be congruent with your personality and the tempo you have established at the onset of the conversation.

If your approach is direct, and staccato, then you ask questions in the same manner.  If this doesn't work for this prospect, your awareness of rapport or lack of it, will guide your adjustments to your approach.

If your approach repetitively fails to provide you the opportunity to gather the information, then change your approach.

Just as proper qualification is the key to a sale, a good attitude regarding your function as a salesperson is the key to continued successful selling.  A salesperson helps people come to decisions.  If you experience the pain of indecision and reason that any decision is better than no decision, then you'll find your prospects appreciate your interest in their situations. 

On the other hand, if you choose to remain in a dark room throwing marbles, at least all the other people in there with you can't see your face.

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Jeffrey Hansler is a professional speaker, author, and consultant. He is a frequent speaker at association events and is the author of Sell Little Red Hen! Sell! He can be reached at jhansler@oxfordco.com.

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