How to Pre-Qualify a Sales Lead

Got a long list of prospects? Don't know where to start? Your challenge is to to focus your time and energy on the prospects who are the most likely to buy. And that means pre-qualifying your sales leads....before you call them. Here's exactly how:

• Step One: Visualize Your Target. Ask ...yourself the following questions: What is the specific benefit or improvement of my customers' lives that will occur as the result of them using my product? How will they feel differently because they are using it? Who is most likely to experience these positive feelings? What is their income, position, experience and level of authority? Your goal for this step is to determine your ideal customer.
• Step Two: Identify Your Strengths. Ask yourself the following questions: What is that we do better than any other company? Why should our ideal customer buy from us rather than the competition? If our competitors were asked (and answered honestly) what would they say that our company does better than anyone else? Your goal for this step is to determine what's unique about your company's offer, so that you can match those characteristics more closely to the expectations of potential customers.
• Step Three: Match Strengths and Targets. Ask yourself the following question: who, specifically, are the customers who would value and appreciate what our offering does better than our competitor's offering? Your goal for this step is to determine specific type of customer which is the best match for your offering. This is a process of elimination, not inclusion! You want to pick your shots, so think like a sniper rather than a machine gunner.
• Step Four: Concentrate your Sales Efforts. Focus on those few customers who can benefit the most from your company's offering. Your ideal customer should want your product, need your offering, be able to use your offering and afford your offering. Making sales calls with customers who don't fit the profile you've created will probably be a waste of your valuable time.
• Step Five: Provide Feedback to Marketing. If you're still getting long lists of undifferentiated leads, you need to help your marketing team (or whomever is passing you those leads) to better focus their lead generation efforts. Your goal in this step is to make the four step process above more automatic, so that you don't have to spend your own time eliminating unlikely prospects.