Qualify

Mike Montague interviews Brian Jackson on How to Succeed at Your 30 Second Commercial. Brian is an award-winning Sandler Trainer in San Diego, CA.

Troy Elmore, Sandler trainer, shows you how to succeed with the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques needed to be more successful at dealing with the competition and selling a crowded marketplace. Get the best practices collected from around the world.

Listen Time: 21 Minutes

Brian, an inside sales rep, spent too much of his time chasing deals that ended up going nowhere. He knew it; his sales manager Francine knew it. Late one Friday afternoon, Francine asked him to give some thought to the matter, and to come up with some ideas about why this was a problem for him.

Not all prospects are qualified to see your presentation (or get your quote, see your demonstration, or entertain your proposal). There are particular criteria that a sales professional must make sure are present first.

A prospect must be truly qualified before they see your solution. Performing some "due diligence" to be sure you and your prospect are still on the same page will help you discover if you are ready to make a presentation.

Do a Reality Check on Your Sales Forecast - If inactive prospects have snuck into your pipeline, now is the best time to clean them out. Remember – only active, qualified prospects who are currently in discussion with you, and moving through the sales process, should form the basis of your sales forecasts.

If you are asked to forecast the number of sales you’ll close or the amount of sales revenue you’ll generate in the coming month, could you come up with a meaningful answer? Meaningful in that it’s based on something more concrete than wishing and hoping? Most salespeople, if they are being honest, would answer “no.”  Discover how to take the mystery out of sales forecasting and make it a reliable and predictable process.  

Have you ever had a series of good meetings with a prospect gathered all kinds of information and given what you thought was a great presentation only to receive a response like, "Let me think about it," "I have to share all of this with my boss," or, "We'll get back to you?" ... and you never hear another word?

Having a big pipeline of “prospects” is typically seen as desirable. The more prospects you put into the pipeline, the more will eventually emerge as customers. At least that’s the theory. And the theory is partially true. Some of the people you put in the pipeline will become customers. The question is, “How many will be customers and how long will it take for them to materialize from the other end of the pipe?”

At Sandler Training, we believe in not solely talking about features and benefits during your sales call, but rather focusing on the prospect’s needs. However, there is a time for presenting, once you have qualified the opportunity. Once a prospect is fully qualified in Pain, Budget, and Decision, then it is time for you to make the presentation, and you want to make that presentation as persuasive as possible.

If your goal is to find more prospects, get more and better referrals, and make more commission dollars in 2016 than you did in 2015, consider upping your social selling game. Here are four quick tips that will help you to avoid some common mistakes online.

Creating an effective sales pipeline can be a massive headache for sales leaders because reps have been known to stuff the pipeline with opportunities that have zero chance of closing. In a previous life, I took over a product specialist role selling a web-based media monitoring and crisis communications program. My first six weeks in that role was spent culling a $3 million pipeline down to $160,000 of real, qualified opportunities

Does this sound familiar to you? Prospect A says, "This looks very good. I think there's an excellent chance we'll do business." The salesperson thinks, "I've got one." Prospect B comments, "Your price is higher than we expected." The salesperson thinks, "I'll have to cut the price to close the deal." Prospect C reveals, "We were hoping for a shorter delivery time." The salesperson thinks, "I'll have to push this through as a rush order to get the sale."e