Hello Fellow Sales people,
We all are selling some kind of Product or a Service in the Indian Market. The leads that we come across are mixed w.r.t. their Biz Model, Expertise in the industry, their needs, the purchasing power and so on. The biggest problem we face is in ‘Qualifying’ the lead.
By ‘Qualifying’, it is meant that does the Lead hold a potential to work with your agency or not. Would you enjoy working with/for them? And other such questions.
In this post, I’ll help you with 5 steps to dig deep into the prospect’s situation and qualifying them as a hot lead –
1. Do a background research on the Prospect and his/her firm. Try and understand have they been involved with something of similar sorts of Product or Service. You should know whether the prospect has enough knowledge about your service or not, this will hugely affect your approach towards the lead.
You can have two kinds of meetings with your prospects –
a. Where you have a fruitful discussion on how can your agency help them achieve better ROI, branding and stuff (They have used similar services in the past)
b. A tuition, where you do and tell them about the industry, your product or service. And they don’t know anything about it. (They haven’t used any similar services in the past)
I wouldn’t mind the latter but kind of prefer the former. 🙂
2. Understand their Spending spree on Products/Services similar to yours.
For instance, we are into Digital Marketing and Advanced Technology Services, you could know more here.
A general practice I always follow is browsing their websites and Social Channels to see if they have worked with an agency, which agency made their website. Also speculate how much they could have spent on their digital needs till now. This is bound to give you some good insights on their spending capabilities on Digital.
3. Understand their Intent and Interest
Their interest and intent is different. The prospect could be simply understanding the market, could be a competitor trying to know more about you. Or he/she could be actually interested in your agency and the offering.
Always do a due diligence on their company, past and other things that are relevant to you. You could also prepare a Lead Score Sheet so as to qualify them.
4. Seek Alignment
It’s very simple, “If it works for them, it works for you, it would work for you both”. Always before you close a deal, make sure that the customer is someone who sort of resonates with you, and would not be a nightmare of a Client in the future!
However, if it’s a really big brand and you’ve been itching to get someone like it on-board, this goes out of the window! :-p
5. Practice and Perseverance make a better salesman!
You don’t learn qualifying so quickly, put in time. Analyze each of your next prospect in this way. You will need dozens and dozens of Prospects before you get a knack of this process.