How to Qualify Leads in Sales for Ultimate Productivity

Sales qualification is the process used to determine if the lead is a fit for business or not. It involves a series of checks to determine if the prospect would get value from your product or service and whether or not would you make a profit in return. In the absence of qualification, the company would end up wasting critical time and resources in wooing prospects only to realize that they wouldn't get business from them. Hence, it is important to qualify your leads and here we will teach you how.

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Major Criterias to Qualify Leads:

1. Target Market:

We already discussed the importance of target market and need to stick to it in previous chapters. The first stage of lead qualification involves determining if the customer fits into the target market or not. You obviously selected your target market after careful analysis and identified the most profitable types of customers. If the prospect isn’t one of them then why bother to chase somebody who doesn’t fit the organizational criteria?

2. Problem Solution Match:

In sales opportunities exists in problems. We make a sale by solving a problem for our prospect. In this stage of qualification, we ensure that our solution solves the problem of the potential customer. If it is required to tailor the product to individual requirements then the effort involved should bring in sustainable profits for the company.

3. Decision Maker:

There might be a person with the need for our product in the target market but it is not necessary that he can initiate the transaction. While dealing with companies we need to know if the person in contact has enough influence to make a purchasing decision for a company or not. If yes, we check if he has enough budget to afford the solution.

Read More: Know how to warm cold leads

Some Qualifying Questions to Ask at a Sales Meeting:

• What’s the problem are you trying to fix?
• Why are you trying to solve the issue now?
• What solutions have you tried to solve this issue? If yes, why haven’t they worked?
• What are your expectations from our solution?
• Is a specific budget already allocated for solving the problem? If not, by when would that be possible?
• How is the budget finally finalized by the company?
• How your company would make this decision?
• Are any other decision makers involved? If yes, then who are they?
• What is the timeline for this project?
• Are there any hurdles that could potentially extend payments and implementation process?

While the above set of questions satisfies all major qualification criterias, there are unstructured and confusing. Hence, to make the entire process organized there are many frameworks used for the qualification process. Here is one of them.

Read More: How to Find B2B Leads that Generate Revenue?

BANT Sales Qualification Framework:

BANT - Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline, is a framework that qualifies a lead using a broad spectrum of questions. It was originally developed by IBM, but is now popularly used by many companies. It offers information on following grounds:

• Budget: Can the prospect afford the solution?
• Authority: Does the prospect has enough influence to sign off on a purchase or get others to do it?
• Need: Can you solve the problem of the prospect?
• Timeline: Can you present the solution in the given timeline?

Here are some qualifying questions classified into BANT segments:

Budget:

• Have you determined a budget for the project? What is it?
• How much is the monetary importance attached to this problem?
• Are you taking some other steps to solve the issue?
• Are there any fluctuations in funding based on seasons?

Authority:

• Who finally allocates the budget for the project?
• Are other people involved in purchase decision? If yes, who?
• In the past have you made purchasing decisions for a solution similar to ours? If yes, how?
• Do you have any concerns relating to purchase now or in near future? If yes, how can we eliminate them?

Need:

• What are the challenges that you are currently struggling with?
• What’s the center point of the problem, and what makes it worth spending time on?
• Why was this issue not addressed before?
• How do you think this problem can be solved?

Timeline:

• In what time do you expect this problem to be solved?
• Are there any priorities superseding this project?
• Are you evaluating any of competing or substitute products or services?
• Do you have sufficient internal resources to implement the solution right now?

BANT is a very popular framework practiced by sales executives across the world. You can always adjust it to suit your individual business needs. All these questions might seem overwhelming but is necessary that you ask them. Avoiding the qualification process can result in tremendous loss of time and effort. The further you take a person through the sales journey the more disheartening it is to face rejection. With qualification, you save your energy for the leads that actually convert and result in profits.

Jump to Chapter 6 of Sales 101 - Creating Sales Collateral 

Get the complete handbook on generating leads and closing them. Our sales 101 eBook covers all the aspects of the sales process and brings out the best learning experience.