Prospecting & Qualifying

In this episode of the How to Succeed Podcast, Emily Yepes discusses some common mistakes salespeople make when prospecting for new customers. She explains that a lot of the fear and anxiety around prospecting stems from negative beliefs salespeople have about the process.

Around this time of year, buyers on a “use it or lose it” type budget tend to get itchy. The itch comes from having money left in their budget that they have no plan to spend this year, but they won’t get that money again next year if they don’t make a purchase before January 1.

Here are some of the key questions we coach salespeople to be prepared to ask in the initial phases of a conversation with a prospect.

One of the ways we can differentiate on how we sell instead of what we sell is to engage our prospects emotionally in the causes of and solutions to their problems.

Creating a consistent, repeatable, scalable sales function means we need all of our salespeople to interact consistently with prospects and clients.

Eight simple questions about your personal approach to prospecting

Sometimes when we’re qualifying, we hear an “I don’t know” (IDK) response to a question we need to get answered to determine if the prospect we’re talking to is ideal.

Our prospects have been trained, by salespeople seeking to get their needs met at the expense of rather than in service to their clients, not to trust salespeople so they developed mechanisms to reduce the “influence” that salespeople have in the buying process. One of the most common is to put up a (virtual) paper wall by requesting a proposal/quote/information from us before we’ve even gotten to “hello.”

Mike Montague interviews Hamish Knox on How to Succeed at Trials and Demos.

When you’re in the middle of a prospecting discussion – that is, when you’re initiating the first real-time voice-to-voice engagement with a possible buyer – what is your goal?