Salespeople: Thinking Like Marketers Will Help You Qualify Leads

Target Audience is a concept which with marketers are intimately familiar. Recognizing which demographics make the best potential customers for your product or service is important if you intend to drive brand awareness. However, salespeople often are not always as savvy as the marketing department when it comes to knowing who is the best target for their efforts.

Oftentimes, we in sales will relentlessly chase anyone and everyone who even remotely looks like a prospect, just to find out after many months that they really never had any interest in our product anyway. In some cases, business owners and managers will let salespeople court them for a long while, just because they don’t want to be rude and just outright say “no.” Needless to say, this is a big waste of everyone’s time, and could be avoided if the salesperson had done a bit of preliminary planning on the types of prospects they were going to approach.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself before contacting decision makers about your widget/service:
1. What common traits do your current clients share? Organize a diverse sampling of your clients into different groups and classes that each have different characteristics. What common themes exist? What distinctions are clear?
2. Is this business experiencing enough growth to have a real, foreseeable need for what you offer? The need for different products and services depends upon the health and growth rate of the prospect. Is a doctor’s office seeing tons of referrals, and in need of a new automated phone system? Is the comic store on the corner expanding its volume so much that it could seriously use your inventory management software?
3. What is the most common client profile with which you see success? With what size company do you do the most business? What industries?

Just a little legwork can go a very long way when qualifying leads. If you take some time to determine who your best customer demographic is, you can more effectively manage your time by going after only likely candidates. What other steps/questions have you used in determining who your most qualified leads are?