Selling in a Crisis

33Qualify Better

In a crisis, you only have enough time, resources, and attention to work on pipeline opportunities that have the highest probability of closing. You must avoid spinning your wheels on deals that will never close.

In sales, everything begins with a qualified prospect. Time is money, and the most expensive use of sales time is spending it on an unqualified prospect. Yet, during a crisis, desperation brought on by a thin or empty pipeline makes it super easy to waste time on the wrong prospects and wrong stakeholders.

Desperation is the enemy of qualifying better. It clouds your judgment and leads to confirmation bias. You gravitate to anyone who will talk with you, see buying signals where there are none, and waste hours of selling time with stakeholders who don't have the authority, budget, or intention to buy.

Qualifying better begins with gathering information while prospecting. It continues during your initial conversations with stakeholders, through discovery, and maintaining acute awareness throughout the entire sales process for signs that might disqualify or lower the win probability of your deal.

There are three types of qualifiers that you must consider:

1. Technical qualifiers are quantifiable facts and figures. This is the easiest information to gather before engaging a prospect and traditionally what we consider when qualifying accounts. How much or how many do they buy? What do they buy? How big is the organization? Where are they located? What is ...