The Ultimate Guide to Sales Qualification

The discovery call is one of the most important conversations a salesperson can have with a potential customer.

这是一个众所周知的岔路口对你和你r prospect — they’re a good enough fit for your product or service to warrant discussing next steps, or it’s time to part ways.

但是，呼叫说起来容易做起来难。那就是销售资格的出现。

通过提出正确的问题，您将能够确定关系是否应该继续，以及如果交易最终可行的适当下一步。本指南将引导您介绍销售资格的基础知识，介绍您可以使用的不同框架，并提供有关取消资格和对话提示的指示。

如果没有销售资格，您可能每天都会与数百个潜在客户交谈 - 只需完成一两个封闭式优惠即可为您提供所有努力。这是任何成功的销售过程的重要组成部分，但是为什么如此关键？让我们来看看。

Why is sales qualification important?

Simply put, sales qualification is important to sales organizations because it significantly improves close ratios. Without sales qualification, you risk pursuing leads who aren’t a good fit for the product due to budgetary constraints, organizational challenges, or other factors.

Sales qualification is simply a better way to do sales. It allows you to pursue the leads who are most likely to purchase the product, saving you time and energy.

Here are more reasons sales qualification is so important:

• You can move on when the lead isn’t qualified and spend more time on the prospects who are more likely to buy.
• 您可以专注于较小的，特定的买家，这可以帮助您提供更个性化的销售体验。
• 你可以学习的来龙去脉买方查尔lenges and deliver a better solution as a result.
• You can guarantee that most of your activities lead to a positive impact in revenue.
• You can create different sales qualification processes for different verticals and keep a list of pitches that still feel personalized.

Let’s say you try to sell your product to a lead you haven't qualified. If the product is a poor fit, the customer might return the product for a refund or go on a social media tirade.

By intentionally qualifying prospects through adiscovery call, you can deliver a highly tailored solution that improves post-purchase satisfaction.

What does the sales qualification process look like as a whole? Let’s walk through that below.

线索资格过程

The lead qualification process begins with a pool of leads that have been generated by your marketing, sales, acquisition, and product teams. If you work at a smaller team, this pool of leads may come from website form submissions and may not have a specific designation.

In a sales organization, there are several types of leads:

• Unqualified Leads: Unqualified leads haven’t been nurtured enough in the飞轮to be forwarded to a sales team.
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): MQLs are leads who are fit to receive marketing communications such as email campaigns, content offers, and more.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): SQLs are leads who are ready to connect with a sales rep and begin the sales process.
• Product Qualified Leads (PQLs): PQLs have indicated a strong interest in the product by either starting a freemium subscription or signing up for a free trial.
• 转换合格的线索（CQLS）：CQL是通过提交表单或按点击按钮在您的网站上转换的任何潜在客户。

这些领导n fed into a lead qualification framework, where you can then ask a series of合格的问题to find out whether they’re a good or poor product-fit.

From there, the leads are divided into qualified and disqualified leads. The qualified leads are then fed into the sales process. Disqualified leads are fed into a nurturing sequence, where they’ll ideally warm up to the product and make a purchase later down the line.

Let's take a look at three of the most crucial aspects of the lead qualification process: qualifying questions, qualified prospects, and frameworks you can use to qualify leads.

What is a qualifying question?

A qualifying question helps the salesperson determine their prospect's fit for one criteria. That might be need, budget, authority, sense of urgency, or another factor.

A good qualifying question is typically open-ended. Asking a close-ended question, like“这是现在的优先事项吗？”boxes the buyer into an answer. The better version would be "Where does this fall on your list of business priorities?"Because you're not leading the prospect to an answer, the response will usually be more honest and revealing.

Here are some good qualifying questions:

• What business challenge can this product help you solve?

• What has prevented you from trying to solve the problem until now?

• What does your budget look like for this project?

• Are you using any solutions to solve this problem? If so, why are you switching?

• What is your principal priority in terms of solving this problem? Which functionality would be most important?

• What does success look like for your company after using this product?

• Would you be the daily user of the product? Who in your team would use this product on the daily?

• What are some points of friction in your day-to-day that you feel this product can help you streamline?

• Which decision-makers would be involved in the purchase of this product?

• 那会是我跟进mm / dd / yy吗yy?

The answers to these questions would then result in you qualifying or disqualifying the prospect.

What is a qualified prospect?

A qualified prospect has gone through the lead qualification process and is now ready to be entered into thesales pipeline.

You’ll typically do the bulk of your qualification during a discovery call, but it certainly isn’t where qualification starts or ends. At every step of the sales process, you’ll continuously evaluate prospects for more and more specific characteristics.

销售代表必须在三个不同级别的前景中获得资格：“组织级别”，“机会级别”和“利益相关者级别”的资格。

Organization-Level Prospect Qualification

这是最基本的资格级别，除了您是否应该进行更多研究之外，还没有告诉您很多其他内容。如果您的公司具有bob全站app买方角色，请在获得潜在客户资格时参考。买家是否与给定角色的人口统计相匹配？

Questions you should ask at this stage include:

• Is the prospect in your territory?

• Do you sell to their industry?

• What’s the company size?

• Does the account fit your company’s buyer persona?

机会级别的潜在客户资格

This form of qualification is probably what you thought of when you read the title of this post. Opportunity-level sales qualification is where you determine whether your prospect has a specific need or challenge you can satisfy and whether it’s feasible for them to implement your particular product or service. The other half of a good buyer persona, opportunity-level characteristics give insight into whether a prospect could benefit from your offering.

To determine whether your prospect is qualified on an opportunity level, ask the following:

• 潜在客户是否熟悉您出售的产品类型？

• Do they have a challenge that your product can help them solve?

• Do they have a team or a person who’ll be using the product?

Stakeholder-Level Prospect Qualification

假设您已经确定您的潜在客户的公司非常适合您的解决方案，并且适合您理想的买家角色。bob全站app是时候进入尼特（Nitty-Gritty）了 - 您的联系点能否真正提出购买决定的扳机？

To determine this, ask your prospect the following questions:

• 此购买会来自您的预算吗？

• Who else is involved in the decision?

• 您有此购买决定的标准吗？谁定义了它们？

When to Disqualify Prospects

These three levels are listed in the order you should use them to disqualify.

For instance, if your prospect is a complete departure from your company’s buyer persona, it’s safe to disqualify them right then and there on an organizational level. Maybe one day, you’ll serve their type of buyer, but right now you don’t — so don’t waste time trying to shoehorn your offering into their business.

Similarly, you could be speaking with the CEO of an organization with complete budget authority who passes stakeholder-level qualification with flying colors. But if there’s no problem, there’s no need for your solution. Qualify for business pain first.

另外，请记住，除非潜在客户在所有三个级别上都有资格，否则您不应该在销售过程中提高他们。例如，如果您向潜在客户询问公司的战略目标，并且无法回答，那么这是一个好兆头，他们与决策过程还不够bob全站app近，并且缺乏影响力。

You should disqualify this contact at the stakeholder level, even though they pass at the opportunity level.

Why Disqualifying Isn’t a Bad Thing

Many salespeople are loath to disqualify prospects and shrink their pipelines.

Their natural instinct is trying to work as many leads as possible, but this isn’t the best approach. The quality of your leads matter more than the quantity.

As a salesperson, your most precious asset is your time, and it’s far better to spend it on a handful of your best prospects than spreading yourself thin across dozens of leads. Trying to close every deal that comes along is only going to result in dead ends with poor fit prospects, while you neglect prospects likely to buy.

Up until now, we’ve discussed qualifying questions and what a qualified prospect looks like. You can organize all of the processes we’ve discussed thus far usinglead qualification frameworks.

How to Qualify a Lead with Lead Qualification Frameworks

A qualification framework is essentially a rubric that salespeople can use to determine whether a prospect is likely to become a successful customer.

Every customer and every sale is different, but all closed-won deals share commonalities. Sales qualification frameworks distill those shared characteristics into general traits reps can look for when qualifying.

The BANT Qualification Framework

在各种公司和各个市场中都使用了旧的销售资格框架，Bant（预算，权限，需求，时间表）。

Originally developed by IBM, BANT covers all the broad strokes of opportunity- and stakeholder-level qualification.

BANT seeks to uncover the following four pieces of information:

• Budget: Is the prospect capable of buying?
• Authority: Does your contact have adequate authority to sign off on a purchase?
• Need: Does the prospect have a business pain you can solve?
• Timeline: When is the prospect planning to buy?

Here are a few examples of BANT questions in the context of a prospect conversation:

While BANT addresses many opportunity-level requirements, it misses the mark on others.

“终极”购买局可能是一个以上的人。确保您在此过程的早期参与所有相关的利益相关者，并确保每个人的买入。

“Timeline” is another area where BANT falls short today. A strict BANT qualification might tell you to cycle a lead who won’t be ready to buy until next year into a closed-lost queue.

But you might be acting prematurely — send over educational resources and offer to help until they’re ready to buy, if you can.

MEDDIC

MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion)was pioneered by Jack Napoli when he was at technology company PTC. MEDDIC requires sales reps to understand every aspect of a target company's purchase process, down to whether you have an internal champion — an employee at a prospective company who will internally sell your product.

MEDDIC was incredibly valuable for increasing forecasting accuracy, something that's crucial for companies that sell to enterprise companies — after all, losing just one deal can be debilitating when each is worth several million dollars.

"From $0 to $100 million, [PTC was] successful because we sold a better widget," HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan said. "From $100 million to $1 billion, we sold a shift in technology. MEDDIC became important because it's not just any old purchase — it's a transformation of the business."

You should consider using MEDDIC as a qualification framework if your company sells a product that requires a transformation in behavior or average sales price is incredibly high, as understanding exactly how a prospect buys, why they would buy, and who's championing you internally is crucial to maintaining an accurate pipeline.

CHAMP Sales

CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization) is similar to ANUM but places Challenges ahead of Authority.

CHAMP also defines authority as a “call-to-action,” not a roadblock. If your initial contact is a low-level employee, you can safely assume they won’t be the decision-maker. That doesn’t mean you should hang up the phone. Instead, ask questions that help you map the company’s organizational hierarchy to determine who to reach out to next.

GPCTBA/C&I

Yes, it’s a long acronym, but a useful one. Developed at HubSpot, the qualification framework GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority/Negative Consequences and Positive Implications) is a response to changes in buyer behavior. Buyers come to the sales process increasingly informed, so salespeople need to add value on top of product knowledge.

但是价值不是销售代表可以“添加”的东西 - 为了真正充当顾问，您必须探索产品或服务可以解决的离散问题的范围。这意味着了解潜在客户的战略目标，公司的业务模式以及您讨论的特定问题如何适合其职业生涯的更大局面。bob全站app

Here are some of the questions you should ask at each step:

Goals

The purpose of the following questions is to find out your prospect’s quantitative goals. You can help clarify or set goals with your prospect if their response isn’t well-defined.

• What is your top priority this year?

• Do you have specific company goals?

• Do you have published revenue goals for this quarter/year?

Plans

Once you understand your prospect’s goals, find out what work they’ve already done to achieve them. Determine what’s worked and what hasn’t, and make suggestions for improvement.

• What are you planning to do to achieve your goals?

• What did you do last year? What worked and what didn’t? What are you going to do differently this year?

• Do you think XYZ might make it hard to implement your plan?

• Do you have the right resources available to implement this plan?

Challenges

定义潜在客户的挑战 - 并强化他们已经尝试过的事情是不起作用的 - 至关重要。除非他们知道需要帮助，否则潜在客户不会成为客户。

• Why do you think you’ll be able to eliminate this challenge now, even though you’ve tried in the past and you’re still dealing with it?

• Do you think you have the internal expertise to deal with these challenges?

• If you realize early enough in the year that this plan isn’t fixing this challenge, how will you shift gears?

Timeline

Your most important asset is your time. So while a prospect that doesn’t want to buy now or in the near future isn’t necessarily a lost cause, they should move down your priority list.

• When will you begin implementing this plan?

• Do you have bandwidth and resources to implement this plan now?

• Would you like help thinking through the steps involved in executing this plan, so you can figure out when you should implement each piece?

Budget

只是问问“你的预算是多少？”, isn’t a question likely to get you valuable insight, according to HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre.

Instead, try asking:

• Are we in agreement on the potential ROI of [product or service]?

• 您是否在另一个产品上花钱来解决我们讨论过的问题？

Then, go in for the kill. Databox CEO and former HubSpot VP of Sales Pete Caputa suggests phrasing the budget question this way:

"We've established that your goal is X and that you're spending Y now to try and achieve X. But it's not working. In order to hire us, you will need to invest Z. Since Z is pretty similar to Y and you're more confident that our solution will get you to your goal, do you believe it makes sense to invest Z to hire us?"

Authority

Unlike in BANT, qualifying for authority under this framework isn’t necessarily trying to determine whether your contact is a decision-maker. Your contact might be an influencer or a coach, two types of internal champions who can give you insight into the decision-maker’s thought process.

If your contact isn’t the economic buyer, ask them:

• Are the goals we’ve discussed important to the economic buyer?

• Amongst their priorities, where does this fall?

• What concerns do you anticipate they’ll raise?

• How should we go about getting the economic buyer on board?

Negative Consequences and Positive Implications

In this part of the qualification process, you’re finding out what happens if your prospect does or does not achieve their goals.

“If your product can significantly help them avoid consequences and further aid in achieving even bigger follow-up goals, you’ve got a very strong value proposition,” Caputa says.

Here are some C&I questions to ask prospects:

• What happens if you do or don’t reach your goals? Does the outcome affect you on a personal level?

• When you overcome this challenge, what will you do next?

• Do you stand to get promoted or get more resources if you can hit your goal? Would you lose responsibility or be demoted if you don’t?

The benefit of GPCTBA/C&I is that it allows salespeople to gather a huge amount of information. If your product is complex, highly differentiated, and stands to become an integral part of your prospect’s business strategy, having these insights is incredibly valuable. Sales reps selling these kinds of products need to step into their prospects’ world to be effective advisors and business partners.

然而,GPCTBA /希恩可能不是适合每一个年代ales force. Depending on what you sell, such thorough qualification may not be necessary.

ANUM

ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money) is an alternative spin on BANT. When qualifying using ANUM, a sales rep’s first priority should be to determine whether they’re speaking with a decision-maker.

Need functions the same way as it does in BANT, but has been moved up in priority. Urgency correlates with Timing, while Money replaces Budget.

FAINT

TheRAIN Groupadvocates using FAINT (Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing) to qualify sales leads. FAINT is designed to reflect the fact that many purchase decisions are unplanned and thus won’t be associated with a set budget.

Like ANUM, reps using FAINT should look for organizations with the capacity to buy, regardless of whether a discrete budget has been set aside. FAINT also adds Interest into the mix.

According to RAIN Group’s John Doerr and Mike Schultz, Interest is defined as “[generating] interest from the buyer in learning what’s possible and how to achieve a new and better reality than the one they have today.”

Sales Qualifying: Good Signs and Red Flags

如果您听说过这一点，请停下来：“这不是您所说的，这就是您说的话。”

This phrase is the root of countless arguments, but it’s as good as gold when it comes to sales qualification. Your prospect will provide you as much information via their tone of voice and delivery as the words they actually speak.

Here are some tip-offs (both good and bad) to listen for when qualifying a prospect that can help you determine whether to advance the sales process or disqualify ASAP.

Good Signs to Move a Prospect Forward

Excuses

Wait. How can excuses be a good thing?

借口有助于解决我们想要成为的人的行动。在销售对话中，如果您的潜在客户试图解释以前关于商业痛苦的无所作为，则您的耳朵应该振作起来。这表明了两件事之一：借口是合法的，或者您的前景希望他们早些时候做了一些事情，并试图合理化为什么他们没有做的事情。无论哪种方式，它都证实他们的痛苦是真实的。

Specificity

可以为问题提供具体答案的潜在客户"What are your goals?"and"When do you need to see results?"have thought carefully about their problem. Listen for sequential plans, thought-out explanations, and statistics. Specifics also indicate that your prospect feels real pain. After all, people without real problems don’t spend time thinking about why they exist and how to address them.

Of course, the caveat is that specifics must be accompanied by reality. A prospect who says,"I want to quadruple revenue in the next two weeks,"is using specifics to demonstrate that they don’t have strong business acumen.

Knowledge

Specificity’s partner is knowledge. A knowledge check is your best bet for qualifying at the stakeholder level. True decision-makers will have intimate knowledge of company goals, challenges, and needs. A contact who doesn’t have access to this information likely isn’t going to be valuable in the sales process.

Red Flags in the Sales Process

Inconsistency

A prospect whose answers contradict each other is likely one who wants to be helpful, but can’t because they don’t possess adequate knowledge. However, this isn’t a dealbreaker — prod them to tell you who does know the answers, and continue qualifying the opportunity with another contact.

Short answers

True business pain permeates an organization — executives lose sleep over it and employees have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis. If you give the impression that you can help alleviate the pain, prospects will want to talk to you.

A prospect who’s giving you one-word answers isn’t someone who feels there's a basis for a conversation. It could be that the problem is a non-issue, or the contact isn’t clued in enough to feel its severity. Depending on what you think is going on, disqualify or try reaching out to another member of the organization.

Over to You

Sales success rests on effective qualification. Your ability to find good fit prospects will make or break your business. Prospects who turn into happy customers mean not only revenue, but increased word-of-mouth, referrals, and the possibility of cross- or upselling. So it’s imperative that you get it right.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.