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Investment InformationSales Process - How to Avoid Wasting Time on Prospects Who CAN'T or WON'T Pay
by:
Alan Rigg
Do you have blind faith that, if you can somehow persuade a prospect to engage in a sales cycle, you wish eventually do a sale? If you do, watch out! This belief can waste your time, effort, and institution resources.
Unfortunately, time and resource investments do not inevitably produce sales. How many a of the opportunities in your pipeline have been stalled at the same step in the sales cycle for weeks...or months? In how many a opportunities have you and your institution endowed
large
amounts of time, energy and resources (conducting product demonstrations, writing extended proposals, providing product evaluations, etc.), only to have the prospect decide they don't WANT to buy, or prove INCAPABLE of funding the purchase? Even as once
you do sales, how many a turn out to be "nightmare" customers who are always discontent and consume brobdingnagian amounts of post-sale resources?
All Prospects Are NOT Created Equal
You DO need to help your prospects explore whether their business problems are substantial enough to justify finance
time in a sales cycle. However, you as well need to numbers out whether each prospect is WORTHY of your time and resource investments! If a prospect is not a nice fit, graciously
exit from the opportunity! (Why not refer them to a challenger and let the challenger burn several cycles?)
How can you determine whether a prospect is worthy of your time and resource investments? Many a sales skills training courses teach an acronym, M-A-N, that stands for Money, Authority, and Need. The basic idea is to determine whether:
1. The prospect is willing to commit enough budget dollars (MONEY) to pay for the product or service
2. The key decision makers and influencers (AUTHORITY) have been identified; and
3. The prospect's pain (NEED) is severe enough to justify finance
in a solution.
Unfortunately, even as once
you do a nice job of M-A-N qualification, you can be "blindsided" by issues that delay sales cycles or destroy opportunities outright. For example:
* Several prospects prove incapable of securing financing. They may have a budget, but they are not "credit worthy", so they can't FUND the budget.
* Several decision makers need to have specific information provided in a specific format before they can authorize a purchase
decision.
* Sometimes you invest extended time and effort in troubleshooting complex problems and designing solutions, only to be advised that the prospect must take the planned
resolution OUT TO BID. This can lead to the possibility being lost to a low bidder or the gain of the possibility being pummeled.
To avoid these issues, add additional questions to the M-A-N qualification process. The descriptor that I have appointed
to this revised process is M-A-I-N BP, which stands for MONEY, AUTHORITY, INFORMATION, NEED, and Purchase
PROCESS. Here are sample M-A-I-N BP questions:
MONEY
* How wish your prospect pay for the product or service?
* Has a budget been established?
* Are they credit worthy?
AUTHORITY
* Who (in the prospect's organization) necessarily to approve an acquisition of this nature?
INFORMATION
* What information do the decision makers require before they can do a decision?
* What format makes this information need to be in?
NEED
* What are the prospect's business problems?
* How compelling are they? In different words, can you quantify (associate dollars, percentages, and time frames with) the pain the prospect is feeling?
* Are the quantified business impacts substantial enough to warrant investment by the prospect's organization (and YOUR company) in characteristic and fixing the problem(s)?
BUYING PROCESS
* What is the prospect's purchase
(procurement) process?
* What impact power this process have on the gain of the transaction?
* What competitive advantage wish you obtain if you invest your time and resources in designing a resolution that goes out to bid?
If you decide to add M-A-I-N BP qualification to your sales possibility qualification process, here are several final thoughts to support in mind:
* If you don't cognize the answers to ALL of the M-A-I-N BP questions, it is extremely
likely you are wasting your time and resources!
* Possibility qualification is NOT A ONE-TIME EVENT. As an possibility advances through the sales cycle, you should oft ask whether any of the answers to the qualification questions have changed. If an answer changes, it could impact the length of the sales cycle and even as destroy the viability of the opportunity. At minimum, an answer change wish probably require a change in focus and/or a reprioritization of planned activities.
* Ne'er
feel bad just about disabling
an "opportunity". The numbers of possibility in each territory is virtually unlimited. If you with kid gloves
qualify and re-qualify each opportunity, and only invest time and resources in qualified opportunities, you wish maximize your return on time and resources invested.
Just just about the author:
Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: Why Most Salespeople Don't Perform and What to Do Just just about It. His company, 80/20 Sales Performance, helps business owners, executives, and managers DOUBLE sales by implementing The Right Formula(tm) for building top-performing sales teams. For much information and much FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com
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