Salespeople need to do more than spot and qualify the best leads — they need to position themselves to pursue the right prospects at the right time.

The good news: Most salespeople are already looking in the right places for the info they need. It’s mostly a matter of using the info and sources more effectively.

With an effective strategy to qualify and nurture prospects, salespeople can keep their pipelines full and generate new sales more consistently.

Using customer profiles to prioritize prospects

Salespeople typically know where to find the info they need on prospects — the web, annual reports, trade publications, key industry contacts and conferences, etc. However, they don’t always pull those pieces together to create a complete profile of the prospect – one that can be compared against their ideal customer.

To do that, salespeople need to determine the key factors their customers have in common, such as a company’s:

• Size and potential for expansion
• Projected revenue growth
• Financial performance
• Industry and markets, and
• Core customers and partnerships.

Compiling this info may take a while, but it saves time across the board by helping salespeople spot and qualify their best prospects sooner. Plus, profiling customers this way can point to connections and relationships between prospects and salespeople’s existing customers — which leads to valuable referrals.

Tip: Salespeople should also create a profile of the “wrong” customer — someone who is unprofitable, a bad long-term fit, has no growth potential, etc. — to downgrade such prospects when red flags appear.

Training tip: Ask attendees to discuss their most effective techniques for qualifying and prioritizing prospects. How do they use customer profiling to gain an edge? What other tools help them sort out hot and cold leads?

Keeping the pipeline full

With a strategy in place for profiling the strongest and weakest prospects, salespeople can better focus their efforts on pursuing the hottest leads. However, the key to keeping the pipeline full of hot leads is targeting the best prospects first — but without letting not-so-hot prospects slip through the cracks. After all, three of four sales come from longer-term prospects.

Salespeople naturally want to go after the most promising, immediate opportunities first. But if they also carve out time for prospects with strong future potential, salespeople give themselves an ongoing advantage by:

• Cultivating relationships without heavy pressure or immediate expectations (which can turn buyers off)
• Positioning themselves as a credible advisor who is interested in helping the prospect’s business, and
• Staying close enough to recognize when a lukewarm prospect’s needs are just starting to heat up.

Another key for salespeople is finding out — and working around — the prospect’s schedule. What are the buyer’s up and down times daily, weekly and monthly? Making contact largely depends on perfect timing.

Salespeople should also keep in mind the approach to handling both hot and cold prospects is fundamentally the same: Show buyers you’ve done your homework by bringing real value with each contact or visit.

Some ways to do this:

• Send a summary of insights from a conference or industry meeting that’s highly relevant to the buyer’s business, or
• Provide prospects a referral or qualified lead that could significantly help their business.

Training tip: Ask attendees to estimate how much time they spend prospecting vs. selling. Is it enough? Where should they look for improvement? What would best motivate them to improve their prospecting efforts?

Tags: pipeline, profile, prospect, sales meeting, tip, training