Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

Qualifying prospects is as fundamental to sales success as prospecting so why do so many people struggle with effective selling qualifying?

From a recent post at Six Sigma Selling:

You probably have salespeople working overtime right now on deals that will be:

• bad business if you win them (too much trouble, not worth the revenue)
• lost to a competitor
• lost to no decision

If you've been around professional sales organizations for a long time, you already know that poor salespeople ignore qualification criteria; good salespeople, and their managers, obsess about it.

Everyone in sales development teaches about qualifying.  What needs to be addressed is why sales people won't actually execute what they've been taught.

David Kurlan of Objective Management Group would submit to you that the problem is either in the crucial elements for success:  Desire, Commitment, Outlook and Responsibility or the Major Performance Factors:  Need for Approval, Difficulty Recovering from Rejection, Buy Cycle, Record Collection or Discomfort talking about money.

The best way to fix these problems is to uncover the issues up front via an assessment process that focuses on sales skills not just behaviors and personality traits.  You must find out if the will and the skill to sell exist.