Quoting is not qualifying. We often must remind salespeople that "You are not a Quote Jockey. You don't make commissions on quotes. You don't need the practice of quoting. You don't need to help the current vendor by supplying the buyer with your information. You don't need to make the buyer smarter. And you don't need to waste your time, your effort or the resources of your company quoting on something that you have less than a good chance of selling."

So, stop quoting and start qualifying prospects who fit the profile of your ideal client. Start qualifying these prospects for "severe mental anguish" - the motivation to buy your product or service. Start qualifying them for their motivation to leave their current vendor relationship. Start qualifying them for their sense of urgency and ability to invest the resources required to buy.

How do great salespeople do this? Here are four tips on qualifying prospects more effectively:

Tip 1: Know Who You Should Be Selling To

If you don't already know who you should be selling to, you need only look as far as your book of business (or the book of the most successful salesperson you know) and determine which clients make you the most money. Typically, 20% of your clients account for 80% of your revenue.

Tip 2: Ask for Introductions, Not Referrals

Select 5-10 of your clients, provide them with your target prospect, and ask them if they know anyone who looks like that and, if so, ask them for an introduction. If you want to learn a very comfortable way to do this, watch our Sales Brew on Getting Introductions. This will help you clearly understand the difference between asking for a referral and an introduction.

Tip 3: Qualify Prospects for Severe Mental Anguish

Once you have a list of prospects and appropriate decision-makers and you get the opportunity to meet, you must begin qualifying for severe mental anguish - the prospect's motivation to buy your product or service.

This is tricky. You will have to get past the surface discussion that invariably happens at initial sales meetings. You will want to drill down past the first indication of a problem (pain indicator). Most salespeople, when they uncover the initial indications of a problem, stop digging and go immediately to their solution and begin pitching. At this point in the relationship, this is inappropriate since you don't yet know if the problem is big or bad enough to motivate the prospect to take action or if they even have a budget.

Drill down. Gain more information. Ask great questions so that they continue talking about the problem. Get them emotionally involved.

This takes practice. Here is another tip to qualifying prospects: the Rule of 3R. This means asking the Right question, the Right way, at the Right time. If you learn how to do this, you will help the buyer discover that they have a problem and that they want to fix the problem. Then they will ask you if your product or service can make the problem go away. This is a much better way to qualify a prospect, to help them self-discover.

A Sample Approach to Qualifying Prospects

Here is a sample approach for qualifying prospects (this needs to be planned, not canned). Once you ask your initial question that gets a pain indicator response, e.g., "I'm unhappy with...?", you say the following:

• "Tell me more about that." Ask in a nurturing way and then don't say anything. Let them respond.

• "And?" Ask like it's a question - they will keep talking.

• "How long has that been a problem?" Don't step over your own question. Ask it and don't say anything. Let them think. Don't be tempted to talk just because there is silence.

• "What has your current vendor done to help you with this problem?" If they say "Nothing," then you should respond with, "Hmmm, I wonder why."

• If they indicate that the current vendor has done something, you should respond with, "How is that working?" Keep in mind if it were working, you wouldn't be there.

• "How much will it cost if you don't fix the problem?"

• "Is the problem bad enough for you to undo your current vendor relationship?"

• "Do you want to fix the problem?" Assume they say "yes."

• "Are you sure?"

• "Suppose (magic word) we could fix the problem, what would happen next?"

You must have the ability to listen carefully to what the prospect is saying because that will lead you to your next question and will help you get closer to the emotion associated with the problem. Remember, you are trying to get to real emotion because this is what will motivate the prospect to buy. And, if there is not enough emotion, you don't have a real prospect.

Of course, qualifying for money is equally important, and you will want to make sure there is a budget for solving the problem.

Tip 4: Know When to Walk Away

Tip 4 is the most important tip on qualifying prospects: if you are unable to qualify a prospect for mental anguish to solve a real and immediate problem with real available money, then it's time to move on to the next prospect. Don't waste your time trying to create a buyer where none exists. Sure, you can ask and add them to your database to stay in touch, but they do not belong in your pipeline.

Unfortunately, most salespeople keep non-prospects in their pipelines when they should be eliminating them. These non-prospects take up time and energy that should be directed to finding new contacts, qualifying real prospects and selling.

Managers, use these tips on qualifying prospects at your next sales meeting. Drive a discussion and do some role play around those drill-down questions. Your #1 job is to help your salespeople become more effective in qualifying and closing more business.

Building a high-performance sales team is a lot like preparing a great meal. You need the right ingredients, a reliable process, and someone who knows how to bring everything together. In sales, the science comes from measurable activities, data, and systems, while the art comes from how well your team communicates, connects with prospects, and executes. When sales leaders understand how to balance both, they are better equipped to coach their people, improve performance, and create sustainable growth.

Cooking Up a High-Performance Sales Team

Many Christmases ago, my wife, Linda, gave me a cookbook called The Science of Good Cooking.

It was a fitting gift because I genuinely enjoy cooking, mostly because I genuinely enjoy eating. I am not the type of cook who spends hours preparing elaborate gourmet dishes. Give me meat, potatoes, pasta, soup, barbecue, stew, or a good sandwich, and I am happy. Vegetables are a different story, although ratatouille, steamed broccoli, and sautéed French green beans occasionally make the cut.

For years, I approached cooking mostly through instinct and experimentation. Over time, however, I learned that every successful dish involves both science and art.

The science explains why certain techniques work:

• Cooking meat low and slow helps break down tough proteins and creates a more tender result.
• Resting meat allows the juices to redistribute.
• Measuring temperature is more reliable than guessing whether something is finished.
• The right balance of heat, time, and ingredients can be the difference between dinner and disaster.

Once you understand the science, you can begin adding your own art.

The food becomes your canvas. You can adjust the seasoning, experiment with ingredients, and make the finished dish your own. Personally, I like a little extra zing, so cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, Tabasco, jalapeños, butter, and half-and-half tend to find their way into my recipes.

The same combination of art and science is required to build a high-performance sales team.

The Science of Sales Performance

The science of sales growth is found in the activities, measurements, systems, and standards that consistently produce results.

In other words, it begins with effort.

Your salespeople may generate opportunities by:

1. Networking within the communities and industries they serve
2. Calling prospects and following up with existing contacts
3. Using LinkedIn and other platforms to build relationships
4. Meeting with internal partners who have access to ideal prospects
5. Delivering an exceptional client experience that creates advocates
6. Asking satisfied clients for introductions
7. Building relationships with referral partners
8. Writing, speaking, and presenting to establish expertise

These are the ingredients.

However, owning all the right ingredients does not automatically produce a great meal. Your team must consistently use them, measure them, and follow a process that gives those activities the best opportunity to succeed.

This is where sales leadership becomes critical.

Most organizations have a CRM that collects plenty of data. But a CRM is simply a kitchen full of equipment. It cannot determine whether your team is following the recipe, using the right ingredients, or producing the desired result.

Sales leaders must:

• Identify the activities and metrics that matter most
• Establish performance standards that encourage growth
• Connect those activities to a defined sales process
• Create individual sales success formulas
• Compare actual performance with goals
• Measure conversion ratios at each stage of the process
• Use business intelligence to predict future performance
• Compare those predictions with actual outcomes

The purpose of the data is not simply to document what already happened. It should help leaders determine what is likely to happen next and what adjustments need to be made now.

The Art of Sales Execution

Effort tells you what your salespeople are doing.

Execution tells you how well they are doing it.

Two salespeople can complete the same number of calls, meetings, presentations, and follow-ups while producing dramatically different results. The difference is often found in the art of selling.

Consider the following questions:

• How well does the salesperson ask questions?
• Do they uncover meaningful insight or simply gather basic facts?
• Can they use stories, metaphors, and examples to make their message memorable?
• How well do they understand and respond to emotion?
• Do they sound confident and engaging during an initial phone call?
• Can they command attention when presenting?
• Do they communicate differently from every other salesperson competing for the prospect’s time?
• Are they passionate, committed, and willing to do the necessary work while maintaining ethical, legal, and professional standards?

These skills are difficult to capture in a spreadsheet, but they frequently determine whether an opportunity advances or disappears.

The science may tell you that a salesperson completed 20 prospecting calls. The art determines whether anyone wanted to continue the conversation.

Coaching Is Where Art and Science Come Together

Building a high-performance sales team requires managers to evaluate both effort and execution.

The data helps identify where performance is breaking down. Coaching helps improve it.

For example, the numbers may reveal that a salesperson is scheduling plenty of first appointments but converting very few of them into qualified opportunities. That is the science.

The manager must then determine why.

Is the salesperson asking weak questions? Are they talking too much? Are they failing to uncover urgency? Are they presenting solutions before fully understanding the problem? Do they struggle to discuss money, decision-making, or commitment?

That diagnosis and the coaching conversation that follows represent the art.

Effective sales coaches must:

• Build relationships based on trust and confidence
• Understand what truly motivates each salesperson
• Ask questions that help people discover their own solutions
• Hold the team accountable to meaningful standards
• Refuse to normalize mediocrity
• Avoid allowing a need for approval to weaken accountability
• Prioritize the success and development of their people

Great coaching is not about giving more instructions. It is about using the available data to identify the right coaching opportunity and then helping the salesperson change their behavior.

Your Sales Team Needs More Than a Recipe

A great recipe provides structure, but it still requires someone who understands how to execute it.

The same is true in sales.

Your CRM, sales process, activity standards, and performance metrics provide the science. Your team’s communication skills, emotional intelligence, confidence, creativity, and ability to connect with prospects provide the art.

Strong sales leaders know how to combine both.

Too much focus on activity can create a team that stays busy without producing results. Too much focus on personality and instinct can create inconsistent performance that is difficult to repeat or scale.

A high-performance sales team needs the right ingredients, a proven recipe, consistent execution, and a coach who knows when to turn up the heat.

That is how you cook up sustainable sales growth.

Summer is a time for family adventures, some outdoor fun and perhaps even some downtime and relaxation for both salespeople and their prospects and clients. But there are plenty of sales strategies that you and your team can still focus on and implement. Here are six that we recommend:

1. Enjoy the journey

As you think about your sales strategies this summer, you must understand that the journey may take longer, and you will likely run into detours, accidents, and slowdowns.

If you do not slow down and enjoy each stop along the way, you will become irritable and frustrated. This will cause you to move things along faster and, when you do, you will miss steps and sights along the way, and potentially damage relationships. Slow down and enjoy the ride!

2. Have a process and follow the process

What we know thanks to our sales evaluation partner, Objective Management Group, is that 95% of top producers (roughly only 25% of all 3 million salespeople assessed) follow a consistent sales process. What is important to note today, though, is that the process is more of an approach to help the salesperson focus on the buyer's process.

Have a milestone-centric system within your CRM so that you can check off each step along the way. This is the best way to make sure that you are following a sales strategy that fully qualifies a prospect, for their sake and yours.

3. Sales growth requires nurturing

No matter where you are in your career, you need nurturing. You must replenish yourself with new information, be reminded of what you've done in the past that led to success, and receive coaching to improve skills and change behaviors.

Find time this summer to search and find new resources to help you refine your sales strategies. Here is our list of recommended reading from our sales experts, and listen to some of the top sales podcasts. Summer is a great time to nurture yourself!

4. Do your homework

It makes sense to do some homework before you call on someone, especially when cold calling. You must get a feel for their business, challenges, organizational structure, and find out anything you can about their current business state. This helps you frame your questions so that you sound well-informed about them and their industry. This knowledge and understanding help you more quickly establish credibility.

Understand that what you think you know might not be true. Not that a company would intentionally lie or be misleading, but understand that they are looking to put their best foot forward. So be cautious, ask more questions, and work to validate what you think you know and inquire about what you don't.

5. Record the adventure

Record your notes in your CRM. Check off steps as you complete them. Any documents you send, make sure you upload them to the prospect's file. One of the best sales strategies of all time is to be willing to discuss your opportunities with others so you can learn, and they can learn.

Go back and look at your notes as you progress through the process, so that you do not have to remember everything. It's DOCUMENTED! This will free you up to pay closer attention when you are meeting with your prospect.

6. Someone always needs help

There are plenty of people in your marketplace that need help. Not just any help but specialized help. To be that specialized resource, you cannot look, act, and sound like everyone else. You must have a different approach, have different conversations, and focus on pressing issues and business solutions instead of your products and services. Summer is a great time to refine your unique selling advantage!

Summer will keep moving whether you slow down or not. The salespeople who come out ahead aren't the ones who push harder through July and August. They're the ones who stay in the process, take care of themselves, and keep showing up for the people who need them. Enjoy the season, but don't check out on your sales strategies. Your pipeline will thank you in the fall.

"To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do these every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three: you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be joy or sorrow. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week; you're going to have something special."

- Jimmy Valvano, March 4, 1993,  Acceptance Speech at the ESPY Awards for the Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award

So, here you are mid-year 2026. Are you having fun? Do you find yourself in a position to laugh on a regular basis, or do you take this business so seriously that you've lost your passion in sales and forgotten why you decided to get into professional selling? I've said this often over the years: "If you aren't having fun, get out and do something else." Life is too short not to have fun doing what you spend over 25% of your day doing.

Have Fun or Get Out

If you start having fun, you won't worry so much about selling, and the people you meet won't worry so much about being sold. It's kind of funny that way. Sure, you do serious things for your clients, but we're not going to remember the sale you made or didn't make. What your client will remember is you, and how you were there for them when they needed you the most. And if it isn't you, it will be someone else, so you might as well be memorable by having fun. Find a way to laugh when faced with difficulty. Find a way to smile and say something light when dealt a difficult situation. Find a way to ease someone else's burden with a smile and a laugh.

Money Isn't the Point

How much time do you spend thinking? Not only thinking about your next sale, or the coverage, or the terms of the contract, or the features and benefits of what you are selling, but also about you, where you are going, and what you will do once you get there. Certainly, most salespeople get into sales for the money. But then what? If you get reasonably good at what you do (selling), then money problems will go away. And by the way, if you really enjoy what you do, have fun at it, your money problems will go away too. So once you've decided that it isn't about chasing the money, what is it about?

I have a good friend, Tim Mackey. We've known each other now for over 30 years, and in our very first meeting we talked about money. Tim's perspective, which has become my perspective as well, is that money is a resource: a resource that buys you freedom, freedom of time and freedom of choice. Once you have all the money you need, what next? What goals do you have that are bigger than you? What goals do you have that would be beneficial to others? What goals do you have that are a testament that you did, in fact, make the world a better place for having been here?

What Passion in Sales Really Means

Is selling your passion? Or better yet, do you have passion for what you do and what it does for others? Selling the right things to the right people changes lives. It certainly changes your life, and if you've approached your prospect or client the right way and focused on them, not yourself, you change their life too. You bring something to the table that maybe, just maybe, buys them freedom: freedom of time and freedom to make choices. Choices like expanding a business, taking more time with family, retiring early from work, and following the passions of their heart.

Passion Is Non-Negotiable in Insurance

If you are in the insurance business, then you may be the most important person in someone's life when they need someone like you the most. When people face the tragedy of loss, they suffer emotionally, and many times physically and almost always financially. If you've done your job, you can eliminate the financial burdens they may be facing, which in turn will help them emotionally. But the key here is that you must be passionate about what you do. You must decide that your calling is to help as many people as possible.

You must decide that you are the one who will have the greatest impact on their life or business. That defines passion in selling.

Sales organizations typically have plenty of sales data due to the growth and usage of CRM systems, which have become critical to capturing the activities occurring with the sales team. But using sales performance data to run effective sales meetings is often the greater challenge for sales managers and leaders. In our coaching platform, we offer several tools to help in this area, and one of the most effective, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-use tools is the sales data insights that come from holding regular Sales Huddles.

Why Huddles Help Coaches Run Effective Sales Meetings

Huddles, as defined by Verne Harnish, founder and president of Gazelles, are:

1. A communication process or system that allows for the sharing of real-time information
2. An opportunity to focus on "burning platform" issues for a team or company
3. A way to bring sharp focus and attention to a critical business driver
4. The most important 15 minutes in any company meeting

Each company should start by determining the most important sales activity data points to capture in their huddle regularly each week or month, such as contacts, appointments, proposals, COIs, sales, etc. If a sales manager does not schedule a regular means to monitor what is going on in the field in real time, they cannot coach, adjust the play, or get in front of any client issues or trends.

Huddles provide real-time information so that sales managers can make real-time decisions and provide real-time feedback or coaching. This is vastly different than waiting for month-end or quarter-end reporting on results because huddles capture what is happening now, this week. The sales performance metrics that are captured in Huddles are a means to run effective sales meetings and can then be used to coach salespeople to impact current deals.

Coaching with Sales Data Insights from Where’s Walter

We suggest a technique that we call “Where’s Walter,” pictured and explained below.

Coaching a salesperson’s activities can be simplified into two areas: their effort vs. their execution. Effort is described as evaluating if they are doing whatever it takes in the area of outreach and working hard to attain their goals. Execution evaluates their effectiveness in the sales process. Are they doing the right things to take a prospect through an effective sales process, or do they have a problem?

Using Where’s Walter for Coaching

As a coaching approach, we recommend sales leaders place their people into one of the four boxes noted above and then have the conversations below with the salespeople in each quadrant. These are guidelines, of course, and can be adjusted. One word of caution: do not soften too much. Leaders must be tough and direct at times to identify real areas of concern and development.

Execution Results & Effort

“Bob, thank you for the results you are generating. You must be thrilled, as this will help you achieve your personal goals and objectives. Just as important, though, I also want to thank you for your consistent effort. You may not realize this, but others on the team look to you and follow your lead. The way that you execute on sales skills week in and week out sets a great example for the rest of the team. Thank you. Now, Bob, what else can I do for you?”

Execution Results but Lacks Effort

“Bob, I want to thank you for the results you are generating. You must be thrilled, as this will help you achieve the personal goals and objectives you have for your family. I am worried about one thing, though; can we talk about that? Bob, how long is our sales cycle? (120 days).

Okay, so based on that and looking at our success formula, then the results you are getting today are a result of what? (The activity I did a while back).

That’s what I was thinking, and that is why I am concerned. Based on the activity here (show them the data), you are headed for a slump. Is that where you want to be?”

Effort Is There but Poor Execution Results

“Bob, obviously, based on the numbers you see here, you are not on schedule to achieve the extraordinary year you committed to managing yourself toward. But this is where I’m confused. The data I have, which tells me about your effort, indicates that you should be at or above your goals, but that isn’t the case.

My experience tells me that it can only be because of one of two things: either the data you are entering is not accurate, or you are failing to execute properly. Which one do you think it is?”

Lack of Effort and Results

“Bob, I have to tell you that I cannot figure this out. Your effort and results are a total surprise to me. If several months ago, someone said to me that you would be failing, I would have said, ‘No way.’ (Show Bob the job posting you used for the position he is in and his resume, then show him his current sales activity and results.)

Bob, I take a look at this (job info) and I think, ‘This is what I hired.’ I look at this (the results), and I’m thinking, ‘This is what I got.’ Bob, did I make a mistake?”

Collecting the right data utilizing Huddles can help leaders run more effective sales meetings. Then, using the Where’s Walter platform gives sales coaches a framework to use performance metrics from Huddles to generate conversations, identify areas for salespeople to focus on, and gain insights for immediate coaching. This helps improve skills, performance, and results.