Qualifying Prospects - How Do You Do It?

Have you ever used your time and found that you still do not sponsor a prospect and do not make a sale?

What is the magic and secret?

Let's start with one simple and powerful pillar regarding sales because that is what each and everyone is in.

The first thing with marketing sales is this...

It is not an event. It is a process.

TIME is valuable.

So the more time you spend on unqualified leads, prospects who are not looking, not hungry and buying....you're wasting time.

Now, that doesn't mean to suddenly close all your process you got going for you because you can have a platform, which educates, tools which filters, and even segment lists which taken action later.

You can educate, build trust, credibility through time.

Combining offline with online methods to help people make it "their" idea to decide to take action.

Let's look at it...

What We Mean By Qualifying Prospect
In the business dictionary.com and it's in many of my books I bought over the years, it defines qualifying as this..

In selling - it is a process of determining if a certain lead (potential customer) has certain characteristics (such as ability, authority, and inclination to purchase, and economic size of the expected order) that qualify him or her as a prospect.

So what that means is this..

• You know what you're selling.
• You know what it solves for your prospects.
• You know exactly the type of prospect it's for.
• There is a price and you ain't budging from that price.
• There is the terms and you ain't budging from these terms.
• Which means, you know exactly what questions to ask to determine the prospect has these characteristics...fast!

Or you're going to waste your sweet time.

What Are These Characteristics?

The characteristics - does the prospect fit with what you have?

The characteristics - does the prospect has a desire, a need?

Is the prospect comitted e.g. willing to solve theor problem and pay?

Through the conversation when asking question, you will know if...

• The prospect is looking.
• They have a need.
• Their level of comittment
• and what to do next.

Handling Objections
The ONLY time, you will get a hard time, offline and online is when you didn't ask questions and...handled all the objections before hand.

Whether that is an article, a squeeze page with a video, a sales letter.

If it's offline then it be verbally asking questions and going through the process to get your prospects to handle their own objections.

You do that for example..

"Joe, what does it take to succeed in a home business?
"It needs knowledge,"replies joe, "skill, training."
"That's exactly it Joe. As you said, without training, education you will have a frustrating time."

So you use you ask questions, let your prospects handle their own objections.

Always try and lead towards education instead of the pitch.

If you didn't ask questions, didn't handle the objections first and did what most do then you get...

a) Oh I don't like to make money off people.
b) Oh is this a pyramid thingy.
c) The people at top make more money
d) Blah, Blah, Blah.

Most of these are not even from them but from someone else's experience and if any did say that, I'd ask..

"Is this from your experience."
"Yes."
"I like to know what you experienced. What happened."

And lead back to the "education question."

If the reply is..

"No, it's not my experience."
"Joe, do you agree, we cannot base our success and failures on what someone else has done and experience?"
"Yes," replies Joe.
"Why is that do you think?"
"Well, we don't know what the other person has done, what training they had etc etc."
"As you said Joe, a true business owner must make their own decisions through education themselves. And someones failures can also be someones success story. That's why it's best to get more information to make YOUR own mind up than someone else does it for you."

Again, leading back to...education

Remember sales is a process not an event.

If you want to really hit the nail in the head, to make sure the prospects really does qualify...

Give them valuable information by first leading them to your website blog and build your list. Lead them to a place where they need to show comittment.

Lead them to a place where you have an enviroment that educates, engages, inspires, filters and reveals solutions.

Now, your prospect is in the loop and even if your prospect does not join you, your opportunity; you will be able to:

• Build a list.
• Build trust
• Convert to sale

With.......

Funded proposal e.g information product, training courses, ebooks, paid subscriptions or other tools.

No matter how much you read, the real true learning begins when you take action.

Go out there to ask questions, make it a learning process to first get better at communications.

Just do that for one month.

Then step it up to try the next step until you have got the full process mastered.

Adam Taha