Lead qualification in consultative selling: How to ensure more closings?
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 6:28 am
A few months ago we published a note on the methods to use to qualify leads in consultative sales and another with advice for delivering qualified prospects to the sales team .
Today we want to share some more tips on lead qualification that will help us secure more closings, answering some questions we have received in recent months.
Tip 1. To qualify a lead we need to answer at least 5 questions
To begin a lead qualification process we need the prospect to be willing to interact with us.
The specialized blog Merca2.0 always suggests asking these questions to evaluate its quality:
How did you hear about us?
What is your need and what do you expect to find in your supplier?
What attracted you to our brand?
How can we help you make the purchasing decision? Who is part of the decision-making process?
If our target market is broad, managing these questions one-on-one can be a real mess, so it would be a good idea to automate the rating dialogues.
Tip 2. Transactional qualification does not apply to consultative sales
This is one of the most common mistakes that we should avoid: Lead scoring works very well in transactional sales, but when we move on to a consultative B2B sale, it is advisable to use other qualification methods such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Purchase Timeframe), ANUM (Authority-Need-Urgency-Money) or 7Ps + C (Problem, People, Project, Budget, Priority, Timeframe, Decision-making process, Competitors).
Tip 3. What is the best way to achieve more closings?
In consultative sales, the closing is the result of very thorough work carried out from the beginning: the one who built the most trust from the beginning to the end of the business relationship wins. Hence the importance of being the first to arrive at the purchasing process, advising the prospect so that they can make the best choice: ours!
There is no specific method or recipe that guarantees a higher closing rate, but the more complex the sale, the more variables should be included in the rating (for example, the 7Ps + C).
However, to make this process less invasive and more agile, discovery dynamics with the client could be considered through Design Thinking techniques. During these sessions, the objective is to work on defining their problems and possible solutions.
Tip 4. How to distinguish Hot Leads among hundreds of prospects to serve them in the shortest time possible?
To do this, we recommend delving deeper into the SCRUM for Sales technique, which mobile phone saudi arabia mobile number directory proposes a dashboard to track conversion funnels in an agile manner and thus better identify those opportunities in a hot state so that they can be dealt with in time.
And to close, we share 3 keys to implementing a Lead Management program
Understand your customer (study their profile and their buyer journey stage by stage, their pain points, their interests, their expectations and their aspirations).
Think about how to add value to their purchasing process (if you are thorough in point 1, point 2 will be very easy for you) and generate content that provides that value.
Create an architecture of the process you are going to automate. It is very important that before choosing the tool you can draw the entire process. If it is not clear on paper, it will not be clear in the tool either.
Finally, remember that salespeople don't want to waste time qualifying leads, they focus on closing sales!
And that is precisely the role of B2B marketing: Delivering qualified sales leads (SQL): Less quantity with higher quality to generate more efficient processes.
Today we want to share some more tips on lead qualification that will help us secure more closings, answering some questions we have received in recent months.
Tip 1. To qualify a lead we need to answer at least 5 questions
To begin a lead qualification process we need the prospect to be willing to interact with us.
The specialized blog Merca2.0 always suggests asking these questions to evaluate its quality:
How did you hear about us?
What is your need and what do you expect to find in your supplier?
What attracted you to our brand?
How can we help you make the purchasing decision? Who is part of the decision-making process?
If our target market is broad, managing these questions one-on-one can be a real mess, so it would be a good idea to automate the rating dialogues.
Tip 2. Transactional qualification does not apply to consultative sales
This is one of the most common mistakes that we should avoid: Lead scoring works very well in transactional sales, but when we move on to a consultative B2B sale, it is advisable to use other qualification methods such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Purchase Timeframe), ANUM (Authority-Need-Urgency-Money) or 7Ps + C (Problem, People, Project, Budget, Priority, Timeframe, Decision-making process, Competitors).
Tip 3. What is the best way to achieve more closings?
In consultative sales, the closing is the result of very thorough work carried out from the beginning: the one who built the most trust from the beginning to the end of the business relationship wins. Hence the importance of being the first to arrive at the purchasing process, advising the prospect so that they can make the best choice: ours!
There is no specific method or recipe that guarantees a higher closing rate, but the more complex the sale, the more variables should be included in the rating (for example, the 7Ps + C).
However, to make this process less invasive and more agile, discovery dynamics with the client could be considered through Design Thinking techniques. During these sessions, the objective is to work on defining their problems and possible solutions.
Tip 4. How to distinguish Hot Leads among hundreds of prospects to serve them in the shortest time possible?
To do this, we recommend delving deeper into the SCRUM for Sales technique, which mobile phone saudi arabia mobile number directory proposes a dashboard to track conversion funnels in an agile manner and thus better identify those opportunities in a hot state so that they can be dealt with in time.
And to close, we share 3 keys to implementing a Lead Management program
Understand your customer (study their profile and their buyer journey stage by stage, their pain points, their interests, their expectations and their aspirations).
Think about how to add value to their purchasing process (if you are thorough in point 1, point 2 will be very easy for you) and generate content that provides that value.
Create an architecture of the process you are going to automate. It is very important that before choosing the tool you can draw the entire process. If it is not clear on paper, it will not be clear in the tool either.
Finally, remember that salespeople don't want to waste time qualifying leads, they focus on closing sales!
And that is precisely the role of B2B marketing: Delivering qualified sales leads (SQL): Less quantity with higher quality to generate more efficient processes.