How you allocate your time as a salesperson is key. In particular, maintaining a healthy pipeline requires that you balance your efforts between:
• Focus on closing the most likely deals for this quarter.
• Encourage those prospects with potential for the next quarter.
• Generate new prospects to enter the top of the sales funnel.

Getting the balance right can be a challenge. The key to efficient use of your time is a lead and opportunity pre-qualification system that you are going to focus on. But, too often, prequalification is applied forcefully. Applying the popular BANT criteria (budget, authority, time, and need) too rigorously to an inbound inquiry or cold call could exclude most of the market, including many companies that don’t have a budget for their solution now, but they still represent potential. customers.

In addition to selling to those who are already actively seeking a solution in the market, every sales organization must generate, foster, and nurture demand for its solutions. That means sales and marketing must work together, substituting marketing for prequalification at the lead generation stage. While some leads are classified as sales or ready for sales meetings, others that are not ready for the next step are not wasted, but nurtured. Later in the sales cycle, prequalification becomes more important, as the time and resources you must devote to an opportunity increase. Progressive pre-qualification – asking the right questions – ensures that you can continuously adapt your sales approach (if you’re talking to the wrong people or addressing the wrong requirements) to ensure you have the best chance of success.

Prequalification, like all aspects of selling, is not something you do to a potential customer, it’s something you do with them. It should be a two-way process: that means asking the customer what stage they are in and what they want to do next, if at all. It is important to remember that you have to earn the right to ask progressively more direct and searching questions.

Your approach should reflect the stage of the buying cycle (if there is one) you’re both in, as shown in the table below, ideally incorporating as many buyer-focused questions as possible.

The decision to participate in the buying process, in itself, is a significant commitment of resources on the part of the buyer. For this reason, it is usually done in stages, first requiring the sponsor in the buying organization to present a rationale for a purchase decision and preparing a business case.

• Only a limited number of projects can be evaluated at a time. This means that even if a project is of interest, the time may not be right. As a supplier, you need to show buyers how your project can impact their immediate business priorities.

• Given the cost and time required, organizations will want to ‘kill’ poor projects as quickly as possible. You may have to do most (or all) of the initial execution of a project to gain traction.

• Organizations are standardizing their approach to purchasing decisions, including action steps, document templates, etc. This makes the process more repeatable and consistent, saving them time. You need to know, and follow, the approach required.

• Bringing another vendor into the process costs time and money, so don’t expect to be late when you hear a project is being considered, even if your solution is ideal.

• Buyers want to limit the time/cost of the buying process, which means being judicious about the time they spend with sellers. When you want to access all the stakeholders, you have to take into account the fact that this represents an additional waste of your time and increases the cost of the decision.

• Buyers want something back for the time they spend with sellers. They may need to meet with three vendors because their internal process requires three vendor quotes, but if each vendor requires 20-40 hours of time (including briefings, presentations, proposals, ongoing communication, etc.), it’s understandable that the buyer wants some immediate refund.

• Once a supplier has been selected, it makes sense that the buyer would want to develop and deepen that relationship, rather than go through the process all over again. When customers switch to another provider, they face real switching costs related to the process of evaluation, education, and learning to trust another provider.