Prioritize your sales
If you are part of the sales team of a company or you carry out the sales of your own company, surely you have found prospects (candidates to be customers) that are 100% ready to buy you, and others that need more follow-up, which leads to a dilemma for the sales team; How to know if my prospects are ready to buy me?
Locate the stage where they are
The first thing you have to understand and analyze is the stage of the buying process where your prospects are and what are these facets? Our Hubspot friends describe three stages, which I will explain in detail:
- “Awareness Stage”
Within the field of Marketing it is said that many times people do not know well what are the problems or needs they have but they are aware that there is something that fails, so they began to investigate why this fails. In this phase the prospect is experienced and expressing the symptoms of a problem or opportunity but still does not know exactly what is this, so he is looking for information to understand, understand and give a name to his problem.
- “Consideration Stage”
In this stage, the prospect has already clearly defined his problem, and is looking for methods and information to help him solve this specific problem.
- “Decision Stage”
At this stage the prospect has already decided on the strategy, method or approach to solve their problem. Now, what he is doing is looking for specific products and brands that help him solve his problem based on the strategy that he chose. Within this stage the prospects put together all these options of products and brands and they are discarding the options until reaching the final decision.
But, how will identifying these stages help you get more prospects ready to buy ?, very easy, to apply the correct sales strategy and customer tracking you have to first identify at which stage of the purchase process are these, since the approach and follow-up of a person who is in the Awareness Stage to one who is in the Decision Stage will be totally different. Likewise, identifying in what stage each prospect you have is will help you prioritize your calls, visits, etc.
Observe and rate your prospects
Once you have identified in which facet your prospects are, what you have to do simultaneously is to qualify them, that is, to determine whether they fulfill certain necessary characteristics so that they can advance in the sales process. Qualifying each of the prospects you have will help you identify if they need help, if they are interested in receiving it, and most importantly if you can offer that help.
Hubspot describes a methodology known as the BANT Framework, basically it identifies 4 aspects to qualify from the prospects, which will help you prioritize your sales efforts, thus obtaining greater closures for your company:
- Budget
It is about evaluating if the prospect has the economic budget to be able to contract the services or products that are offered to him, and that will help him to solve his needs or problems.
- Authority
Is the person or prospect with whom you are treating the final decision-maker? Or can it direct you directly and quickly with the final decision-maker? As you will already be aware, if one does not deal directly with the person who has the purchasing authority, the sale process becomes more delayed and there are more chances of not reaching a sale closing.
- Need
You have to qualify the degree of the need they have, that is, evaluate if the prospects have an «unbearable» need or problem.
- Time
Likewise, the degree of urgency must be qualified. If this has a very urgent need to resolve, it is most likely that they buy the product or service quickly, but if the need is not urgent, the sale closing can be extended.
You will evaluate these aspects through questions that you will ask your prospects, the ideal is to evaluate them from the first call or meeting you have with them. Likewise, to obtain objective information about your prospects, rate the 4 previous items with a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being «never going to buy me», and 10 «this prospect will buy me today». If a prospect obtains a very high grade on average, you will know that you have to place a higher priority on this one, and vice versa.
Control and manage the information
Something crucial that you do not have to forget is to have a good control and management of your prospects, since it will not do you any good to know which prospect is more valuable, or what kind of information or strategy to use with it (remember the Buyer’s Journey), if you do not have a good administration and monitoring of your sales.
For this, I highly recommend using a CRM, this will not only help you improve your sales management, but you will also be able to store all the information of each client and prospect you have. If you want to know a little more about what CRM is, I recommend the following Merca 2.0 article
I assure you that if you use these tips you will find out in a short time which prospects are ready to buy you and their characteristics. As you can see, these tips or strategies are 100% focused on the client, so I highly recommend developing a very detailed profile of your client through the Persona Methodology.