The B2B selling process is long-drawn and ranges from a few months to a few years. It’s no surprise then, that businesses should focus on leads that are highly relevant. Sometimes, a lead from a Fortune 500 company may not be the right one simply because they’re very price sensitive or their purchase is a straight re-buy or there’s a lack of fit between your products and their needs.
So, it’s essential to qualify the nature of the lead to a point where you know the urgency of the business need, the budgets involved, the participants in the buying process and finally, the time of decision-making.
Here are 6 parameters that are required to be predefined in order to completely qualify a lead and take it into the next step of your prospecting process.
Need Identification:
As simple as this sounds, it’s essential to understand the extent of the prospect’s need. Ask yourself if your product is adding value to this customer because he has a genuine need or are you just wasting your time with someone who’s a nice guy, chats with you on the phone, but is not worth your lead prospecting time. If he really wants to chat, well, have drinks during happy hour.
The point here is to identify the obvious needs and the vague needs. Rank these needs in order from the need that is critical for the sale to occur to the need that is the least critical.
Scale : Use a scale from 1 to 5 with one being the least critical and 5 being the most critical.
Product Fit:
The B2B sales world is famous for its customizations. The ability to provide a customization benefit does give you an edge in the selling process, but will strain your product design, manufacturing and installation processes. For this parameter, ask yourself whether your products or services meet or exceed their technical, performance and reliability requirements? If you need to do some minor reconfigurations to get this order, then it’s still a good fit. But, if you’re going to have to retool half your plant, walk away.
Scale: If they want what you make or may need you to change a few specs, give ‘em an ‘A’. Anything more than a few extra specs gets a ‘C’ unless it’s a multi-million dollar project and/or your CEO wants to do business with them.
Opportunity Size/Budgets:
The best things in life are free, sang the Beatles, unfortunately, your value-adding product comes with a price tag. The size-of-opportunity is a key question that you need to ask in order to qualify this lead as you’ll have an idea of the revenue potential of this prospect. Naturally, you’ll never get an actual number, but a ball-park estimate will tell you how serious they are about purchasing your product. If your prospect is price sensitive, then you’ll get various indications early in the game about ‘reduced budgets’, ‘bad economy’, ‘cost cutting’ etc. If quality, reliability and other service-related factors are very important factors in the decision-making process, that’s a good serious prospect to have.
Scale: Rate your prospects as A, B or C depending on their fit. If you’re aware that their budget’s within range, then assign an ‘A’ rating. If the prospect’s price sensitive but will consider other factors like time of implementation, delivery options and other factors while making his purchase decision, assign a ‘B’ rating. If the prospect is very very price sensitive, assign a ‘C’ rating and walk away.
Authority:
This is another important factor. What is your contact’s role in the purchase decision process? Is he a recommender, influencer or decision maker? Understanding how many people are involved in the decision making process qualifies the lead further. If your product costs $10K or so and if your prospect is a mid-sized manufacturing organization, then it’s quite possible that one single person has the authority to approve a sale. However, if your product is in the $100K plus category, then there has to be a chain of command or a buying/purchasing committee that approves such big-ticket sales.
If your big-ticket product lead states (with exaggerated bravado) that he is the final authority, then he’s not being candid. It’s better not to waste too much time with such prospects.
Scale: No scale here. Simply assign the R (Recommender), I (Influencer) or D (Decision maker) tag based on the contact’s position in the firm.
Timing:
When will they make a final decision on buying your product? When do they plan to implement it? At what stage of the buying process is this organization at presently? For some products like office supplies, the time line for purchase is short, but for big-ticket items, it may take 6, 12 to 24 months. This information is useful in mapping and quantifying the potential of your sales pipeline. But, more importantly, this information allows you to plan your selling strategy for every member of the decision chain.
Scale : Rank it on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 assigned to a prospect who is in the early stages of the buying process. The firms that are in the middle or towards the end of the buying process get a 3. The tire kickers get a 1.
Typically, 10% of all your prospects will be kicking tires. About 40% or so will be in the early stages of the buying process, 20% will be in the middle stages and 10% will be towards the end of the buying process. Note that these numbers vary for the different B2B sectors. I’ve based these estimates on my experiences in the construction products industry and software sales sector.
Competition:
This is very good information to have handy. Understanding the size and reputation of your competition should be an integral part of your planning process, thus allowing you to calibrate your strategy accordingly.
Scale: All competition gets an ‘A’ because it’s so good to know who else is playing this game.
Having worked on salesforce.com, Dynamics CRM and even Zoho CRM for a while, I found that qualifying these leads with the sales team using the above criteria, enabled me to categorize them efficiently and plan the appropriate marketing communication towards them.
Brian Carroll recently ran the above poll on LinkedIn with telling results. B2B selling is a prolonged process and there tends to be a bit of downtime in between your communication with your prospects. Use that time to qualify them better by understanding their businesses, researching your competitor’s offerings/marketing programs and identifying other players within the organization (a good internal coach is always a valuable asset) you’re trying to sell to.
