Lead Qualification Help

Landon Ellis

Lead qualification is a critical step in the sales process. What, in your experience, are the key criteria and strategies for effectively qualifying leads? How do you ensure that you're focusing your sales efforts on prospects who are most likely to convert into customers? Share your insights and best practices for lead qualification in sales.

David Chimenti

There’s a lot of ways to pull data around peak conditions for maximization of adoption of your offering and, if you are using MEDDICC, a lot of the other general questions will be there. So starting with known data points that reveal the current users who have maximized adoption of your solution is a good start, but from here it’s about asking the correct questions and listening.

There’s a misconception that a sales call is generally supposed to be comfortable for the prospect. Research from Harvard Business School reflects that people inaccurately estimate what their decision will be at decision time based on how they feel at the time you are speaking with them (let me know if you want the research). As such, it’s a lot more effective for the end game to get them into uncomfortable situations on the call at times as we can not accurately predict how they will feel at decision time.

That’s one reason I want my qualification process to take them across the emotional spectrum. The other reason is because we have to find pain. They are not qualified if they are not experiencing pain and will not make a change unless the pain that they don’t want to look at is coming out of their mouth based on the questions I’ve asked. The prospect’s willingness to share that pain will be in direct correlation to the strength of the relationship I’ve built, so qualification as an ongoing process like MEDDICC teaches has to be a combination of these two. When I say relationship, getting them to like you is always great, but more importantly they have to respect that I a) am credible b) can solve their problem and c) have their best interests in mind.

Lastly, are they willing to start negotiating from the get go. That doesn’t mean price, but it could mean access to the economic buyer, a meeting with the buying committee, getting information from others parts of the organization, or some other type of homework that gauges their willingness to be involved in ANY sales process (whether it’s your sales process or their buying process). @Antonella O'Day has some really good best practices around using forms to get information from other stakeholders that helps prove this out for me. There are tips and tricks in there for using solo documents to gain individual insights and using shared docs where you can see the edit history to understand the pecking order in the sphere of influence better. This gives us a better idea of how real the deal is based on how big the sphere of influence is, how willing are others in the org to play ball, and who can erase what someone else said on the doc (pecking order and also reveals prioritization).