Three categories of prospects

If you find our posts useful, don't forget to subscribe to our RSS Feeds or Email Updates

In our Prospect Management Report, there’s a feature called the “Likelihood Gauge.” The purpose of it is to cause salespeople to really size up a prospect based on criteria, not feel.

If you never use our Prospect Management Report or any similar tool, this information is still worthwhile, so listen up!

The reality is, all prospects fall into one of three categories:

• Those with whom you have no shot at the business. (And if you knew this, you would stop hounding them immediately…)
• Those with whom you will get the business. (Unless something goes catastrophically wrong…)
• Those with whom you have at least some chance at the business. (Winning the business is up in the air, it’s yours to win or lose…)

Wouldn’t life be easy if you knew which category every one of your prospects fell into? Well, stay with me, you can. I’m going to outline criteria that will help guide you as to whether you should be spending time pursuing a prospect.

No Shot at the Business

You have no shot at the business — or at least no realistic shot at the business — when you’re up against these six issues.

• You came into the evaluation process after everyone else.
• There is a personal relationship between buyer and current vendor (the “incumbent”).
• The buyer specifically mentions a need to “get competing quotes” to compare against their current vendor.
• There is a family member or close friend involved as a bridge between the buyer and the current vendor.
• This deal/opportunity does not play to your company’s strengths either due to geography, customer needs, or your staffing.
• The buyer hasn’t agreed that there is a pressing problem needing solved, even if they’ve agreed to follow you through your sales process.

You Will Get the Business

You will get the business — or it looks pretty good — when one or more of these three criteria are at work in your favor:

• It’s a corporate-mandated deal. Though you still need to handle these with appropriate diplomacy, you should not lose these.
• You’ve signed the deal or gotten a formal “Yes” from the customer, but have only subtle loose ends to tie up. (Note: this doesn’t apply to deals where you get the “Yes” but still have issues to negotiate.)
• You have a strong, personal relationship with the buyer where trust runs deep and the buyer has become your internal coach.

You Have Some Chance at the Business

Obviously, this is where most of our deals land, or at least we think. These are scenarios where:

• There are no personal connections for or against you.
• The prospect is taking the process seriously — making and keeping appointments, asking their own questions, completing assignments you give them, etc.
• There is a realistic deadline for when the decision will be made, and you know why that deadline is important to them. In other words, it’s not an arbitrary date (a sure sign the buyer is playing games: arbitrary dates can be ignored so very easily).
• The buyer needs to make a change from their current vendor for some specific, acknowledged reason beyond price.

While some of these critieria may be elementary to you, the reality is, salespeople continually misclassify prospects that should be in the “No Shot” category and put them in the “Some Chance” category. They do this to either pad their reports to management or because they’re so optimistic they’ve believed themselves into thinking they can see people who will never buy from them. This tragic mistake means countless pipelines and funnels and forecasts are littered throughout the country with bogus prospects that will never say yes.

The answer, then, is to screen, screen, screen. Or, as it’s often called in sales training, qualify, qualify, qualify. I prefer screen, because it suggests that people may move in or out, and you don’t care, as long as they move. The word qualify suggests you find a way — any way — to ensure they are a prospect.

My challenge to every salesperson is to do a more thorough, objective job of screening your prospects and gauging them on the criteria above. Specific industries may even be able to add custom criteria to screen people in or out.

This will cause your forecasts and funnels to be far more foolproof and accurate, eliminating not only the time wasted calling on “No Shot” prospects, but the embarrassment of continually reporting them on your call sheets.