Sales qualification isn’t an event - it’s a process

Posted by Bob Apollo on Tue, Feb, 2013

Many sales pipelines include a stage labelled “qualified”. But if - like most of the companies I work with - you’re selling complex, high-value solutions with multiple stakeholders involved in the decision process, qualification isn’t an event - it’s a continuous process.

And you’re not the only party doing the qualifying - your prospect is going through a similar exercise throughout their buying decision process. In fact, you might think in terms of two parallel streams.

Parallel thoughts 

While you’re thinking about “will they do anything?”, “are they likely to buy from us?” and “will it be worth winning?”, your prospect will be wondering “why should we change at all?”, “why should we change now?” and “what should we change to?”

And at the end of the day, after a lot of time and effort has been consumed on both sides, the statistically most likely outcome is that your prospect will decide, after all, to do nothing. If they don’t have to change, they probably won’t.

No better than a coin toss 

It’s no wonder that the latest studies of sales forecast accuracy have concluded that at an individual deal level, and measured in terms of “did the deal close when expected, at the value expected”, your odds of getting it right are no better than tossing a coin.

It’s no wonder that improving sales forecast accuracy is a key imperative for many B2B sales organisations - or that focusing on more effective qualification can help to significantly improve the situation.

BANT won’t help 

Changing B2B buyer behaviour patterns mean that relying on the traditionalBANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe) qualification approach isn’t going to improve the situation. You can read why here .

But you can’t afford to abandon formalised qualification guidelines, either: that way lies madness, and a huge waste of time, money and other resources. The only practical option is to see qualification as a continuous process, and not as a singular event.

Requalify at every stage 

Effectively, you need to requalify opportunities at every stage in the pipeline using well defined and increasingly stringent criteria. And it’s not just a matter of uncovering new facts or pieces of evidence: you also need to recheck and requalify factors that have previously “passed the test”.

You need to take into account the fact that your prospect’s buying decision journey is unlikely to be completely linear. At every point, your prospect could decide to move forwards, to move backwards, to loop around in a circle or to abandon the journey altogether.

Measure progress based on outcomes 

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