Having examples of qualifying questions is essential for any sales process, especially when it comes to prospecting and qualifying leads.
Qualifying questions help sales reps understand their prospects better and identify the best opportunities.
They also help determine whether a prospect is ready to buy and if they are a good fit for the product or service being offered.
This guide will provide tips on creating practical qualifying questions that will help you identify the best leads and increase your chances of closing more deals while working from home in your Sales department.
What are Qualifying Questions and How Do They Help with Lead Generation?
Qualifying questions can be used to determine a lead’s fit for a product or service, their budget, timeline, and other key criteria that can help sales teams make informed decisions about which leads to pursue.
Additionally, qualifying questions can also be used during the sales prospecting process to ensure that sales reps are targeting the right prospects with their outreach efforts, leading to the highest potential for conversion.
Lead vs Prospect: What’s the Meaning?
If you’re looking for the difference between a prospect and a lead, the most basic and simple answer is that a prospect is a qualified lead.
A lead is a person who might be interested in the service or product you are offering, but until we don’t qualify it, it doesn’t become a prospect.
Therefore, the prospect meaning refers to the possibility from you, as a sales representative, to qualify a lead by asking relevant questions about their business, the issues or obstacles they face every day, their economic availability, and the timing for the implementation of the solution.
Lastly, to summarize the early stage of a sales cycle, it all starts with the lead generation, continues with the qualification into the prospect, and then finishes with the deal closure as an opportunity.
All the rest is customer retention, which is a topic we will handle in other articles.
Qualification Criteria – What Are the Most Important Factors When Evaluating Leads?
Lead qualification is an important part of the sales process, as it helps to identify which leads are worth pursuing and which ones should be discarded.
The criteria used to evaluate leads vary from company to company, but some key factors should always be taken into account when evaluating a lead.
By understanding these criteria, you can ensure that you are targeting the most qualified leads and avoiding wasting time on those who do not fit your customer profile.
In order to do that, here you can find some examples of criteria used to evaluate and qualify leads:
Examples of the Most Powerful Qualifying Questions to Get the Information You Need
The right questions while qualifying a lead or prospect, can also give you valuable insights into their needs, pain points, and preferences.
In this article, you will explore some of the most powerful qualifying questions that you can use to get the information you need from prospects.
You will look at examples of prospecting questions, customer survey questions for lead qualification, and how to qualify a lead with just a few simple inquiries.
By the end of this article, you’ll have all the tools necessary to start crafting your qualifying questionnaires and surveys depending on what exactly you want to discover from your prospect:
Examples of Qualifying Questions: Finding the Decision-Maker
These prospecting questions will help you out identifying if you’re already talking to the decision-maker or any other agent in the lead qualification process.
Identifying with whom are you talking is key for you to understand if you will need to expand the process by talking to only one person or more involved in the sales cycle.
It can seem impolite to ask the decision-maker to be present in every conversation, and hard to achieve, but you should try to do it, at least to involve him/her in the emails that are being sent or the online meetings that are being held.
Some examples you can use to identify the decision-maker in your lead qualification process are:
- Walk me through your day-to-day job: are you the designated person to evaluate and implement this kind of solution?
- Would you be a daily user of the product?
- Who in your team would use this product daily?
- Which decision-makers would be involved in the purchase of this product?
- Have you been involved previously in purchasing any kind of software/service/product to streamline this process or to solve this issue?
Examples of Qualifying Questions: Understanding Their Needs
These questions help identify a prospect’s biggest hurdles, desires, and motivations.
It will help you understand why they might have chosen to work with you in the first place.
By finding out what the top struggles are for them and what needs they hope to fill, you will be able to tailor your pitch or value proposition better than if it had been made without knowledge of their situation.
If it’s not clear what your prospects’ needs and motivations are for working with your company, try asking some questions about what makes the prospect feel most fulfilled professionally or personally.
Some examples you can use to identify the needs or problems to be solved in your lead qualification process are:
- What are your biggest obstacles to boosting growth in your company/department?
- What business issue can this service help you solve or overcome?
- What has prevented you so far from trying to overcome the problem?
- Are you currently using another solution to solve this problem? If so, why are you considering alternatives?
- Which feature of our solution would be most relevant to your business case?
Examples of Qualifying Questions: Evaluating the Budget
Talking about money at the beginning of a sales conversation can be tricky, but is going to save you a lot of useless effort with prospects that can’t afford your product or service.
The fact of having already a budget available or, at least, the willingness to set up a budget for it, is key for you to know if the customer is willing to buy what you are selling.
On the other hand, if you are requested to tell them a price, you asking them to ask for the money they’re willing to spend, always talk in terms of ranges (not fixed rates or prices).
This will give you (and the prospect) some space for negotiation and will help you both achieve a good deal.
Some examples you can use to identify the available budget in your lead qualification process are:
- Have you already set a budget for this solution internally?
- What does your budget look like for this solution?
- How much are you currently spending for the solution in place? (in case they have already a similar solution implemented)
- What would be the range of budget that you might have available for this solution?
- Do you have an estimation of how much money are you spending without having a solution like ours in place?
Examples of Qualifying Questions: Forecasting the Closure
These questions are going to help you identify when the prospect is going to be able to place the order and start implementing your service or product.
Your prospective customers will only purchase your product if they have a strong enough reason to do it quickly.
This could be their need for accurate accounting data or the requirement for a new solution for their executive team.
Whatever it is, you need to give them convincing reasons to make the purchase right away.
If the prospect is not able to do that at this stage, you can always request further meetings involving the decision-maker this time or set appointments to follow up on the status of the decision.
Some examples you can use in order to identify the timeframe in your lead qualification process are:
- When do you think you are going to have an answer?
- When are you going to meet the decision-maker(s) to discuss this topic?
- Are you willing to implement the solution this year/month/quarter? If yes, when exactly?
- When can we meet again? Can I follow this up on the date of dd/mm/yyyy?
- When should we set a meeting with your superior to resolve the last pending questions?
Conclusion: How to Incorporate Qualifying Questions into Your Prospecting Process
As mentioned, qualifying questions are an essential part of the prospecting process.
When used correctly, qualifying questions can help sales teams save time and resources by targeting the right prospects with the right messaging.
In this article, you have explored the best examples of qualifying questions in your prospecting process so that you can successfully qualify leads and increase your chances of closing deals.
However, if you are looking for a definitive answer on how to incorporate the qualifying questions into a prospecting conversation, there is no unique answer.
The best moment to ask these questions is at the beginning of the conversation with the decision-maker or the influencer.
Every person is unique, which makes every conversation unique as well, therefore, we can’t assist you by telling you when to “place” those questions, but as soon as you have answers for these, you will be able to recognize if you are wasting or not your time.
In the end, selling is mostly a negotiation made with the right information, but also the right intuition.
We will be covering other relevant topics about how to qualify leads and other examples of questions, but if you would like to add something to this article or have more info about other related topics, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment below!
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