Uncomplicate – How to disqualify leads
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
There’s no dearth of content about how to nurture and convert leads. All these steps could be made a much easier process if you have the following two elements in place.
Now these are things that most of us know and have consumed, but what about lead disqualification?
You read it right, lead disqualification. As much as qualifying and closing deals is important, Tom Williams, CEO of Deal Point, feels that disqualification of leads should be an important part of your sales cycle.
“We think that a lot of time gets spent bringing new leads into the funnel. And then everybody has the experience of just working a bad deal to death,” says Tom. As an industry, we’ve always focussed on qualifying leads at the start of the funnel, and assuming that they are ‘worthy’ of being pursued until they say no.
That’s not always the right way, Tom feels.
Qualify at every stage
It is important for a salesperson to keep qualifying leads at every stage of the funnel. “The big mistake is that you can be qualified today, but things change over the course of the sales cycle. Just because a lead is qualified on day one, doesn’t mean that the prospect is qualified on day ten,” Tom says.
So, it’s really important to ask yourself at every stage whether the lead is still a qualified prospect. To ensure this, its pivotal to have a robust process to assess how a qualified prospect ideally looks like at each stage.
You can do this by asking questions like:
- Is this person still a well qualified prospect?
- Do they still require attention and time?
It’s important to realise you learn more information as you interact more with the prospect, and it’s absolutely okay to disqualify them if they don’t fit your ‘ideal’ customer profile.
What signals to look for?
But how do you look for signals to disqualify a lead when they’re in the middle of a funnel? A lot of factors need to be considered for disqualifying a lead. For example, you should consider how long a prospect been on a sales cycle vs how long they should have been. You also need to have a buyer-centric approach to disqualifying a lead.
“Who is the buyer? Do you really, really know who the buyers are? And not just the single buyer, but all of the buyers across that decision making team? Second, do you know what their initiatives are? So what are the problems that they’re trying to solve inside their organisation? And again, to a greater and greater degree? And third, do you know what their buying process is? Do they have a purchasing department? Do they have set budgets that they’re never allowed to break?”
However, it’s important to realise that you are not going to know all of this on day one of prospecting. That’s why it’s all the more important to build a bigger and better picture of the buying processes, buying teams, and other buying initiatives.
The hidden advantage with lead disqualification
Aside from advantages like saving money and time, and fastening sales processes, lead disqualification has a lot of advantages. It helps a sales rep and the organisation build a strong reputation.
For example, telling a prospective customer ‘..but we’re not right for you’ builds a lot of credibility because it shows that you really are thinking about the prospect’s best interests. “And I promise they will call you first when they next have a problem in your domain.”
