etailinsights eCommerce Data and Sales Blog
3 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself Before Trying to Close an etailer Prospect
posted by Darren Pierce
If your website and marketing efforts are doing their jobs, you should have a steady stream of new leads flowing to the sales team. Unfortunately, not every one of those leads is going to turn into a sale. Plenty of leads never become prospects, and plenty of prospects never amount to anything more than some good conversation.
Identifying the prospects that are most ready and willing to close a deal is your key to selling efficiently, and one way to truly determine if a lead is qualified enough to close is to ask yourself these three questions.
1) Can I Actually Help Them?
If you don’t know how you can help them, you have no value to bring to the table.
The point is that you should be able to identify specific ways in which you can make that etailer’s life easier before ever picking up the phone. Sometimes, the answer isn’t very obvious. In those cases, do as much research as you can on your prospect and start thinking outside of the box.
If you still can’t identify how you can add value, it might be time to move on or at least pull back and wait to see if anything more develops.
2) Do They Need Help?
It’s one thing to be able to determine how you can help them. It’s a whole different thing to determine whether or not they actually need your help.
Most people think that if you answer “yes” to the first question, the answer to this second question will automatically be “yes” as well. Not true. Don’t fall into the trap of always believing that because a prospect has a problem they’ll need your help solving it. That’s not always the case.
3) Do They Want Help?
Most businesses have problems that need to and can be solved by 3rd parties, but if management doesn’t see the value in outsourcing for help, then it doesn’t matter what value you bring to the table. They’re not going to bite.
You may know how to help them, and they may need your help, but if they’re unwilling to accept it, there’s not much you can do about it. Dig in and ask as many questions as you can to clarify their interest in partnering with you. Then you can decide whether pursuing the next step is appropriate.
If you can’t answer “yes” to any one of these three questions, your prospect probably isn’t qualified enough to consider closing. Pump the breaks, and then go back to the drawing board.
