How To Qualify Leads And Prospects

How To Qualify Leads And Prospects

To make the correct judgement, you need the essential insights, and this is what it means by "qualify". If you are not selling the product or service to the correct lead, you will end up wasting a lot of money, time, energy and resources. So what you should do to qualify leads and prospects? How will you know whether a prospect is fit for your offer? Will the lead ultimately lead to a sales opportunity?

You should invest your money and time only after qualifying someone. Only then you should start selling the service or product to the prospect.

If you are not quite experienced you will jump at the given opportunity without properly studying the prospect. What happens here is you are trying to selling something on an assumption without the proper background check. It may or may not culminate in sales. Only mindless salespeople will do this kind of marketing and they will end up losing their energy and time chasing wrong leads.

Instead of talking all the time, try to listen to your prospect. Then you will understand whether he/she is a qualified prospect. If you listen to them your chances of selling will be much higher.

Spend time on qualified prospects, and you'll achieve significantly more costly deals.

Even if you get a qualified lead you must put in a lot of effort to make him/her your customer. You must know all about your valuable prospect or else you will miss an opportunity to sell your product or service to them.

If you end up selling a product to a wrong customer or to people who should not have bought your product, it is not just bad for the customer but bad for you and your company.

To find a quality lead you must know how to evaluate a prospect. For instance, you must know what their drawbacks are. How have they evaluated your solution? What type of an organisation they belong to? These details are essential to personalise your pitch for your prospects.

Know their pain points and also about their organization and personality. If a salesman is not able to close a deal it shows that he did not know all the important details about his prospect and hence he did not properly qualify as lead.

Ask as many questions as possible to your customer and gather the correct information. There are certain qualifying questions which every salesman should be aware of. We list out the most important ones.

Customer profile

A prospect should match your ideal customer profile. How big is the company? What industry are they in? Where are they located?

Needs

You must know your customer's needs to qualify the prospect. And you should know how to fulfil their requirements and requests. You should have an idea what result they are aspiring for, and how the result is going to impact their company or team.

Decision making process

You should also know how they make decisions and how many people are involved in the decision-making process. Are they impulsive buyers or do they take time to buy products?

For instance, some companies take almost a year to purchase products. But if you have a sales target to achieve in the next four months then they are not your qualified prospects.

Competition

It is said that you should keep your friends close and enemies closer. So you should know about your competitors. You must know whether the lead has worked with any of your competitors and also what are the decisive factors on which they will base their decision on.

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Do Financial Services Agents & Brokers Need Wakeup Advice?

Financial Services Agents

Agents in the financial services sector play a crucial role in sustaining the business. Financial services encompass broad sub verticals like - banking, insurance, and investment funds companies where their crucial role like building relationships and getting business volumes cannot be underestimated.

Personalized sales are the approach set by agents and brokers for decades. They carry a lot of information on products, markets, and prices. But after the IoT, big data and analytics came to the center stage, it became imperative for agents and brokers to stay relevant. The mobile customers supported by mobile workforce of businesses are posing existential threats to agents and brokers. Many may wonder - is this the end of the road for brokers and agents?

Financial services honchos may consider eliminating the role of agents attracting new prospects with reduced premium or discounts. But wait a bit more before you send the execution order as they have the firepower still. It is into this area focused study is required.

Can Agents Stay Relevant?

Now the question before us is, are agents and brokers relevant? First of all they have time tested relationship with a large number of accounts whom they assiduously nurtured. Today, the brokers themselves are mobile and know the IT tools to nurture their audience. With the help of IT apps on their mobile they go for client acquisition faster. In this process, they:

•  Contact their prospects and educate them about the products. 
•  Provide valuable pieces of advice on most feasible product for them. 
•  Evaluate the performance of securities. 
•  Build relationship after gaining an understanding on every aspect of customer relationships.

We are coming to the important aspect. Today technology obsolescence is making the role of agents irrelevant. To some extent it is true if the mobile customers make a total shift from agents and have direct interaction with the company. But the question is how feasible is that idea. We all know in our busy schedules, giving priority be it paying premium or buying stocks may not be appealing to all with a few exceptions. The reason behind this is people are not that self motivated and agents step into this gap with their relationship nurturing skills.

In areas like spending money people are little scary as well as slow decision makers. This cannot be construed as weakness but in fact it is wisdom as sensible ones do lot of research and thinking before they take the plunge. What does this mean for the financial services sector? Financial sector services may be enthusiastic about IT tools which helps the customers to take informed decisions. But what is the exact scenario? People will do all research with the tools on mobile but many will be unlikely to take the final purchase decision because there is a need for a resource person to give relevant and contextual information on products and services. This should be followed by the ability to close the deal once the curiosity level is raised to the highest. Who can replace agents or brokers who had been doing this for decades?

So, now the readers might have understood the value of agents in clinching the deal. Getting business is not an ordinary deal. It requires a lot of effort, constant follow up on clients to arrive at a decision. Just SMS alerts won't do the trick. Having said this, let us consider how the agents can be used creatively with technology in this era of technology disruption. We also need to consider how agents can be empowered with technology and how.

Agents Can Be on Survival Mode with IT Tools

To survive in today's volatile markets, what is most needed is actionable information. Agents who are working overtime in building relationships and closing deals definitely require latest IT tools, to be specific BI, big data and analytics tools to take key decisions. In the case of insurance, BI tools can help the agents and brokers to derive key insights on customers and understand their inclination to offer customized products or solutions. BI dashboards will help them to manage relationships effectively. So is the case with banking and investment companies who hire third parties for business development.

Application of analytics comes in different areas like content analytics, context analytics and business analytics. In content analytics unstructured data like call center logs, sensor data, audio, video data can be analyzed to track trends, customer responses, etc. In context analytics data is analyzed to understand the context which is vital to take context based decisions. In business analytics patterns, behaviors or trends are discovered through statistical analysis. Last but not least is predictive analytics where application of techniques like statistical analysis, regression analysis, correlation analysis, cluster analysis, social media analytics etc., are applied for new product development.

Agents are catalysts in information gathering as they move with people and trigger discussions on products and services. Because of this stronger reason, one cannot conclude that agents are on their way out in the disruptive technology era. But at the same time agents should take recourse to IT for their survival as well as the survival of financial services businesses. Let time tell the rest.