Qualification’s Value
For any inside rep, it is extremely important to convey all the information that you are provided during your qualification conversation to the Outside Rep receiving the opportunity. This week Jaime, Nicole and I conducted a workshop to help reinforce the listening and note taking skills of our BDRs to strengthen the quality of our leads. Now, I can't divulge all of our secrets, but I will let you know of some of the key areas that are important to gather during your initial call to help arm your outside rep for their follow up conversation.
First and foremost, you need to uncover the "Business Profile". What is the structure of the company? What process do they have in place or what solution are they using? It is during this part of the conversation that you want to include all of the qualification specific details. For our CDRs (Client Development Representatives) whom prospect out to clients that AG would like to do business with, they want to discover how those organizations currently generate leads? What tradeshows do they attend, or how do they generate inbound opportunities from webinars or white paper downloads? What is the quality of those leads? How are they following up and tracking the progress of those leads? This is going to provide our sales team with landscape of the organization, and to help follow up with more probing questions.
From their probing questions, they need to uncover the "pains/needs" within the organization. What is going to be the compelling reason that the organization will want to look into our services? What are the limitations or weaknesses within the current process? How is the organization planning on addressing those pains (if at all)? This is extremely important for our Outside Reps to know, because it is going to allow them to speak specific to the organizations needs. For our CDRs, we want to know how many of those leads are they following up on? Are they able to track the progress of all your B and C leads? Are they currently seeing the ROI for their tradeshow events? Are they meeting their quarterly goals? We want to be sure to uncover the reason that the organization wants to talk to us. Elementary, sure, but that makes it no less important.
Another important question for an Inside team to as is, "what other vendors is the organization evaluating or what alternative solution are they looking into?" This is going to provide your Outside team with immeasurable value when they speak with their prospect. Knowing who the other competition is will allow your Outside Rep to focus on what differentiates you from the others, as well as highlighting weaknesses that your competition may have in line with the organizations needs. For AG, if we are aware that you may also be looking other companies in our industry as an alternative outsourced solution, we know to speak specific to the quality of our leads and the success that we have had when it comes to forecast and closed business from our opportunities.
There are many other topics that you want to uncover during your qualification call but the top three are the most important (do not neglect budget and decision making process though). By providing your Outside team with this information, they are going to be able to go into the follow up call with the utmost confidence and knowledge of the environment and the organization's needs to help increase the probability of taking the conversation to the next step!