Many organisations have defined its sales process as a set of actions to engage with prospect customers, typically starting with meeting them, pitching its unique value proposition to eventually pushing out a product or service to these prospects. Not knowing a prospect’s background, needs, challenges, timings, budget or goals may result in a company spending moneys with a highly uncertain or wrong closing outcome. Here’s why gathering qualifying prospect information first, is of the highest importance.

Not every incoming lead is a good fit for a product or service, even if it seemingly appears to be so upon registration. And eventually, buyers don’t buy just because they have a serious need, a deadline, or budgets to spend. They buy because of a true problems they want to see solved. These prospects don’t want to be sold to, they want to be properly educated in order to make educated decisions on how to solve these problems. The only way to properly do that, is to query about the contexts of these problems, listen, and make honest recommendations, preferably—but not necessarily at any cost—based on the company’s offer.

Especially in SaaS/subscription environments where a company’s customer acquisition costs are recuperated after months of fees being paid. If customers tend to keep on churning before that time, the company is making losses…

While the specific sales qualification questions an inside sales rep asks will depend on the product or service they sell, there are rather general questions that can help recognise who’s a potential successful customer in the making:

• What is the problem at stake and why are you trying to solve it now?
• Has someone been trying to solve the problem in the past and why wasn’t it successful?
• What happens if the problem isn’t solved? What would be the financial impact?
• What’s the budget, and how does the approval process look like? Who will have a say in the process?
• What are the objections the prospect could identify?
• What other solutions are being considered?
• When would the solution need to be implemented/operational?
• What are the next steps planned?

Next to understanding the context, and upon a successful qualification, the inside sales rep will also encourage the prospect customer to move further in the process, typically arranging a next meeting with an account executive.