Leads are very good for a business, but if they don’t turn into sales they are pretty much useless. Qualifying sales leads is actually the real art of selling. It is a selling skill that makes the difference between average salespeople and brilliant ones. The good news is that this skill can be learned and trained, so that even entrepreneurs and small business owners who have no idea about qualifying sales leads and closing sales can become pretty good at it.
The sales pitch is very important and it is the moment where most people make the mistake of rushing into talking the audience into buying their product before even knowing if there’s a real need for it. This is the first rule you are going to learn in any selling skills training: identify a need before talking about your product. This can be done by asking questions.
When you discover a need, the next step is to confirm it. After you get the confirmation, it’s time for you to start your speech about how your product or service satisfies the need of your prospect. Many people make another mistake here: they start to enumerate the product features instead of giving the benefits and support them with the appropriate features.
To give you only one example, let’s assume we have a prospect, an old lady who wants to vacuum under her sofa without having to bend too much. If you tell her your vacuum cleaner has 4kW power, your words won’t resonate in her mind as strongly as if you told her the vacuum cleaner has the power suck the dirt from 2 feet distance, which means she doesn’t need to bend over that much for cleaning under her sofa.
Writing and delivering a sales pitch is always about qualifying sales leads. This is why you need to know and follow the right procedure, otherwise you aren’t going to get too many sales. It is very important to know your customer before preparing what you want to communicate to her. If you start rambling about your company and your products from the first sentence to the last, you are going to lose your audience before having the chance to conclude any sale. Everything, from your company logo to the last piece of communication needs to be directed towards fulfilling a need of your target prospects. This is how smart selling is done and how one can maximize the profits by doing things the professional way instead of trying desperately to grab the attention of those sales leads.
In conclusion, it’s great to have a steady flow of sales leads, but if you don’t qualify them and close the sale, your efforts will have been in vain. Learn how to ask the right questions at the right times, train yourself to spot any opportunity and score big on the sales and on your company’s profits. This is not an impossible dream, but only well-organized business owners see it come true.