Qualifying is an important step in the sales cycle. It helps sales teams optimize their time and energy. Prospects have problems that your businesses offerings may be able to solve and want to know if the offering being sold will solve their problem.
Meanwhile, salespeople are trying to identify any problem the prospect is trying to solve, and the urgency with which they would like to solve it. Understanding this urgency helps salespeople determine whether they can close the deal. This activity is called qualification.
Many qualification questions can be easily answered in casual conversations during in-person interactions. The absence of in-person interactions makes it much harder for sales people to answer these questions.
Qualifying Prospects In Person Is No Longer An Option
Qualifying is a skill salespeople traditionally develop by past selling experiences. This makes qualification one of the toughest skill to teach when training new salespeople. It’s literally a gut reaction developed over a long period of time.
Digital Selling doesn’t rely on gut instinct to qualify prospects. Instead, it uses a quantitative method to qualify sales opportunities based on engagement data. Digital Selling utilizes rich media content and sales collateral to engage a prospective buyer. Every piece of content that is sent to a prospect, produces engagement analytics when it’s viewed. This data is sent back to the salesperson in real-time. As a result, salespeople can use simple metrics like viewing time, numbers of views, and shares as key indicators to qualify a sales opportunity. Since qualification no longer requires long term experience, it becomes much easier to teach. Additionally, a salesperson can manage several engagements at once enabling them to qualify more prospects and ultimately close more deals.
Qualifying Prospects Using Engagement Analytics
Let’s revisit our newly wed couple that is looking for their first home. With digital selling, they can take embark on virtual tours of the properties they are interested in from the comfort of their home. Rich media offers them a conclusive understanding of the property. Their engagement analytics are shared (in real-time) with a real-estate agent. The agent can use this data to determine the properties the couple is interested in. Given this engagement data, when the couple requests an in person tour, two pieces of information make qualification crystal clear:
- The agent can see how much and what research the couple has done to nurture their buying interest.
- The agent can avoid sharing information the couple already knows about the property they are visiting.
It’s that easy. Data driven qualification means your sales team can qualify more prospects, faster.
You can leverage engagement based qualification today using fullfeel’s Digital Selling solution.