Many salespeople are desperate to engage prospects in sales cycles. After all, it is much more fun to manage sales cycles than it is to prospect. Plus, they get to add opportunities to their pipeline, which gives their sales manager the impression that they are actually doing something useful. These salespeople have blind faith that if they can somehow convince prospects to engage in sales cycles, they will eventually make sales. This belief causes them to indiscriminately invest time, effort, and company resources in any prospect who expresses even the slightest interest in one of their offerings.
Unfortunately, sales cycle time and resource investments do not inevitably produce sales. How many of the opportunities in your pipeline have been stalled at the same step in the sales cycle for weeks…or months? In how many opportunities has your company invested enormous amounts of time, energy and resources (conducting product demonstrations, writing lengthy proposals, facilitating product evaluations, etc.), only to have the prospect either choose not to buy or prove incapable of securing necessary financing? Even when sales are made, how many turn out to be “nightmare” customers who are always dissatisfied and consume huge amounts of post-sales resources?
All prospects are not created equal. Salespeople do need to help prospects explore whether their business problems are substantial enough to justify investing time in a sales cycle (Business Problem Qualification). However, salespeople also need to determine whether the prospect is worthy of time and resource investments by the salesperson’s company. If a prospect is not a good fit, a wise salesperson disengages from the opportunity (why not refer them to a competitor and let the competitor burn some cycles?) and searches for other prospects.
How can salespeople accomplish this type of qualification? Many sales methodology training courses teach an acronym, M-A-N, that stands for Money, Authority, and Need. The idea is to determine whether: (1) the prospect is willing to commit enough budget dollars (Money) to pay for the offering; (2) the key decision makers and influencers (Authority) have been identified; and (3) the prospect’s pain (Need) is severe enough to justify investing in a solution.
Unfortunately, even when salespeople do a good job of M-A-N qualification, they can be “blindsided” by issues that delay sales cycles or destroy opportunities outright. For example, some prospects prove incapable of securing the financing necessary to fund their budgets. (In other words, they are not “credit worthy”.) Some decision makers need to have specific information provided in a specific format before they can authorize a buying decision. Sometimes salespeople invest considerable time and effort in troubleshooting complex problems and designing solutions, only to be informed that the prospect must take the proposed solution out to bid. This can lead to the opportunity being lost to a low bidder or the profitability of the opportunity being decimated.
To avoid these issues, salespeople should add additional questions to the M-A-N qualification process. The acronym that I have assigned to this revised process is M-A-I-N BP, which stands for Money, Authority, Information, Need, and Buying Process. A sample M-A-I-N BP qualification form is provided in Appendix A.
When salespeople successfully complete both Business Problem Qualification and M-A-I-N BP Qualification, management is able to make very educated resource allocation decisions. Expensive time and resources can be laser-focused on opportunities that have the best chance of producing attractive returns on investment.
Business Problem and M-A-I-N BP qualification should not be one-time activities, especially if sales cycles extend over weeks or months. It is entirely possible for decision makers to change, business priorities to change, budget allocations to change, etc. The most successful salespeople periodically revisit opportunity qualification to ensure that no substantial changes that might delay or derail the sales cycle have occurred.