Is Prospect Qualification Part of Your Sales Efforts?
The past few years have been challenging to say the least. When you combine the lack of staff with the incredible amount of work accounting firms have, there’s a real wake-up call at the leadership level.
If firms want to keep their teams in place, they must make some changes. While this is not easy, some positives will come from those changes.
As firms grow and mature, so does their client base. The struggle then becomes, what do firms do with the smaller, not-so-profitable clients that don’t fit their profile anymore?
In reality, most firms have this bucket of clients that aren’t a good fit and cause stress for their staff. Culling these types of clients has become a priority for firms to pare their client base down to those that best fit their firm to alleviate that stress.
However, culling clients only addresses one part of the problem. While firms have gotten better at identifying their ideal clients and working hard to attract them, one missing piece firms should consider when trying to build a practice full of ideal clients: prospect qualification.
What is prospect qualification?
Prospect qualification is a common term and action in traditional selling. If leads are sent to a salesperson, they want to know the leads are qualified, meaning an opportunity is worth them spending time pursuing.
So often, accountants feel the pressure to bring in the next new client and new business that they chase most people – really anyone – who shows interest in working with them and seem like they might be a good fit. This is where prospect qualification can make a difference in not just the types of clients firms bring in, but also improve time efficiency.
Prospect qualification can be a confusing part of the sales process, mainly because most people struggle to understand the difference between qualification and discovery. The term discovery is thrown around a lot and often is used interchangeably with prospect qualification. While there are scenarios where they could be done at the same time, they are two distinct actions that need to occur independently in the early stages of the sales process. The following definitions help distinguish these two activities:
- Qualification is the process of determining if the prospective client is a good fit and worth pursuing.
- Discovery is the process of uncovering the prospective client’s needs and mapping them to possible solutions.
Identifying what a prospect needs and identifying what a prospect needs from you can become blurry. The critical difference is the focus is on you in the qualification process. Finding out if the prospect is a good fit and if they are ready to buy is more self-serving.
This is where you can bring efficiency into your selling process and focus your time on the best prospective clients. The second step, discovery, puts the focus back on the prospect once you have decided they are qualified.
There are many ways to qualify prospective clients, but here are three main areas to focus on when qualifying prospective clients:
Do you have the right expertise?
At the most basic level, start by looking at whether or not they fit your firm’s ideal client profile. Are they in an industry you serve? Are they looking for services your firm currently provides?
If the prospect is a real estate investment company but your firm primarily works with nonprofits and governmental entities, does it make sense to pursue them?
What if the types of services they need fall into your industry niches but not your service lines? For example, say you provide family office services to high-net-worth individuals but they need estate tax work.
Maybe you can do this type of work if you need to, but it probably makes more sense to refer them out and pass on them.
Are they the right size?
Another easy thing to evaluate before even meeting with a prospect is whether the size of the prospective client fits your firm’s lines of business. Consider the following.
- Do they appear big enough to meet firm minimums? It can be simple to assess if your minimum for tax services is $3,000 but the individual asks for tax prep services with one W-2.
- Are they too big for you to provide the right level of service, or would their needs potentially be outside of your expertise? If your firm doesn’t have the right expertise in place to do the job well, it might do more harm than good to try to win the business rather than refer it to someone who could do a great job for the client.
These are simple ways to pre-qualify a prospective client before taking the next step and wasting time.
Are you talking to the right people?
The last piece of prequalification is making sure the person you’re meeting with has the authority to make a decision. There is nothing worse than investing hours in discovery meetings and proposals only to find out they don’t have the authority, at which point you need to start over with the decision-makers.
You probably won’t be able to confirm the decision maker or the decision-making process until you meet with the prospect, but you can get a few clues from someone’s title or level in the organization. If the person you are engaging with is in an entry-level position, chances are they aren’t making any decisions. They could be a great champion for you, but you likely will need to sell to someone higher up the food chain to get an actual decision.
Sometimes this information can be easily found through research, but other times you will need to have a conversation to uncover these details. Knowing where the other person stands in the beginning of the process changes how you approach – and even pursue – the opportunity.
Key Takeaway
As you become more proactive in your sales approach, you will spend more time away from billable work. By learning how to pre-qualify prospective clients, you’ll ensure you spend valuable time in scenarios where you are most likely to see rewards from your efforts.
When you can leverage prospect qualification in your sales process, you will focus your time and energy on the best prospective clients and, in turn, win more deals efficiently and consistently.