Getting Across the Finish Line with Your Sales Prospects

Do things like this ever happen to you?

• A website consultant meets a prospect at a networking event. The prospect likes what he hears and agrees to connect the following week set up a time to meet. Next week the prospect becomes strangely unavailable. After four calls, the consultant lets the possibility die.

• An event planner has a great first meeting with her prospect and identifies a number of areas where the prospect needs help. During the second meeting she provides a proposal to address those areas of concern. The prospect likes what she hears and tells the event planner that her proposal looks good; she just needs to run it by her management team. When the event planner checks back a few days later, though, she is told the company has decided to work with someone they have used before.

Incidents like these happen every day. They keep many consultants from ever achieving the success that should be possible to them. But how do so many good beginnings have such disappointing endings?

The problem here is the lack of an effective sales-qualifying process. Too many consultants fail to ask enough questions. And they fail to ask the right questions at the right time, in the right way. But this is the skill they must develop if they are going to win more.

• The mindset you need to be effective at executing a qualifying sales process
• The six factors that you must ask about that determine rightness of fit
• The time to ask these questions
• The reason to ask them
• The best words to use to ask them
• The answers you must hear
• And finally, the reason you should look to disqualify your prospect; and why good qualifying is looking to disqualify your prospect, and how to use it to win more.

About Our Speaker:

Carl Harvey is the founder of Success & Self-Esteem, a sales development company that specializes in working with insurance agencies and other professional services firms to help them put in place the processes and practices that support a sales culture of accountability and achievement.

Carl is also a member of the National Speakers Association and is much sought after speaker on issues of sales, self-esteem, and sales development. Among the agencies and associations where he has spoken are William Gallagher Associates, Renaissance Alliance, the Massachusetts Association of Insurance Agents, and the Massachusetts Association of CPAs.