Four ways to qualify leads, meetings and calls

Time is your most valuable commodity. You have only 24 hours in each day and once it’s spent it can never be returned or replaced. Unfortunately, though, not everyone in the business world values time – especially when it’s someone else’s.

For this reason you need to be strict when it comes to qualifying your meetings and phone calls. As a busy business owner and mumpreneur the last thing you want to do is spend two hours in a meeting and an hour or so in travel time only to find out it was a complete waste of your time.

To prevent or at least limit this from happening and ensure you use your time as wisely and profitably as possible, here are four tips to help you further qualify your meetings and calls.

1. Know who your most profitable clients are

Take a look at the characteristics of your most profitable and regular clients. Is there anything that sets them apart? Do they share a particular need, want, problem or challenge? Are they in a specific location? Are they in a particular stage of their life? Do they have a specific income or budget?

The more characteristics you can identify about the clients you want, the easier it will be to work out who benefits most from your products and services, and the types of questions you need to ask to qualify contacts further to guard against wasting your time.

2. Know what you want to achieve

Knowing what you want out of each meeting, call and point of contact can help you direct the conversation more strategically and get the information you need to make it happen.

This will help you develop an agenda to keep you on time and on topic, ensuring that even if a meeting or call is not a productive use of your time you can identify any opportunities to sell alternate products or services and waste as little time as possible.

3. Ask the right questions

The key to qualifying any contact is to ask the right questions. In the case of a potential client questions around their budget, timeline, problem they need solved, level of urgency, objections they have and their expectations can tell you a lot about what they need, why they are buying and how quickly they will buy.

This information can help you determine how much time you should allocate and how quickly you should prioritise it.

4. Make them work (just a little)

Another way to work out how ready someone is to buy is to be slightly unavailable or require them to do something before they see you, like filling in a brief, questionnaire or survey.

The more persistent they are to be in contact with you and the quicker they take action and get information back to you the more qualified they are and the more likely they are to buy.

How do you qualify your meetings and calls?