Question Your Leads To Qualify Them

 

You should connect with your leads to figure out where they’re in the buying process. By asking questions, and getting feedback you can build a relationship with your leads. The right questions can set you on the right path for being available to your leads when they’re ready to buy. It is important to know which questions to ask and what specific answers to look out for, as this is the key to qualifying leads and getting them to the next stage of the sales pipeline.

 

Using the modern lead qualification approach CHAMP: Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization, you can divide all your qualification questions into each category of this approach. Let us go through the steps of this CHAMP approach and have a look at all the suitable qualification questions for each step.

 

Challenges

Your lead buys things because they have a challenge or need. If your company has a solution for these challenges of your lead then you have a beginning of an opportunity. The best way to gain insight into your lead’s challenges is to ask the following questions and listen carefully to their answers:

 

  1. What challenges is your business facing and what problems do you need to solve?
  2. What is driving your interest in our solution?
  3. How long have you had this challenge or problem? What made you decide to solve this problem now?
  4. What objectives are you looking to achieve by solving this pain?
  5. What are the likely consequences if the pain is not solved?

 

The answers to these questions will enable your sales team to determine whether your product will satisfy the lead’s need.

 

Authority

The Authority step is used to get an idea of who the decision-makers are, you must ask your leads questions that will help you map out their company’s organizational structure and point you to the right person. Here are the questions that would help you reach the actual decision-makers :

 

  1. Who, in addition to yourself, is involved in making this solution happen at your company?
  2. How are purchasing decisions made for products like ours and who is involved in looking at this solution?
  3. Who in addition to yourself is the decision maker with most clout? And next to that person, who is the next person? How important is it that they be on board with the decision?
  4. What concerns do you think they may have? If they have any potential concerns, how do you think we should handle them?
  5. Would it make sense for us to schedule a call together with them to answer any potential questions they may have?

 

Money

Once you’ve qualified your lead needs and connected to the decision-makers, it is now time to find out their expectations for the investment they will make to fulfill these needs. Here are some questions which would help you know whether your lead can afford your product :

 

  1. What are your expectations for the investment necessary to purchase the solution?
  2. Do you have a portion of your budget allocated to this?
  3. What is your typical budget allocation process when you need to invest in a solution like this that was outside of the original budget?
  4. When do you plan to ask for budget allocation for this investment?

 

Prioritization

Prioritization is about the lead's timeline, it tells you when they need to solve their issues and challenges. This timeline helps you to know if this project is at the top of your priority list. Remember, you have to be very specific when discussing their timeline. Ask these questions to know about your lead’s timeline for their upcoming projects:

 

  1. Do you currently have a contract? If so, when is it due for renewal? Is there a cancellation fee?
  2. When were you planning on starting the implementation?
  3. So when is the latest when you would want to make a decision? So you wanna have a decision made no later than 2 months. And ideally, when would I prefer to get this done?
  4. So what’s a realistic kind of timeframe that we should be targeting here? When would you like to have the problem solved?
  5. How important is this to you and where does this stack up in terms of priority and urgency? What are some of the other priorities now?
  6. Do you have the time and bandwidth to begin implementation now?
  7. Would you like to hear about how other people I’ve worked with have implemented plans like these? (If they are interested then it indicates that this is important and high on the list of priorities and timeline)
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