Sales Discovery & Qualification

Stage Goals

In the Qualify stage, the objective is to determine if there is a viable pipeline opportunity with the potential to close within 12 months. Sales professionals assess customer pain points, solution fit, and the prospect's willingness to engage in discussions using various techniques from the books mentioned. The goal is to ensure that the opportunity is worth pursuing before investing further resources. Don't waste your time. Better to be last than #2. Walk away professionally.

Decide whether to participate. Assess prospect's pain points, solution fit, and willingness to engage in BANT (You can also use CHAMP, MEDDIC, MEDDPIC) and value hypothesis discussions.

Qualification Criteria

Qualify In (Next Stage Functional & Technical Discovery) (opens in a new tab)

• Prospect has a genuine need for your solution.
• Find a potential Coach on the client side
• There is a reasonable ROI (High-level calculation)
• Agreed on Mutual Evaluation Plan
• Prospect has the budget and authority to make a purchase decision

Qualify Out (Maybe move to Long-Term-Development) (opens in a new tab)

• no perfect client / industry fit
• competition
• no budget
• no authority
• no real timeline
• no need
• just checking the market

Do's and Don'ts

Do

• Start High (VP, SVP, CIO, CFO)
• Maintain a pipeline with five times your quota to ensure success.
• Respond to leads promptly, gather information during initial interactions, and determine lead potential.
• Ask Partners for referrals
• Never give up!

Don't

• Be generic.
• Waste time on low-potential leads or pressure leads into moving forward if they're not ready.
• Waste time with blind RFXs.
• Push prospects into the sales process prematurely.
• Neglect to update your Customer Relations Management (CRM) with Long-Term-Development (LTD) information.

Responsibilities & Tasks

Sales Development (SDR / BDR)

Share insights and information about the prospect to help the sales team better understand their needs and expectations.

Sales (ASD/SD)

• Collaborate with the sales team: Work closely with Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and account executives. Ensure a smooth handoff and maintain a consistent message throughout the sales process.
• Qualify leads quickly, and assess needs, budget, and authority. Use the BANT form for this exercise
• Get Qualification Criteria
• Spend / Inventory/ Current System/ Pain
• Check Salesforce for notes & historical opportunities for customer
• Create Opportunity Scoping Document (OSD)
• Executing Sales Discovery and adding notes to OSD
• Execute BANT assessment and qualify for Opportunity. Uncover potential objections and obstacles: Proactively identify any potential concerns or barriers that may hinder the sales process. Address these objections during the discovery stage and show how your solution overcomes them.
• Start with Mutual Evaluation Plan. Set clear next steps: Clearly communicate the next steps in the sales process with the prospect, including follow-up calls, meetings, product demos, or proposals. Ensure that both parties are aligned and committed to moving forward.
• Create or update Content Portal (Paperflite) and share content & videos
• For RFX organise a meeting to align participation

PreSales (SC) [only limited]

• Focus should be to enable Sales to run the first meeting without PreSales.
• Support sales by researching prospects and identifying their needs.
• Pre-recorded demo videos help reduce the involvement of SCs at an early stage and avoid making standard demos repeatedly.
• [Look & Feel Demo] only if needed. Be careful with making demos at an early stage. You don't know enough yet and may show things the prospect does not care about.
• [Qualification Support] only if needed. You can support the Sales team in a Qualification call if they lack the knowledge to ask the right questions.
• For RFX you should check the RFX document to understand whether we want to participate. You can use the OSD to summarise the findings, but you don't have to.

Additional Materials

Discovery

Basics

Sales Discovery (opens in a new tab)