Posts by InsideSales Team

We’ve all heard of the “Curse of the Slow No,” or the “Slow No Death Spiral”—sales reps wasting time pursuing prospects that they ultimately never had a chance of closing.

Anyone who’s spent any time in sales has likely had a phone call that went something like this: “Oh, well, it looks like the CFO already sent a check to Vendor X, so, um . . . sorry?”

The problem inexperienced reps often have is that they got dumped long before the so-called “final decision”—they just didn’t recognize it.

Which got me thinking, “What is the real definition of a qualified prospect?”

A traditional definition might resemble something like, “A qualified prospect is someone who meets the minimum criteria for buying a product or service, and has expressed a minimum level of interest to do so.” Hardly earth-shattering, right?

But try this trick and see what happens: add the words “from us” to the end of the definition—”A qualified prospect is someone who meets the minimum criteria for buying a product or service, and has expressed a minimum level of interest to buy from us.”

The idea is that on the surface, a potential buyer may meet all of the boiler-plate . . . .