Don’t let potential customers, clients and contacts waste your precious time with needless meetings and phone calls. Make sure they’re worth your effort by qualifying them first.
Time is your most valuable commodity. You will always 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, 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 time-saving 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?
Once you know the characteristics of your ideal clients, you’ll be able to recognise these traits better in potential clients. You’ll become more adept at spotting whether a new contact will be of value to you, and you’ll be able to design the right questions to ask to help confirm this.
Want more articles like this? Check out the business relationships section.
2. 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 to solve, 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.
3. 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.
Having an agenda will help keep you on time and on topic. It will also ensure that – even if a meeting or call doesn’t turn out to be what you thought it would – you’ll be better equipped to notice when it’s taking a turn, and identify any opportunities to sell alternate products or services in the moment.
4. Be slightly unavailable and/or require them to take some level of action
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 such as 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 to save time?
