When trying to grow your business, a large portion of your time is spent chasing down leads and attempting to convert conversations to sales. If you don’t properly qualify your prospects before you begin the sales process, you may waste your energy on the wrong type of prospect.

Qualifying your current book of business and creating profiles will help you maximize your sales process and ensure you are targeting the right type of business for your future efforts. This single step can not only save you tremendous amounts of time, but it will also ensure your return on investment from each prospect is healthy.

Just how do you qualify a sales lead?

First, you need to identify your current customer base by creating profiles for each client. This will help you quantify what constitutes a “good” prospect for your company. These profiles should include how you initially made contact with the client (warm lead or cold call), company characteristics, how the sales process worked for each one and how much interaction you’ve had with them since that initial sale. You can also include personality information on each client, as well as anything special you had to do to make that sale.

Once you have your existing clients profiled, you can begin creating profiles for all of your new prospects. You’ll already have an idea of what type of prospect works best for your sales approach and this will help you drill down to the prospects that will be most likely to buy your products or services.

Whenever you get a new lead, that initial conversation should be geared towards discovery of their needs, what they plan to do to meet those needs and what your role in this process will be. This information is vital towards creating their individual profile and will help you create an individualized strategy for each new prospect.

While every prospect is different and will have different needs, once you have your profiles done, you’ll have a better idea of which type of prospect will be most likely to buy. You’ll streamline your process and be able to focus on your sales conversions, instead of chasing after leads that are unlikely to pan out.