Sales Prospect Spreadsheet

Use this Prospect Fit matrix to help you pinpoint your best sales leads & ops.

It is a straightforward but provocative issue that becomes a recurring dialog internally when salespeople judge whether the potential customer they are talking to is the right salesperson or not. Has your management buy in? Considering so much, the decision to go forward with a potential customer who doesn't suit well has the capability to devastate your business deeply, far beyond the salesroom.

The IMPACT sales force has dealt with these issues on a daily basis and will do so again. So we knew that we had to develop a toolset that would help us find the "no", "maybe" and "best" perspectives for our company. Throughout the years we have learnt a TON (the tough way) as one of these evolving organisations, but perhaps one of the greatest is to understand the quest for a poorly fitting perspective, and engaging them as customers can be as harmful (or worse) for an organisation as making a choice about recruiting a low lyner.

Are here just a few of the things that can happen when sales Reeves opt to move forward that may not be a good fit in the long run: Since sales representatives tend to feel that a potential customer may not be a good match, they can request additional meeting outside the sales cycle.

That means you call in a sales manager (to get the green light or not) and potentially pull off service from other customers for inputs. The end outcome is a much more expensive sales transaction which, when multipleplied by many businesses, has a dramatically negative impact on the position of the " costs of sales " in a profit and loss statement.

We assume in this case that a potential customer who has his headquarters outside your traditional services area has gone through the entire sales cycle and become a customer. Assume your time zone is exactly 12 hrs ahead of your own and demands that several members of your organization's teams hold either 6 a.m. or 8 p.m. gatherings to receive the customer.

For both of the above mentioned sceneries (and we have both seen them) the end outcome is higher selling costs, lower sales and a potentially less prolific sales people. Until recently, the perfect or most suitable criterions of IMPACT were living in the minds of me and some others who have been long-term adopters of IMPACT.

As our sales force grew, however, it was important that we followed these benchmarks so that we could prevent scenarios 1 or 2 or 37. Prospect Fit Matrix is our company's fully digitized guideline for pinpointing the lead(s) we should work with and working together to achieve the best possible result for IMPACT and client.

Hint: You can get your free adaptable copy of this matrices here! What is nice about this model is that it can be adapted to any sales processes or eligibility criterion. This is because many companies provide several different types of service, each of which can have different qualifications in terms of budgeting, timings, etc.

First of all, the "deal stages" of the sales processes must be defined, then the "criteria" that are to be assessed within a certain transaction phase. Using this tool, check and modify the search criterias you use when assessing which potential customers you should work with, and modify at what point in the sales cycle you search for it.

These last three pillars show the "Fit Level" of the potential customer. Lastly, it should be noted that under the header "No" there is a reminder that the potential customer does not meet certain criterias within a particular channel, but does not mean that they are badly suited for other channels you are offering.

Prospect Fit Matrix is engineered to be used before and during every phase of the sales cycle - from initial interview to final pitch. Knowing how it is set up, here are two instances of how it could be used to evaluate the profitability of a potential customer or sales chance.

Companies with a sound sales force that want to be more proactive in their sales calls (outbound approach) may consider assigning a significant number of Business Development Representatives (BDRs) times to search these leads and find the right individuals to get in touch with. For this particular example, the matrix suggests that you use a utility like HubSpot to gather and save leads for every single person.

At this point, under the headline "Deal Stage" (or "Stage" if you want to involve pre-sales activities), you can use the word "Identify" to denote the part of the business that relates to data base prospection and summarize a set of qualification metrics used in the evaluation of the leads that have transformed on your site.

The next right hand columns ("Criteria") lists the things you know when they meet the "Best" or "Maybe" columns that give you the highest returns for your range. Those criterias may include: Using the above mentioned basic qualification criterions and description (as an example), a BDR can quickly quarantine a fistful of contact from a roster of thousand and drastically increase the ROI.

Many times, sellers may not have the necessary leadership intellect to incapacitate an occasion before they begin a discussion with them (Think: a friend of the organisation who refers a lead). Others may have enough opportunities to believe that they are deserving of the talk, but they are not sure that they are well suited to carry on.

The Prospect Fit Matrixcan can be used in both cases during your calls (perhaps opened on a second monitor) to proactively verify that the potential customer you are talking to is ticking the box in the Fit Level column. It gives you the opportunity to remain organised during your call to ensure that you meet the must-have requirements before taking the potential customer to the next phase of the lifecycle.

A further advantage of this is that it improves the seller's communication skills. Knowing the results (the set of metrics ), they can concentrate on the formulation of core issues and make the discussion more natural. Finally, they become more effective by combining several issues into one in order to have the prospect of opening up to certain specific yardsticks.

Hopefully this paper has been useful in helping you identify how important it is to capture the qualification that will make a potential customer or sales chance a "best fit" for your business, and how you can start to scale that understanding with the remainder of your group. Click here to start downloading the FREE Prospect Fitting Matrix template.