The Biblical Sales Force Part 8: Qualification

The Gospel reading on a recent Sunday Mass was from Matthew 15:28. A Gentile woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter. He initially denies her. She is outside his ideal “customer” profile. After she demonstrates the depth of her faith, he heals the girl.

She was not a marketing-qualified lead. She wanted what he offered, she had a compelling reason, and she refused to accept the early disqualification. She essentially qualified herself.

That story surfaces one of the most persistent problems inside sales organizations: the gap between a Marketing Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Lead. They are not the same thing.

The Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Salespeople follow up on MQLs and, when the conversation goes sideways (as it often does), they declare the lead was crap and never properly qualified.

BDRs frequently lean on BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing). I have been calling that practice out for years.

Read “Is BANT a Sales Process or a Man-Made Disaster?“

Read “Improper Use of BANT Will Kill Your Opportunities“

What salespeople almost never say is that a lead was too qualified. In other words, nobody tracks how many potentially good opportunities were killed early because a BDR was forced to apply BANT before a compelling reason even existed. Unless the decision maker is the first person you speak with, the elements of BANT are rarely present at the beginning. They only show up after the prospect has a real reason to change.

The Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) This is where the process gets ridiculous.

An opportunity can be disqualified fairly early if there is no compelling reason to buy. But an opportunity cannot be fully qualified until much later in the sales process. In a short sales cycle that later stage might occur in the first conversation. In a complex B2B sale it might not happen for weeks.

Look at the Baseline Selling diamond below.

The image is from the generic version of Baseline Selling where an opportunity is not fully qualified (“Qualified Opportunity”) until the final milestone on the way to 3rd base has been achieved. There is no such thing as an SQL in a process that actually works. As concepts go, SQLs are just as ridiculous as the BDR role in a sales organization.

Jesus had the right instinct when he first tried to disqualify the woman.

And that is exactly where most salespeople get it backward.

Effective salespeople actively try to disqualify their prospects while ineffective salespeople do very little qualifying at all and almost never attempt to disqualify.

Disqualifying sounds so simple but if it were that easy, every salesperson would already be doing it.

Most sales leaders and salespeople still treat qualifying as a single step to check off.

Not only is that untrue, it is conditional logic that only works when the sequence is respected:

• You cannot achieve a real financial qualification until you have monetized the problem.
• You cannot monetize the problem until you have uncovered a compelling reason to buy.
• You cannot uncover a compelling reason until you have asked the right questions in the right order.
• You cannot ask those questions effectively until you have demonstrated SOB Quality.
• You cannot demonstrate SOB Quality until the prospect has at least acknowledged a need or surface issue.

Everything else sits downstream of that first critical milestone—the compelling reason to buy.

That not only makes it the most important milestone in the entire sales process, but it is also the most difficult milestone for salespeople to achieve. It demands advanced listening and questioning skills that the majority of salespeople simply do not possess.

Those two skills change everything.

When you train and coach a sales team to consistently Build a Case (commonly called “Discovery”) between 1st and 2nd base, the revenue lift is significant. When that work happens inside a repeatable, sequential process like Baseline Selling, the lift becomes dramatic.

We have built our reputation on our ability to get sales teams following a strong sales process where sequence and compelling reasons drive revenue. We would be happy to speak with you about bringing that success to your sales team. You can reach us here.

Image: Grok Imagine