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Five More Questions to Help Define Your Ideal Sales Prospect

Sales Prospect

The best way to be successful in your sales process is to start with ideal sales prospects. This alleviates a lot of wasted time and expense on selling to people who are not your best prospects. When you focus on finding your best customers, you will have more opportunities to sell and to create long-term customers for your brand.

There are eight key questions that you want to ask in order to clearly define the ideal sales prospects for your brand.

Last week, we looked at the Top 3 Keys to Identifying Your Ideal Prospect

From there, you can go on to answer these final five questions to help create a clear picture of who you need to focus on when you begin prospecting for your best potential customers.

1. Why does our customer make a purchase?

Look at each product that you offer. Why does your customer want to buy it? How will it benefit them? Break those benefits down into tangible and intangible.

Tangible benefits are those that can be seen and felt. For example, if they are purchasing a new TV, then a tangible benefit would be the sharper picture, the ease-of-use, the Smart features, or the sound quality.

An intangible benefit is the real reason the customer decides to buy from you instead of someone else. These tend to be more emotional reasons: status, pride, security, respect. These are the benefits that make your customer feel great about the item that they purchased from you.

2. Why will our customer not make a purchase?

What obstacles are standing between your customer and the decision to buy? Each customer is different, so it is up to you to find out what is keeping them from saying yes. Are they concerned about quality? Is the price out of their range? Do they feel that the benefits are not valuable to them? Ask questions to get an idea of how you can overcome objections and move them forward to a purchasing decision.

3. Where can we find our prospects?

This can be physical location or online. When you want to reach your prospects with advertising materials such as sales letters or flyers, then you will need to know the physical address of where to send those materials. If your customers are online, you want to get email addresses or find out what social networks they spend the most time on so you can create ad campaigns that will reach them.

4. When do our customers make a purchase?

This question can be about a specific time frame, like making seasonal purchases, waiting for tax refunds, at the start or end of a year or quarter; or
it can be a question of waiting to see if your product has been tried out by other people and they were satisfied. Know when your best prospects are shopping for your products and be ready to look for them when they are more likely to make a purchase.

5. Who is our competitor?

In almost every industry, there is competition. Look at who your top competitors are. What are they offering to their customers? What persuades a prospect to choose a competing brand over yours? Be honest about what the pros and cons are of what your competitor offers and decide what changes you can make to get more prospects saying yes to you instead of going somewhere else.

As an entrepreneur, your job is to show potential customers how they can benefit from your products. You want it to be clear that yours is the superior product and that they should look to you to meet their needs instead of a competing company.

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