As some of you may know I am one of the students in class that is on their final stretch of the course(Leslie Smith, Steven Ruiz, and myself) and I am working on my client project so after doing tons of research online I came to the conclusion that I need a very extensive questionnaire to properly determine whether or not a Potential Lead can become a Qualified prospect.
Overview: Stages of the sales funnel and how I use it
Lead (Suspect): A lead (also known as a suspect) is someone you have not spoken to. But if a lead appears similar in profile to your target customer, you may decide that they are worth pursuing. Track your most fruitful sources of leads (that is, leads that become customers).
What do Leads look like pertaining to my business? I consider users that have found themselves landing on my site to be potential leads because I feel that action shows the interest they have in my services
Prospect: A prospect has confirmed interest in your offering. You have had a conversation, provided the person with information about what you do, and both of you have agreed to a next step in the sales process.
How do I determine if someone is a Prospect?
I consider someone as a prospect when they have submitted their information through my contact form on my website.
Qualified prospect: Qualification is the most critical and demanding stage of the sales funnel. In the qualification process, you verify that the prospect has a need for your product, that the prospect sees value in your offering, that there is sufficient budget for a deal, that you have access to the decision-maker, and that there is an agreed-upon timeline for the sales process.
But how do you determine if they Qualify?
Once they submit the contact form I will email them my questionnaire to help me determine wether or not I want to take them on as a client.
So if they don’t qualify you will just turn them down?! Are you crazy? Why?!
Yes, no. I do so because if they prove to be ecstatic about getting a new website but have no plan that tells me they are not serious about the need or have no clue what they want.
But, but why? Why if you can just go speak with them, maybe they were just confused at the time, you can help them along the way, after all you do need the money!
TIME. There is no sense in me jumping at every chance I get to make a website for someone when it can equal to:
- Pointless hand-holding them through the process of the web design process.
- Practically help them develop a business plan for their company.
- Loss of better opportunities.
Committed: Ideally, you want to close the deal when all red flags have been dealt with. In reality, most deals close while critical red flags still exist. At this point, you have provided the customer with a proposal that outlines key contractual terms. When a customer has agreed to move forward with a deal, they are “committed” (also known as “verbal commitment” or “verbal”). What remains is to work out the details of the contract, delivery and payment, all of which have the potential to“undo” the commitment. The commitment may be offered contingent upon certain terms being met.
How do you know if they are committed?
If they qualify I would proceed to meet with the client to review the questionnaire, discuss what they want in terms of design, what they have, what they would have to deliver to me, what is expected for me to do, and they will leave with a quote.
After the meeting I will compose a proposal and email it to them along with an invoice.
And if they approve that is when I move on to creating a contract.
Transacted: A sale has transpired when a contract is signed by both parties.
After the contract I will give the client a checklist of what they have to provide for me to finish the site.
My Questionnaire
(the link to my questionnaire is now broken if you want to see it ask me to send it to you)
As you can see my qualification questionnaire plays a huge role in my sales process, I am very new to this and I do expect a lot of trial and error experimenting before I fully resolve my bottlenecks to make my process more efficient.
My purpose for writing this article is for you to start thinking about how you will tailor yours to meet your specific needs. To help you out I provided some links below to sample questionnaires.
Also I used Google Forms to compose my questionnaire and the nifty thing about it is that allows you to:
- Q&A, your way– Choose from a bunch of question options, from multiple choice to dropdowns to a linear scale. Add images and YouTube videos, or get fancy with page branching and question skip logic.
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Organized & analyzed- Responses to your surveys are neatly and automatically collected in Forms, with real time response info and charts. Or, take your data further by viewing it all in Sheets.
Before and during this section of this course I advise you to start thinking of how you plan on charging clients luckily I have a previous post somewhat related to that topic Click Here!!! to read How to Set a Value for Your Design Work.
Steven Sepulveda 