Why you cannot qualify a client over the phone

You cannot qualify a client from a distance, meaning you cannot really find out on the phone whether they are able to buy and want to buy. So the call is not there to save you the meeting. It is there to get you the meeting, because that is where real qualifying happens.

That runs against instinct. When time is short, it is tempting to work out in the first call, or with a form on your website, who is serious and who is not, so you can skip the pointless meetings. It looks efficient, and the source says it is exactly what does not work.

What qualifying is, and why it fails at a distance

Qualifying, in plain words, is finding out whether the person in front of you is able to buy from you, and whether they want to.

The sales book the booklet draws on puts this almost as a confession. In the source's words, it is accepted that reliable, practical qualifying simply cannot be done from afar, and that every customer still has to be qualified, because otherwise sales that could have happened are lost.

Put those two claims together and you get one conclusion. Qualifying is necessary, and it is impossible at a distance. So the job of the phone is not to spare you the meeting but to buy it, because only a face to face meeting lets you qualify properly.

Suppose a consultant who tries to qualify enquiries with an online form. The form does filter, just not the way she wanted. It weeds out people who dislike filling in forms, not the people who are wrong for her.

Now suppose the same consultant in a short twenty-minute meeting. She asks three questions face to face and gets a clear picture of who fits and who does not.

The difference between the two versions is not how many questions she asks. It is where they get asked. You could say the phone buys the room, and the qualifying happens inside it.

What poor qualifying costs you

The source does not leave this as a principle. According to the source, anyone who does not qualify skilfully will find that a large share of their deals end without a sale. By the time that happens, they have already put time and effort into trying to close someone who could never be closed, for one reason or another.

That explains a feeling plenty of owners know well: you are busy all the time, and sales are not going up. The workload is completely real, but it is mostly made of meetings that should never have happened in the first place.

So, by the booklet's reading, that feeling is almost always a sign of missing qualifying, not missing marketing. If you treat it as a marketing problem, you will look for the fix in the wrong place. If many of your meetings should not have happened, more enquiries will mostly bring you more meetings of the same kind.

Suppose a designer who meets everyone who gets in touch. His month is packed with meetings, few of them end in a deal, and he feels as if he never stops working.

Now suppose the same designer asks two questions on the phone before he books anyone in. He ends up with fewer meetings, more deals and fewer hours.

The practical conclusion in the source is short: “spend your time qualifying at the beginning,” before you get stuck somewhere you cannot leave without burning even more time.

So what can you find out on the phone

If full qualifying is impossible from afar, the phone is left with a smaller job, and it is enough: finding out whether there is any reason to meet at all.

The two are not the same. Full qualifying checks whether the person will buy, when and for how much. The phone check looks at one thing only, whether there is something here worth an hour of your day. In most cases two questions will do it.

Suppose you ask what made the person get in touch right now. The answer tells you whether there is a real need here or just curiosity.

Or you ask who else has a say in the decision. The answer tells you whether the person on the line is someone you can actually close with.

The opposite is asking what their budget is. It sounds like an efficient qualifying question, and in practice it makes most people shut down while still on the phone.

The difference between these questions is not the wording. The first two check whether there is a reason to meet. The last one tries to do full qualifying on the phone, which can only be done properly in the meeting.

The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to calculate and one to build, followed by a self-check. The booklet as a whole stands on two lines from its sources, and this is the first of them.

The next time you feel busy but not selling, before you add more advertising, ask whether the problem is how many people contact you, or how many of them should have reached a meeting at all.