Finding opportunities (whether it be jobs), or relationships or places to sell products is a super important part of life.
A lot of people that work for organisations may never have to figure this out.
In fact - ‘sales’ is a career in itself. But if you learn the principles of sales you’ll go way further.
This section covers intelligent qualification of opportuniites and provides explanations of what each is and why it works.
Designing an intelligent qualification system
Don’t assume everyone is a client.
Saying no to a potential client is often as important as winning a client.
This applies to sale but it also applies to life.
Think in the following ways:
How do you qualify value
- You need to have an opinion on what you’re looking for in any interaction.
- If you dont have some kind of criteria or set of principles you work to, your not going to get get very.
The second step is to write out what a good customer looks like:
- Sit down and frame out what your looking for in any relationship and write it down.
- If you know what your looking for, you can use AI or judgement to go looking for something similar.
- For example: You might want ‘budget consious clients’ or ‘student based opportunities’ or ‘premium buyer designcations’.
Try to be as specific as you can. The good and bad for what you’re looking for.
The next step is to then go and find the relationships your after. You may want to analyse behaviour and intent in doing this
You might send out communications to people (outreach) - and see how they behave in response to the messages you put out there. You could do this on the web, via email, via social media or in person. You’ll get a feel for how good interactions feel.
Then when your talking to them, watch how they behave and record that in detail. You want to create an evidence base of what works and what doesn’t.
Things you can look at is:
- How they react to interactions and the language they use
- Their willingness to meet or engage with the content
- What signals or barriers they throw up to a connection
- How long it takes for them to engage.
All are important indicators.
Then you want to understand what a successful sales process looks like, and the progressive steps you need to go through
Turn qualification into a natural conversation that builds trust and gathers data.
Think about how that can look in stages:
- What are the interactions you go through?
- What is the natural tempo of interactions.
- What are the key milestones / or gates you think you should measure
Once you know that even at the gut feel level, you can start to measure how interactions go
- Design your flow
- Document how each interaction goes
- Make adjustments over time to see what works and what doesn’t.
The reason im saying you should measure this is, if you figure out what works and what doesn’t, you can scale it in other modalities and predict what will work and what wont.
The idea is to then start predicting what a relationship will yield. E.g.
- If you have a conversation on a topic, you can start to predict whether the conversation will lead to something you want. And you’ll get to know the red flags that mostly lead to nothing.
- Then you can start to estimate, if I pursue this relationship what is the likely payback over time; and
- What is the end of the relationship likely to end like. Is it good? Is it bad? If it’s bad - why would you bother?
You should try to systematise this, even rudimentarily so you can quality your interactions and figuring out where to play and where not to play.
You can then cluster and segment your prospects and decide where to make the investment in time. Then you want to qualify things.
This isn’t really a tech system - but you may want to create a methodology to measure this. It could be a spreadsheet. It could be a database in Notion. Or it could be a CRM - thats far more scaled. You could also look at marketing automation capabilities - who are you emailing and when and with what? If you have a lot of clients you want to start tracking the interactions.
You may even want to get yourself a sales enablement app too, so you can monitor your interactions. What you measure you can improve.
Qualification as a concept is super important
Getting a feel for valuable interactions as qualified leads is a smart way to think about life - but make sure the focus isn’t just about TAKING from the world. Give some back to. The more you give back - the more positive connections you’ll make as well - and that has a kind of reversal value set as well.
The key point here is - not all relationships are of value - and you can spend a LOT of time figuring that out. Take the time to think that through - and do is systemmatically so when you break the code - you can scale it to even more value.
You cant improve what you don’t measure - so even starting small its good to get into the right practice of keeping data on your interactions. Then when you scale, you can hand things off to others easily.