Sales prospecting process turns your target market into a customer sale. Breaking down the process into 5 stages can help you notice areas of improvement and figure out ways to increase sales, and make your work more efficient and effective.

The first three stages of sales prospecting are the ideal customer profile, suspects, and prospects. These three stages are essential to determining who you want to target, which of your suspects fit into this target, and interacting with them to verify that they match with your ideals. Although these first three steps are vital, they pose a problem when it comes to sales prospecting as a whole. Companies tend to spend about 75% of their time on these three stages, none of which directly generate revenue. To more effectively turn your prospects into customers, you need to focus on the last two stages of prospecting in sales.

The last two stages are the qualified prospect and customer. Qualified prospects are those who have the budget, authority, need, and timing. These individuals will eventually complete the sales process, become your customers and boost profits for your business. These last two stages are key to generating revenue and therefore need to be emphasized. It may seem difficult to change your strategy after relying so heavily on the first three stages, but a great solution can make the process easier. It can be done by partly automating the first three stages of sales prospecting and putting in place a well-structured sales process. This not only brings speed to the sales process and makes it cost-effective but the sales team’s time is intelligently apportioned to bring more closure.

Intelliverse can remove the burden of the first three stages so you can emphasize the qualified prospect and customer stages and therefore more efficiently increase your profits. Intelliverse Managed Solutions and sales prospecting tools can streamline the qualification process by providing more qualified prospects you can quickly turn into customers. Their efficient and effective technology is what ultimately results in a better, faster, and cheaper process of prospecting in sales.

5 Stages of Sales Prospecting