The famous opening phrase of Act 3, Scene 1 from William Shakespeare’s classical play Hamlet is: “To be, or not to be?”.  In the speech that follows, Prince Hamlet complains about the sufferings and injustices of life, but he also understands that the alternative might be worse.

Salespeople in their everyday life, thankfully, are not faced with such critical dilemmas, but still, whenever a new sales opportunity comes in their way, they should be asking themselves the following question: “To sell, or not to sell?”.  The answer may seem to be obvious, but is it actually that obvious? 

According to the book “Let’s get real or let’s not play”, by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig, 65% of salespeople are pursuing worthless deals and 80% of lost sales opportunities are a result of inadequate or non-existent qualification process.  To my view, a sales opportunity needs to be qualified, so as to ensure that it’s worth pursuing and qualification can start with this simple question.

Rather than focusing on quantity, which is the most common approach, we need to focus on quality.  We must set a qualification/disqualification process based on clearly defined criteria that are fully aligned with the go-to-market strategy of our organisation.  And this must be made in such a way that if the opportunity is going to proceed further or not, will be a common decision with the customer, as qualification is, after all, a process of mutual exploration.

This is most crucial especially in B2B selling where the sales cycles can be very long, and we may end up going all the way, only to find out that we should have not been competing in the first place.  And if this is the case most of the times, then the salesperson might end up having the same dilemma with Prince Hamlet!