Decision Process: questions to ask your prospect
Prospect qualifying questions for Decision Process, from no visibility of how a decision will be made to visibility and control of the process.
Grey: moving to yellow
Status: No visibility of how a decision will be made
Guiding light principle: Visibility. You may have some idea about next steps or budget, but until you are able to list out, in detail, the approval process and validation steps, you are still at grey.
- Tell me how you go about making these kinds of purchase decisions.
- Explain to me: if we were to do business together, say next year, what would have to happen?
- Describe to me how you have proceeded with similar evaluations in the past.
Yellow: moving to green
Status: Visibility of the decision process, but it is not in our control/influence
Guiding light principle: Influence. Both elements of the decision process, approval and validation, need to be documented and mutually agreed upon with your prospect. Evidence exists that the customer is also committing time and resources to this process. For example, are they willing to begin reviewing the license agreement/legally binding documents, or to set you up as an approved vendor with procurement?
There should also be a timeline showing the dates for key activities. You must negotiate this timeline so that the approval (paperwork) process does not follow validation; rather, these two processes should be done in parallel.
- Tell me when you have negotiated a timeline that includes elements of both a validation and an approval process.
- Explain to me how these processes can be run in parallel.
- Describe to me who needs to be involved and how we get and keep them involved.
Green
Status: Dominance. Visibility and control/influence of the process
Guiding light principle: Dominance. You’ve applied all the sales rigor associated with DP = yellow, and you’ve influenced the validation process to highlight our differentiators, minimize our weaknesses, expose our competitor’s weaknesses and minimize their strengths.
- Tell me how we are doing.
- Explain to me: if you had to make the decision right now, who would win and why?
- Describe to me our position relative to:
- the competition,
- you doing it on your own, or
- no decision?
Go deeper on Decision Process
The route to a decision: technical, the route to money and the route to paper.