Effective Cold Calling Questions to Qualify
Sales Appointments

The 4 Stages of a Sales Appointment Call Structure 

Qualify Sales Prospects Using Effective Cold Calling Techniques 

Your objective at this Questioning Stage of the call is to discover if the prospect you’re talking to could buy from you and is therefore worth your time meeting. The Important word here is: Could.

Qualifying a prospect on a sales appointment call has nothing to do with whether or not they will buy from you. The objective is to Qualify the prospect as someone that could buy from you. Effective cold calling for sales appointments includes questioning to see which prospects could become customers. 

You qualify prospects in stage 3 of your appointment call and only move to stage 4, where you gain agreement to a meeting, with people that can actually buy from you. By doing this you are only using your valuable selling time on sales appointments where you can close the sale. 

Define a Qualified Sales Prospect

Now clearly define the criteria for your prospects to discover if they are potential customers. 

Before you can write you effective cold calling questions to qualify prospects on your sales appointment calls, you will need to define the criteria that a prospect must meet to make them a potential customer.  What does a prospect need to have or do to be able buy from you? 

This list will vary depending upon what you sell and it could include:

• Credit scores, financial criteria, or payment related information.
• Geographical location, home owner. physical ability.
• Personal details, age, health, nationality, employment, or family status.
• A specific need for a product or process, minimum order size.
• Number of people at address, or number of employees in a business.

Whatever the definite, must have, requirements are, they need to be noted down on a list. Only list what a prospect must have, not what it would be nice for them to have. Not having one of the features on the list should disqualify the prospect as a potential customer and you should politely end the call without agreeing an appointment.

Create Your Effective Cold Calling Script of Qualifying Questions

When you’ve created your list of qualifying criteria the next step is to turn it into a list of effective cold call questions.

If you have several questions on the same topic you can group them together. This makes for a more conversational style of asking, rather than reeling off lots of short closed questions demanding yes or no answers. 

Work on the wording for any questions that may be sensitive, for example questions on financial matters, health, or family status. These may need phrasing tactfully. 

The list should be kept to a minimum as there is only so much time a prospect will give you on the phone. In the earlier Introduction Stage you used benefits in your reason for calling and again in Stage 2, the Motivator. A good sales tip is: The stronger the benefits you used in the earlier stages the more time the prospect will give you now because they can see the potential advantages for them.

Now check your questions

Will the questions give you all the information you need to qualify the prospects as someone you want to meet with? Are there any questions not absolutely necessary to qualify the prospect? Make this stage of the call as brief as possible. You only need to ask questions related to qualifying prospects as people you want to meet with. You don’t want to get dragged into a sales pitch on the phone, unless that benefits you. 

Once you’ve asked your sales appointment questions it should be easy to decide if the prospect qualifies as someone that you want to meet with. If they don’t, politely thank them for their time. If they do qualify move smoothly on to Stage 4: Gaining Agreement

The Stages of a Sales Appointment Call

Learn How to Make Sales Appointments 

A Quick Way to Create Effective Cold Calling Appointment Scripts

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