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Summary: Which is most valuable: customer, prospect or suspect? You may be surprised to find that non-prospects can be of value too.

In a salesperson’s world time is everything. Time directly translates to money. If you keep time in mind when evaluating your prospect pool you might find that non-prospects have more value than you think. Consider the hierarchy of prospects:

Qualified Prospect, good chance of becoming a customer.

Prospect, has potential but more information is necessary.

Suspect, looks like they might use our products and services.

Name, just a company name and nothing else.

What about non-prospects and where do they fit in? What about those companies that you absolutely know will never buy from you or your company? They might even be companies that you don’t want to sell for one reason or another. Where do you put them in the prospect hierarchy?

You put them right under Qualified Prospects. The reason for this has everything to do with time. Prospects, Suspects and Names will, by necessity, burn time and require resources. If you’re like most salespeople you will never be able to adequately cover all of the prospects that are available to you. When you can eliminate a prospect as a potential future customer then you are free to focus on your better prospects. The sooner you know they are a non-prospect, the sooner you stop wasting time on them. It’s as simple as that.

Every cold call is valuable. When you are prospecting you are either moving a prospect toward being a customer or you are eliminating them as a prospect. If you are looking for needles in a haystack and you can eliminate some of the straw, doesn’t that help eliminate some of the clutter and help you zero in on the needles?

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Tags: prospects

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