If you desire to make more money and work less in you sales career, then it would be in your interest to invest time in learning how to properly qualify prospective customers. More than any other sales activity we perform, this separates the winners from the losers in sales.

The #1 reason most salespeople fail in my opinion is because they don’t have enough prospects to sell to. Because of this, many salespeople come to believe that every lead they receive is “gold”. When this viewpoint is taken, little or no qualifying of the prospect takes place by the salesperson.

This is ultimately a mistake, because the #2 reason that most salespeople fail is by not properly qualifying prospective customers. In other words, the salesperson fails because he or she wastes too much time on prospects that will never buy or even if they do become customers, they don’t have enough sales volume to warrant the salesperson’s time.

We can take sales training to improve our overall salesmanship. We can read sales books or blogs to increase our selling knowledge. But we cannot create more time. No man, alive or dead, has ever been able to completely eradicate the problem of having only so much time.

Never forget that your time is valuable. And never hand over the most precious asset you have in sales (your time) without ensuring you have the utmost opportunity (by qualifying your prospects) to get the financial reward you deserve. If you don’t have a qualification process based on your business and customers currently in place, you should immediately develop one and practice it on an ongoing basis as soon as possible.