Good qualification is critical for salespeople to avoid wasting time and to focus their energy on higher potential prospects.

You can find solid guidelines for qualification criteria in many good sales books; and SalesBlogger colleague Colin Wilson has some excellent free resources to help with qualification on his Entrepreneurial Salesperson website.

But there’s a dirty little secret about qualification I’m going to share with you.

It’s a tip geared at professionals (consultants, lawyers, accountants) and other non-salespeople who have to sell.

It’s one you won’t hear anywhere else – so shhhh – don’t spread it around.

If you want to get better at qualification – the most important thing you can do is: get a better pipeline.

You see the idea behind qualification is great. Weed out low probability and low value opportunities and prospects so that you can focus your precious time on the higher potential ones.

The problem is that most professionals and other non-salespeople hate lead generation (cold calling, networking, and initial meetings) so much that they actively avoid it – or at best do it very badly. As a result, their pipelines are often so weak, they don’t have any high potential opportunties in them.

Qualification then becomes a charade – one I’ve seen played out many, many times in professional firms. The consultant, accountant or lawyer inflates the assesment of their opportunities so as not to look so bad. To avoid embarassment, they force-fit them to the qualification criteria – knowing full well that the vast majority of them aren’t really worth pursuing. But once they’ve declared publicly how great the opportunities are, and how they meet the qualification criteria; they are forced to chase them – despite knowing in their heart of hearts that it’s just a waste of time.

So what’s the best way of improving opportunity qualification?

In most cases, I’ve found that for professional firms, they key is not to redo the qualification criteria, nor to order professionals to “get tougher” in the way they qualify. The first step is to boost their capabilities and motiviation in lead generation. It’s only when lead generation is working well, and they have a strong pool of opportunities entering the funnel that qualification then becomes a valuable and effective tool.