Anyone who shows an interest in your company or your products can be considered a prospect. However, not all these potential customers will end up buying from you.
Qualifying your clients allows you to validate if they have a real interest in your products and services. The fact that the prospect is really interested does not necessarily mean that he is THE customer.
Going through different filters and learning about your prospects will help you qualify them and decide if you want to work on making them a customer. This process can sometimes be time consuming, but it will most certainly lead you to export success.
There are currently many ways to find your potential customers and the diversity of prospects is just as great. Therefore, you need to sort and select them. Qualifying your clients enables you to:
In short, customer qualification gives you the opportunity to be effective more quickly while cutting your marketing costs. It goes without saying that your sales team will have greater motivation to develop the market knowing that they are addressing the right people from the start!
CQI can help you develop your international business development strategy by starting with the qualification of potential customers. Here’s how we can help you:
Our team will initially work with you to determine the type of client you want to land based on various criteria such as: number of employees, sales, size of the company, etc. This important step in planning will help guide our research for the prospecting of clients. We will also determine the information you wish to get from these potential clients.
We will futher proceed with the prospection of potential clients using the pre-established criteria. To do this, CQI subscribes to various professional databases that provide access to detailed information for each business sector.
Once we have the list, we work with you to establish a few prospects to contact and rank them in order of importance, so we know which ones to start with. We then carry out in-depth research on the selected prospects to learn more about them, build our pitch and prepare the questions we want to ask.
When we call customers to qualify them, we will most likely have additional information to send them. It is important to have marketing tools presenting your company and product that are adapted to the clientele and the target market. This document must be sent quickly after the contact is made. CQI can also help you prepare these marketing tools ahead of the client qualification calls.
CQI will then proceed with telephone prospecting calls to validate the interest in your products and services. We have experts on our team who are fluent in English and Spanish to sound out your potential customers. We will provide you with a report presenting the follow-ups made, as well as a summary of our exchanges for each potential client reached.
Targeting the right potential customers when prospecting allows you to invest your resources and time wisely. Qualifying customers will allow you to perform more efficiently and increase your customers’ satisfaction, because you will have learned to know them better. However, having experienced personnel to handle prospection and customer qualification is sometimes difficult.
CQI’s team can certainly assist you in this most important step of your expansion project. With its Horizon 360TM Export Coaching Program, CQI can also support you at every step of your international expansion process, whether it be for your international business plan, your marketing strategy, customs compliance and more!