Feeding your competitors poison

“I like to feed my competitors a steady diet of poison” is one of our all time favorite quotes from one of our members in the label printing space.  The quote became very relevant during our current research project for a prospect qualification tool for members.  Our research has shown that members that have adopted a process for qualifying their prospect and even re-qualifying their customers were in the top quartile of profitability for all print service providers. 

More interesting was the fact that the prospect qualification tool was more useful in finding out which jobs to take on instead of trying to figure out which jobs would close. What that means is that the most profitable companies were first and foremost using to tool to optimize the time of their customer service and manufacturing and secondarily the time of the sales force.  Saying no to bad prospects and customers and sending this “poison” to your competitors was a sure way to win in the marketplace.

As we continue to do more research in this area, we would love to hear from you. It would be good to hear what type of questions you ask that helps you qualify your prospects?