A brief history of sales opportunity qualification

The quality and accuracy of opportunity qualification is widely acknowledged to be a key predictor of future sales success – and a critical differentiator between the best salespeople and the rest.
Today’s top salespeople have too much respect for their own time to waste it on “opportunities” they have little or no chance of closing – while their less-effective colleagues often appear to hold on to dead or dying opportunities like a shipwrecked sailor clinging on to a piece of driftwood.
When we analyse relative sales performance, the benefits are obvious: the additional time and effort that top salespeople invest in qualification is more than repaid in terms, shorter sales cycles, greater average deal values and higher win rates.
Sales leaders that have implemented consistent opportunity qualification protocols see similar benefits across their entire sales organisation, together with dramatically improved forecast accuracy.
I’d like to share some experiences that I believe provide the basis for