Appropriate Questions for Ideal Prospects

How do you know who to talk to to make money today?

For the sake of context, let's say you have 100 people who want to speak with you. Maybe they've messaged you on messenger, or replied to one of your emails. One way or another they've all indicated an interest in talking to you.

BUT

You only have time to have valuable and useful conversations with 10 of those people.

How do you decide who to speak with?

This - in essence - is the quandary of any business that generates leads and must spend time with those leads to sell to them. You don't want to just speak with anyone who walks through the door, you want to speak with the right people.

As much as your messaging does work to dog whistle those best people and bring them in, there's still another layer of qualification.

For those people,

We want to ask our qualifying questions.

BUT

We also want to make sure those questions are appropriate for those prospects, while still getting us the information we need.

Let's explore some appropriate and inappropriate situations for a few different types of questions. One of the most common qualifying questions or categories that people use is financial based. If you're selling a product or service which requires a certain level of income or investment capability for the expense to make sense, you'll be trying to qualify people at or above that level.

But it doesn't always work to just ask "hey what's your income?"

If you sell business coaching, if you do cashflow type stuff, if you are selling crypto investment coaching --- it's appropriate to ask "what is your revenue/profit/income?" We want to know that because we want to qualify if they can afford our services. It's an appropriate question given the context because for them, the kind of help they get will depend on the resources they have. *It makes sense to them to have to share that information.*

If you are selling energy healing, fat loss, yoga, etc, it's *not* appropriate to ask them how much money they make. Even though *we want to know this information* so we can qualify them, it's not an appropriate question because what we are helping them with has nothing to do with their income. Asking them about their income is only going to make them think you're just trying to scam them, or are only interested in their money.

We need to come up with a good question that will help us discern how much money they make if that is a qualifying necessity for whatever you are selling.

To figure this out,

We have to ask ourselves:

What makes a good fit?

Maybe you sell a fat loss program, but its built for people who are busier executive types (who likely have a lot of money) ... so we need to figure out questions which tell us whether they fit in the demographic we are going after.

Those questions could be ...

what have you done (fitness wise)?

do you travel a lot?

what is the nature of your work (do you sit down a lot, move, etc -- relevant questions, can reveal their level of employment)

Its great if they can just say "I'm the CEO of a fortune 500 company so I'm very busy" - so we can qualify them financially with appropriate questions.

Coming up with your list of questions.

First, start off with exactly what you want to know about your prospect to determine if they are a good fit now.

That might include ...

• how much money they make

• how much time they have

• their relative level of experience

• their age

• their gender

• where they live

• their marital status

etc

The point is to be direct in this first part because ...

Second, you're going to take your list of direct questions, consider your ideal prospect's state of mind, and walk through each of them to ask yourself ... is this an appropriate question. If not, then for each of those inappropriate questions, come up with as many ways as you can think of to discern the answer you need without asking the question (what is the nature of your work?)

Is it appropriate for me to ask my prospect how much money they make? Is it appropriate for me to ask them if they are married? Is it appropriate for me to ask them how they spend their time and money on hobbies?

The direct questions might be fine.

But if they are not appropriate, you need to come up with a different question which naturally fits in to the conversation and which allows you to infer the information.

Ask them about who they are, what they do, what they've done. Think about the tools they use or may have used.

Don't ask them anything that requires a lot of education on your market/industry/service/product, unless you really really really only want to speak with people who come to you with that level of education to begin with.

(But be real with yourself about whether that specific educated knowledge is necessary in your ideal prospect - for most people this is not the case)

It does not HAVE to be financial, but we must discern how to allocate our resources ... so if you can find a way to filter for the people who can afford your services now, that may be a much better allocation of your resources in the short term.

Maybe it's financial. Maybe it's hobbies. Maybe it's their work, or their family situation.

What are the defining characteristics that you believe must be true in order for them to work with you today?

Let's say I want to talk only with people who are married and have 2 or more kids. What questions can I ask which would reveal whether or not they are married and have kids?

It might be fine to ask "are you married, do you have kids?" If you're explicitly directly helping people who are married and have children, that's an obvious and appropriate question.

What you are doing might not specifically have to do with their marital and kid status, but you may have observed that all of your best clients are in that position, so that has become one of your qualifiers. What can you ask? Is it appropriate to ask "what do you love to do with your free time?" Because the right person may be inclined to answer "spend time with my wife and kids."

Here are two different angles to approach figuring out these questions:

You're probably going to find that for specific questions you want to ask, your ideal prospect/customer is going to answer those questions in a specific way. So you can ask yourself,

How would my ideal prospect answer this question?

OR,

What question can I ask which would have my ideal prospect answering this specific way?

This is just one small part of the set of skills detailed in The Cash Now Blitz, where Nic Peterson and Laurel Portié walked through key Cash Now Campaigns for getting quick results from your audience now.

Identifying the right people to speak with is a key skill.

If you'd like to learn more and dive into the rest of The Cash Now Blitz skillset - check it out below (available to MBD+ subscribers):

Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.

Joseph Robertson, CMO Man Bites Dog

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