Every so often, it’s good to clean up your database of potential customers, so that you remove the pseudo-opportunities and focus only on the real ones.
Where ‘real’ means:
Those people who actually are a good candidate, aka a qualified prospect.
But how do you do that – how do you know which opportunities to get rid of?
Problem is, we all want to tell ourselves that because of this thing, or that thing, or a problem you can solve or a need they have, this particular prospect is qualified, and we should engage and pursue the opportunity.
But then you build yourself a story about something that doesn’t have anything to do with reality.
You end up inventing arguments that you believe qualify a prospect, and you ignore the reasons why they are not qualified.
And this is exactly how you end up with a pipeline full of stuck and stagnant deals.
It’s a big reason why you end up getting ghosted, too: you were simply chasing deals that shouldn’t happen.
So what you do instead, is you start with no.
You look for the reasons why no: reasons why someone is not qualified to work with you.
Enter: the no-list.
This is a handy little checklist of things that you don’t want in your life or business.
Some entries from my list:
- People who treat my time with disrespect: no.
- People who haggle: no.
- People who constantly want to increase the scope of work (the dreaded scope-creep): no.
- People who try to tell me how I should do the work that they pay me to do: no.
- People who argue, don’t want to be coached, who say “yes but!” instead of “Ok, how?”: Nope.
These are the disqualifiers I look for – and there’s a bunch more, too much to go into here.
But whenever I see someone do or say things that are on my no-list, they are automatically disqualified.
I remove them from my database, and I no longer waste my time, or theirs, on trying to make anything happen.
Nice and easy.
Not that disqualifying a person is a value-judgment, mind you – nothing wrong with that person, nothing against them as an individual – it’s just that working together is not going to work out, so there’s no point in engaging with them.
I can’t tell you how much of a difference it’s made to my efficiency, well-being, effectiveness, business results, enrollment rate, revenue…
Just by stopping to think about, and list, the things that shouldn’t be in my life or my business.
So what about you?
What’s on your no-list?
More importantly:
What is not on your no-list, but really it should be there?
And:
Which deals are in your pipeline, that shouldn’t be if you pass them through the filter of your no-list?
