While both sales prospects and sales suspects express initial interest, prospects actively engage in dialogue and demonstrate a genuine desire to explore solutions, while suspects remain passive information gatherers who rarely convert into customers.
Primary Implication
Generating leads for your business is hard work. Determining if the lead represents a prospect or suspect is another challenge to overcome. It’s difficult because both prospects and suspects will look like your target customer. The problem to watch out for is suspects will act as prospects, yet they won’t buy from you.
Ensure your sales process includes methods for filtering out suspects from your leads so that your sales resources are invested in qualified prospects and not wasted on suspects.
Overview
In the beginning, each potential customer is either a prospect or suspect as they begin to consider your product or service.
A prospect is someone who responds to your reasons why they should become interested in you. If they are interested, they will begin to follow the “purchase decision funnel.” If you fail to create interest or they stop engaging with you, it’s because they don’t see reasons to consider your business further, and they return to being non-interested consumers. If they hold back for more information and continue to keep after you for more and more information, they are more than likely a “suspect.”
Suspects meet your target customer criteria and have indicated an interest in buying from your business. The challenge with suspects centers on how they start looking like prospects and never buy from you. Suspects take up your time, always expecting more information yet never acting on what you give them.
Like suspects, prospects also meet your target customer criteria. What’s different is that they have indicated more than a passing interest in what you have to offer, by entering into and then continuing in a dialogue with you to learn more about how you can help them is how you tell a prospect from a suspect.
Suspects will permit you to keep in touch with them, but they never become a serious prospect, one that you can convert into a customer. The problem with sales suspects is they don’t wear a sign that says, “Don’t waste your time on me.” On the contrary, they will behave in the same ways that a sales prospect will. As a result, you will waste time, money, and scarce resources trying to convince them to buy from you.
With suspects, it’s about finding out if they have any interest in what you have to offer, whereas with prospects, it’s about further developing and defining that interest as you work to turn them into customers.
Use your Customer Value Proposition to help prospects confirm themselves by having an interest in you and the value you create. If all they want to do is challenge the value you are trying to offer them, you have a suspect to move on from.