The Five Power Disqualifiers of Sales with Perry Marshall

I recently had the honor of interviewing marketing legend Perry Marshall on my podcast, the Small Business Marketing Minute.  Perry is best known as being one of first people to crack the code on Google Adwords—he literally “wrote the book” on how to properly set up and run a Google Adwords campaign (The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords).  He’s also the author of the best-selling book 80/20 Sales and Marketing, which is widely considered one of the best marketing books of the decade.

The title of the book comes from the famous Pareto Principle, which states that for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.  What this means for sales and marketing, Perry says, is that 80% of your sales are going to come from 20% of your prospects—which makes it absolutely essential that you identify those people so you can focus your time and energy on them, instead wasting most of it on people who just aren’t going to be very valuable customers for you.

To that end, in his book he talks about what he calls the “Five Power Disqualifiers”—in other words, five ways to determine that someone is not your ideal customer.  In my interview with Perry, we reviewed the five power disqualifiers and discussed how local small business owners could use them to improve their sales process.

The five disqualifiers are:

• Do they have the money?
• Do they have a bleeding neck?
• Do they buy into your USP?
• Do they have the ability to say yes?
• Does what you sell fit in to their overall plans?

Use the player below to listen to my interview with Perry and learn how to use these disqualifiers to eliminate the 80% of prospects who aren’t going to buy from you so that you can focus on the 20% of prospects who could be your ideal customers.