If you are a sales training officer you have quite a bit on your mind to make sure that your salespeople follow the rules and do not do you into trouble or your company into trouble with government regulators. If you are a sales manager who also has the job of sales trainer then you know you must teach your salespeople to qualify each and every lead.

Many times your competitors will shop your company and ask many questions and before you get to into a long drawn out sales process and answer hundreds of hundreds of questions it makes sense to make sure the person you're talking to is a decision maker and actually is interested in your products or services.

There is nothing worse then going through the entire sales process and then having your potential customer or prospect tell you that he or she does not have the money to buy your product or service. It is even worse when they tell you;

Thank you for all the information we will keep about file,

As they were just getting the information for a decision maker who is above them in the company. This means all your hard work is now sitting in a file and may not ever be used by the decision maker and worse off you'll have to go through the entire sales process again with the decision maker who is higher up in the company. Consider all this in 2006.