1. Customer Relationship Management for Sales Implementation Guide
  2. Qualifications

Qualifications

To begin creating a script, you must first create qualifications. You use qualifications to classify the questions that you create later in the process. You can group questions according to any guidelines you choose. For example, you might choose to group questions according to product lines. Therefore, you must create a qualification for each product line. You can then create questions for each of the qualifications. When you enter a lead or opportunity, you can choose a qualification. Only the questions associated with that qualification appear for that lead or opportunity.

For example, if an organization sells mountain bikes, road bikes, and bike accessories, you might set up these qualifications:

  • Mountain Bike Sales

  • Road Bike Sales

  • Bike Accessory Sales

When you create a qualification, you enter lead and opportunity thresholds. Thresholds represent the scores that the lead or opportunity must meet or exceed to be qualified.

You would then create questions for each of the classifications, along with their associated answers. When a sales representative tries to sell mountain bikes, he or she can use the Mountain Bike Sales qualification to determine whether the lead or opportunity is qualified. The Mountain Bike Sales qualification would include all of the mountain bike-related questions and answers that were entered into the system.

Note:

It is not mandatory that the lead or opportunity meet the threshold value. The score will not prevent a lead from being converted to a customer, or an opportunity from becoming a sales order. The numbers serve only as a guide.

Additionally, once you associated a qualification with a lead or an opportunity, the qualification becomes read-only, and cannot be updated. Therefore, if you find that you must modify a script after it has been associated with a lead or opportunity, you can copy the existing script, make any necessary modifications to the newly-created script, and then mark the existing script as inactive. The inactive script will no longer be available to be attached to leads or opportunities.