A Sales Secret to Qualify Your Best Prospects

I want to share a simple but powerful sales strategy to help you quickly qualify—and just as importantly, disqualify—your ideal prospects. This is something they don’t teach in the insurance industry, but it is a strategy I started deploying earlier in my career that helped ensure I was talking to better prospects.

My Early Struggles with Prospecting

When I moved to Colorado eleven years ago, I thought every prospect was a good prospect. My mindset was: if I just throw enough against the wall, something will stick. But all that led to was frustration.

I kept myself busy with a full pipeline, but if I was honest, most of it was garbage. I was talking to people who had no real interest in working with me. They’d take my meetings out of politeness, but they weren’t serious.

The Cold-Calling Problem

The agency I worked for used a cold-calling service, and this only made the problem worse. Cold-callers are great at booking appointments, but those meetings are often with unqualified prospects. In many cases, the hardest part was just getting them to show up. And even when they did, the conversation often went nowhere.

I started testing a simple theory: I’d open the meeting with one question—“What intrigued you to take this meeting?”

Time and again, I got the same response:

“Honestly, I didn’t really want to. The caller just wouldn’t let me off the hook.”

Right then, I knew the meeting was dead before it even started. The prospect was defensive, arms crossed, not engaged. There was no real interest—just obligation.

The Shift: From Quantity to Quality

That’s when I made two big decisions:

1. I stopped using cold-calling services. Seven or eight out of every ten meetings went nowhere, wasting my time.
2. I focused on marketing that attracts quality prospects. I wanted to bring in the right people from the start.

But even with better marketing, I needed a better way to qualify leads in my first meeting. That’s when I developed the “Do You Believe What I Believe?” presentation—a simple framework to ensure I was talking to the right people.

The Mindset Shift

First, this strategy goes against what the insurance industry teaches. The old-school thinking says volume is everything—fill your pipeline with as many prospects as possible.

But I learned the hard way that quality beats quantity every time.

Would you rather have a massive pipeline where 75% of leads are worthless? Or a smaller, high-quality pipeline where nearly every conversation moves forward?

Second, stop trying to be all things to all people. Instead, sell your services as if they’re exclusive.

The 12 Gold Coins Approach

I learned this lesson from a peer in the industry who now works with some of the largest companies in America. When he was a sales director for a TPA, they knew exactly what type of employer was the right fit.

They also knew their capacity—they could only take on 12 new clients per year. So instead of chasing volume, he positioned those 12 spots like gold coins—highly valuable and limited.

Each year, he spent his time identifying which 12 companies were lucky enough to receive a gold coin. And guess what? By January, he had all 12 signed, spending the rest of the year carefully selecting next year’s prospects.

Your Takeaway

You probably don’t even need 12 wins this year. Maybe you need five, six, or even fewer to have an incredible year.

So why chase volume when you could be chasing quality?

Start treating your sales process as an interview, not a pitch. See if your prospects are the right fit for YOU. It’ll change your success trajectory—guaranteed.