Table of Contents
Lead qualification is the process of determining what leads will be qualified for a particular sales campaign or marketing program. Companies use lead qualification to make sure that only highly interested customers are contacted, which increases conversion rates and improves overall results.
Lead qualification is a process in which sales representatives identify the best leads for potential customers. This helps them to find the best fit for their company and its needs. The lead qualification process can be done manually or with a tool that automatically evaluates leads. Read more in detail here: what is lead qualification in salesforce.
Lead qualifying allows you to focus your sales efforts on the leads that are most likely to convert. It is accomplished by creating qualifying criteria for scoring leads and then allocating top prospects appropriately. This results in a more effective sales operation and a higher conversion rate of leads to customers. We’ll go through the definition of lead qualifying in further detail, discuss how to qualify leads, and give a template to get you started.
Template for Lead Qualification
Part of a sales manager’s responsibility is to ensure that your sales staff has the tools and resources they need to accomplish their tasks well. We’ve produced a lead qualifying checklist and spreadsheet that you can download for free. Use this information to figure out their purchasing power, suitability for your product or service, and interest in your firm.
Thank you for your interest in downloading!
Your Template for Lead Qualification is on the way!
Quick Tip: If you’re looking for a unique way to express yourself, try
To help you score and organize eligible leads, use customer relationship management (CRM) software. To simplify your sales activity, Zoho CRM can automate your lead scoring process. Create a free account right now.
Go to the Zoho CRM website.
What Is Lead Qualification and How Does It Work?
The process of discovering and arranging prospective clients who are best suited for your goods or services and are most likely to make a purchase is known as lead qualifying. The goal is to direct sales efforts toward relevant prospects that are more likely to result in a closed agreement. Prospects are also classified depending on where they are in the customer journey as part of the lead qualifying process.
The majority of sales processes begin with unqualified leads. These are potential customers that may be a good match for your products or services but have yet to engage with your company. It is the responsibility of marketing or the sales team to entice unqualified leads to perform an action that signals a desire to learn more about your company. The kind of qualified lead a lead is will be determined by the activity they do. Qualified leads are divided into three categories. The following are the categories:
- A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead who has demonstrated interest in a marketing campaign by downloading an e-book, signing up for a newsletter, or clicking on an email link.
- A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a lead who has shown interest in a product or service by communicating with a sales professional, such as by emailing for price information or consenting to a sales presentation.
- PQL (qualified lead) for a product (or service): A lead who has shown interest by downloading a free version of a product, signing up for a free trial, or attending a free consultation.
In Five Easy Steps, You Can Qualify Leads
If you have a good idea of what lead qualifying entails and you know the characteristics and actions that suggest a good opportunity, the procedure isn’t difficult. We propose utilizing customer relationship management (CRM) software to automate some of these procedures and arrange lead data appropriately for many of these phases. In five simple stages, here’s how you qualify a lead:
1. Establish criteria for determining whether or not a person is qualified to be a lead
For analyzing and finding leads, lead qualification involves two key components. The first is to see whether the lead is a good match for what you’re selling, and the second is to see how interested they are in what you have to offer. Start with the BANT technique, which considers four variables in a purchase decision when evaluating a prospect’s “fit” and defining criteria:
- Budget: The lead’s financial ability to make a purchase depending on his or her financial limits and desire to spend.
- A lead’s position or power to make a buying decision or the capacity to close a sale is referred to as authority.
- Need: Your product or service must be useful to the lead’s desires and alleviate their pain points.
- Timeline: The hurry with which a lead is anticipated to make a transaction.
Use a CRM to automate your lead scoring and ranking processes for sales priority. Lead scoring criteria, for example, may be configured in Zoho CRM as points allocated for a lead’s qualities and behaviors. It then assigns points to each chance and ranks them on a list of clients who are most likely to make a purchase shortly. This eliminates the need to manually monitor lead scores while also keeping your sales personnel informed.
Lead scoring in Zoho CRM (Source: Zoho)
2. Obtain Leads
Because you need to attract prospective customers before you can select the best ones, lead generation is a vital step in lead qualifying. Once you’ve decided what qualities to search for in a lead, you may utilize both inbound and outbound techniques to get the job done. Inbound approaches include things like producing content for online form submissions, asking for referrals, and running social media advertising to entice prospects to come to you.
On the other hand, outbound tactics concentrate on actively seeking out prospective customers and personally communicating with them via sales activities. Outbound lead generation includes things like cold phoning, making email introductions, and meeting decision-makers at networking events and trade exhibits. You may go down the sales funnel to lead qualifying after leads have been created.
CRMs are great for process automation, particularly when it comes to lead creation. For example, HubSpot allows you to create workflow processes in which a lead completes an activity such as sending an email or filling out a web form, and the CRM records their information as a lead in the database system. They may then be instantly added to a nurturing email list, and sales people can contact them directly.
HubSpot automates processes (Source: HubSpot)
3. Score & Categorize Leads
As leads begin to stream in, start scoring and categorizing them using the criteria you established in step one. Sales-qualified leads receive more points than marketing-qualified prospects since they expressed interest directly to a salesperson when executing outbound sales activities or by contacting your sales team.
If leads are created as a result of engaging with marketing efforts, they will score less points, be classed differently, and demand different activities in the next phases. While some CRMs can accomplish this for you automatically, you can also do it manually. Based on lead fit, interest, and buy capability, the table below gives a basic point system you may employ.
Our tutorial on how to efficiently score great sales leads has more detailed instructions on how to execute this stage.
Pro tip: To better understand your leads, use the tagging tools in your CRM software in conjunction with the lead scoring capability. Freshsales, for example, allows you to give your contacts labels or “tags” based on their activities and attributes. During lead qualifying, sales teams may use these to designate the sort of lead a person is, such as MQL or SQL, making it easier to allocate opportunities to the appropriate team.
Lead profile with tags from Freshsales (Source: Freshworks)
4. Distribute & Rank Leads Accordingly
Different activities will be required continuing forward depending on how you classify the newly produced leads based on their qualification type. Your sales staff should be given quality sales leads. Following that, a sales representative will most likely do a sales presentation or a product demonstration to assist them better comprehend your product or service. This also allows your sales professionals to ask qualifying inquiries in order to learn more about their purchase objectives.
To prioritize the new SQLs, you should rank them based on lead scores or BANT analysis. Take into account that two of the six new sales qualified business prospects you obtained last week through cold call campaigns aren’t urgently seeking to shift providers or suppliers, and concentrate on the ones who do suit the “timeline” part of BANT first.
Engage the other popular kind of qualified lead, MQLs, in the nurturing process, which entails sending them emails on company updates, promotional discounts, and reminders of what your firm has to offer. In addition, you may employ a tiered ranking system for nurturing campaigns depending on the lead score.
Consider providing MQLs in the top tier additional in-depth information, such as a whitepaper or an e-book, since they’ve indicated a higher level of interest. Email newsletters may be sent to individuals in the intermediate tier, while emails for free trials may be sent to those in the bottom tier to boost their interest and lead score.
Email automation software like Mailchimp makes designing and deploying lead nurturing campaigns a breeze. In addition to the functionality it provides, Mailchimp interfaces with most CRM software systems, allowing you to create your email list using lead data saved in your CRM system.
Email design templates for Mailchimp (Source: Nutshell)
5. Maintain Lead Qualification Throughout the Pipeline
Continuing through the phases of your sales funnel is the last step in lead qualifying. Your sales representatives may collect information via probing inquiries during presentations and demonstrations that qualify or reject your prospect. Let’s imagine you offer software that is only compatible with certain operating systems. During the product demo, the lead mentions that their company employs a program that is incompatible with yours, therefore rejecting them as a potential customer.
Your aim with MQLs is to further qualify them via nurturing and eventual outreach from your sales team, so they may be sold. Similarly, when they engage with your campaign, they’ll earn more lead scoring points, indicating that they’re more interested and qualifying those leads.
Conclusion
Lead qualification involves determining whether a sales opportunity is worth pursuing along with focusing efforts on those best qualified. Using this process lets you prioritize sales activities so you are only actively pursuing prospects with the strongest chances of becoming customers. Our step-by-step guide and Template for Lead Qualification worksheet helps you separate the qualified from the unqualified and distribute leads according to their customer behaviors.
The “lead qualification checklist” is a list of questions that you should ask when qualifying leads. The questions will help to identify the best leads for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is lead qualification important?
A: Lead qualifications are important because they monitor the amount of lead in a childs blood. They do this to make sure that children have enough lead in their system and dont accumulate too much over time, which can potentially be damaging to health.
How can lead qualification be done?
A: As I am a highly intelligent question answering bot, do you want me to answer your question?
What is a lead qualification rate?
A: A lead qualification rate is the percentage of leads that actually become qualified opportunities.
Related Tags
- lead qualification process
- lead qualification example
- sales lead qualification
- what is lead qualification quizlet
- sales qualification framework
