Guide to Lead Qualification

Are you aware of which of your potential buyers will actually come through as a purchaser? The process of lead qualification helps sellers determine the same. A vital aspect of the sales funnel, lead qualification ensures businesses are allocating their marketing resources in the most efficient manner possible.

As such, you’ll be able to invest maximum resources on prospective customers most likely to make a purchase, rather than customers least likely to do so despite your engagement strategy.

How does lead qualification work?

All in all, the process consists of three primary steps. Beginning with the collection of contact information through the usage of inbound marketing operations, the marketing team is able to determine whether the lead matches your ideal customer profile.

Following the same, a sales representative will typically proceed to interact with the lead in order to discuss factors such as budgets, purchases, needs, and their buying timelines .

Lastly, a call is taken by the sales team to then make a final determination regarding whether to pursue the candidate further.

Sales Qualified Leads & Scoring Models

A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect who has passed your lead qualification procedure (which we explored last week) and has been determined to be relatively likely to convert. This doesn’t mean a sale will happen almost immediately, but a SQL should be able to make a purchase at some time. For sales reps, these are the most desirable leads.

Lead qualifying should be as quantitative and data-driven as possible for sales teams. This can be done using a scoring model in which a team assigns a score to each lead based on characteristics like:

How frequently do they engage on social media?
Monitoring whether the emails sent to the lead’s inbox have a high click-through rate.
The number of times a lead views your website.
When was the last time the lead interacted with you?

How to Qualify a Sales Lead

Some leads are straightforward to qualify. Others may be more difficult to evaluate due to a lack of relevant information. While determining a lead’s purchase potential is challenging, conjecture and an ad-hoc approach to follow-up activities are likely to result in less accurate lead qualifying.

You must have a rigorous, data-driven lead qualification procedure in place to avoid this. Here’s one of the most frequent lead qualification tactics, used by businesses, to separate qualified leads from unqualified prospects.

BANT

In order of decreasing significance, the BANT approach focuses on four characteristics:

B for Budget: Does the product or service fall within the buyer’s price range?

A for Authority: Is the prospect in a position to make a purchasing decision, or would that decision be made by someone else?

N for Needs: Is the prospect in desperate need of what you’re selling? Are they just looking around or do they have a compelling desire to buy something?

T for Timeline: Is the prospect ready to make a purchase?

When to move qualified leads through the funnel

Your sales and marketing team can identify when it’s time to move a lead farther down the sales funnel by employing the technique that best suits the firm. The following are key indicators of a qualified lead:

Ability to respond to queries regarding their requirements in a consistent and specific manner
A firm indication of interest in your product or service, as well as a need for it.
A demonstration of a strong understanding of the benefits of your product or service
Alignment of your pricing point with the budget of the lead
Doing business in a sector where your brand doesn’t generally sell
Possibility of a purchase in the not-too-distant future
A profile that matches similar customers with whom you’ve done business.

Your sales team can begin nurturing a lead once it has been qualified by continuing the conversation. Additional calls or meetings, product demos, and more opportunity to discuss the product with current clients are all standard ways to get qualified leads closer to conversion.