What is lead qualification? It's the first step in determining if someone could become a potential customer. Learn about lead qualification best practices.
What is lead qualification? It's a process that can save your business ample time and resources. It tells your sales reps which prospects are likely to engage, move through your pipeline, and eventually buy your products. It also tells when which ones are probably not worth contacting.
Lead qualification is the process of determining if a prospect has the potential to become a customer. It's generally a process conducted by both sales and marketing teams, and it involves gathering data about prospects and matching it up against certain criteria. If a lead passes the test, they're qualified, and it's worth pursuing them. If they don't, they're unqualified, it's highly unlikely that they're interested in making a purchase.
The lead qualification process may look a little different for everyone. Factors like the size of your business and the types of products you sell can all play a role in how you go about it, but at its foundation, you'll identify potential leads, evaluate them, and score them.
The first step is finding your pool of potential leads. There are countless ways to do this. Some companies use their website visitors or people who fill out contact forms or sign up for newsletters and emails. Some take to social media and use the people who engage with them on various platforms. You might even use social listening to see who is talking about something relevant to your product or industry. You can use ad targeting, host webinars and similar events, ask for customer referrals, rely on content marketing, gather info from industry directories, offer surveys, or visit online forums. You can even start a cold outreach campaign.
Once you have your pool of potential leads,, you'll want to narrow it down by ensuring each one fits all or most of your qualifying criteria. That can range from ensuring they have the budget to afford what you're selling to ensuring they have the authority to make purchasing decisions for their businesses. Many companies use a sales qualifying framework to help make this determination.
While there are several frameworks to choose from, here are a few of the most popular:
BANT: Developed by IBM, BANT is probably the oldest and most common framework. It stands for:
CHAMP: CHAMP comes from the book The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. It stands for:
GPCTBA/C&I: This one was developed at HubSpot and is more goal-oriented. It stands for:
MEDDIC: Executives at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) developed MEDDIC back in the 1980s. It's a bit more detailed approach. It stands for:
After you evaluate potential leads, you can then score them, or assign them numerical scores based on how well they align with your ideal customer. Every company has their own method of lead scoring, and some even use software that handles it for you. It's typically done on a scale from 0 to 100, though leads can earn negative scores.
There are multiple lead scoring models that you can use. Again, that will vary by company and which qualities your organization prioritizes in their leads and customers. Some of them include:
How does the lead match up with your target demographics? If you only sell within a certain city or metropolitan area or a certain portion of the United States, you might assign a zero to prospects who live outside that range. If you typically sell your products to people over the age of 50, you might assign those prospects a higher score than you would younger prospects. However, some younger prospects might be shopping for their parents, so instead of a zero, they may receive a lower score. If you're doing B2B sales and aiming for people working in management, you might assign higher scores to higher-level managers who are more likely to make purchasing decisions compared to lower-level ones.
How does the lead interact with your website? If you pull leads from your website data, you can use their behavior to assign scores. For example, someone who visited many pages, signed up for your emails, and added something to their cart might receive a high score, while someone who only spent 30 seconds looking at one or two products receives a lower one.
How does the lead engage with your social media platforms? Do they follow you? Engage with your content? Re-post or share your content? These leads might receive higher scores than those who follow but don't engage.
While lead qualification will look different for every organization, there are a few things you can do to ensure the best possible leads for your company. These include:
1. Aligning sales and marketing teams: You sales and marketing teams should be on the same page when it comes to criteria for leads. They should also share data and insights that can't help you round out the evaluation stage.
2. Regularly updating qualifying criteria: As with every other aspect of your sales process, don't use the same criteria over and over again unless it's backed by actual data. It's important to do an analysis periodically and determine if there have been any major changes. Look at both quantitative and qualitative data for insights.
3. Offering continuous training for your sales team: Your sales team should fully understand the importance of lead qualification and how to do it. Offer continuous training and development until they've mastered it.
4. Utilizing tools and technology: Modern technology has taken a lot of the guesswork out of lead qualification and lead scoring. Your CRM, various prospecting tools, lead capture software, survey tools, marketing automation platforms, and social media management platforms are just a few of the tools you can use.
Effective lead qualification is essential if you want to run a successful sales campaign. Some reasons why include:
If you want to streamline your sales process and improve efficiency, you should start with lead qualification. The process of gathering data on your prospects, evaluating them, and scoring them based on how well they fit your customer profiles is necessary for finding the right leads and turning them into customers. Every business's specific process will vary, but the results are always the same: higher conversion rates, stronger customer relationships, and increased revenue.
