Qualification Strategies for Sales Leads

Many companies have a specific set of criteria for identifying sales-ready leads. For example, they may require that a prospect be able to make a purchase decision on their own or have access to stakeholders with budget authority.

This helps them to avoid spending time and resources on unqualified prospects. Here are some tips to help you qualify your leads:

1. Understand Your Buyer Personas

The more you know your buyer personas, the easier it will be to identify and qualify leads. Each persona has different buying styles and preferences, but if you can understand them, you will be able to deliver solutions that meet their needs. As an example, a business owner may be interested in purchasing your product because it will help them scale their company and become more profitable. If a person is a department head, on the other hand, they will be more concerned about how easy it will be for their team to use your product.

You can find a lot of information about your buyers through market research, customer surveys and even sales data. But the best way to really get to know your buyers is by interviewing them. Get to know their goals, challenges, pain points and communication preferences. You can also create a profile for each persona, as explained by Hubspot, which is helpful when asking qualifying questions. For example, a profile could include things like the person's age, gender, occupation and location, as well as other defining characteristics, such as interests and goals.

2. Determine Your Target Market

It’s important to determine your target market before you start trying to sell anything. This will help you decide what types of leads to focus on, and it will also help you avoid the pitfalls that come along with chasing too many leads.

This step is critical to ensuring that your sales team only works with qualified leads. Defining what a qualified lead looks like can make all the difference in getting them to convert.

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are those who have actively shown interest in your brand, such as by submitting their contact information, signing up for your newsletter, downloading an ebook, or making multiple visits to your website. They are the leads that your marketing department wants to send over to sales.

Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are those that have met your criteria for a potential customer, such as by asking to be added to your database or requesting a demo of your product. They are the leads that your sales team will want to pursue immediately.

3. Create a Marketing Strategy

When you have a clear idea of your ideal customer, it’s easier to define your marketing strategy. This will help you prioritize leads, and ensure your team is working with the right customers. For example, if you’re targeting large enterprise accounts, you may want to use account-based marketing (ABM) tactics to nurture relationships and close deals.

In addition, you’ll need a sales qualification framework to filter out prospects who aren’t ready for your product. This process is known as sales qualification or lead scoring, and it’s an important part of a well-defined marketing and sales process.

For instance, if you’re targeting enterprise software customers, you may want to use a BANT sales methodology that focuses on Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline to identify potential buyers. This will allow you to focus on a smaller number of prospects, and ultimately improve your conversion rates.

Using a sales qualification framework can also help you track and measure your sales process. By identifying high-quality leads and optimizing your sales process, you’ll improve the customer experience and drive revenue growth for your business.

4. Create a Buyer Persona for Each Lead

Creating buyer personas is one of the most important steps in the sales funnel. These semi-fictional characters provide key information about your ideal customers, which can help you improve your outreach efforts, build stronger connections with potential clients, and close more sales.

To create a buyer persona, you should start with the characteristics that define your target market. Using data analytics, surveys, or direct feedback from current customers can help you determine who your ideal customer is. Then, you can use this information to develop marketing strategies that are more effective at reaching these people.

For example, a streaming service might want to create a persona for Jennifer, a single woman who enjoys fashion and travel. She would be interested in learning about new music that fits her preferences, and she could be a great prospect for the business.

However, if her budget doesn’t align with your product price range, she may not be a good fit for the company. That’s why it’s so important to understand your lead market well before making any significant investments in marketing or sales infrastructure.

5. Create a Lead Scoring System

It is important that your lead scoring system aligns with sales objectives and goals. Get input from sales leaders on what they think makes a qualified lead, and make sure the process for passing leads to sales is streamlined and efficient.

The best lead scoring systems use both fit and intent to determine quality, rather than focusing solely on one of the two. Fit data can include prospect identity (such as job title, industry, and company revenue) as well as behavioral data such as daily trial usage and website visits. Intent data can be determined by actions such as email clicks, web form submissions, and social media activity.

A good score model will also include a method for evaluating and refining the criteria that defines quality. This process of regular evaluation helps ensure that great prospects don’t slip through the cracks, and that unqualified leads don’t continue to drain your resources.

The best scoring models are continuously reevaluated to reflect the reality of your business and customer data. For example, you may need to reassess the weighting of certain attributes (such as the prospect’s job title or industry) if their conversion rate has been poor.

6. Ask the Right Questions

Asking the right sales questions can help you determine whether or not a lead is a good fit for your company. These questions should be open-ended and designed to get to the heart of what the customer is looking for. They should also be asked in a manner that does not pressure the buyer into saying yes or no.

A great example of a good qualifying question is: “Can you tell me more about what your biggest business problem is and how you want to solve it?” This sales question shows that the rep cares about solving the customer’s problems and will do whatever is necessary to make it happen.

Many salespeople use a standard framework to qualify leads, such as BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline). There are also other sales qualification models that may be more appropriate for your product or customer profile, such as FACT (funnel, awareness, credibility, trust, and value) or AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action). Whichever sales model you choose, it is important to have a process in place for weeding out bad leads from the start. This will save your team time and energy that could be better spent on chasing quality leads.

7. Create a Ranking System

Once your marketing team has an onslaught of leads, it’s important to have a system in place that helps them prioritize and qualify the prospects. Using the ICP and buyer personas to identify common characteristics of your best customers, you can build a ranking system based on criteria that matters most to your business.

It’s important to take the time to sit down with your sales team and decide which criteria make a marketing qualified lead (or MQL). Once you have the list, it’s time to assign point values. You can use a scoring system like MEDDIC or BANT, or create your own framework.

If your sales team doesn’t have a qualification process in place, it can waste a lot of time and energy by continuing to contact unqualified leads. This can lead to long sales cycles, missed opportunities, and bad deals. By following these 7 strategies to qualify leads, your sales team will have more time and resources to spend on qualified prospects. And less time chasing tire-kickers. This will help you grow your business and improve your sales pipeline performance.

8. Follow Up

Depending on the type of product or service your business offers, there are many different sales qualification frameworks to choose from. It’s important to select the right one so that your team is able to identify the best prospects for your business.

In addition to the MEDDIC framework, some other popular models include FAINT (Funds, Authority, Interest, and Timing), ANUM (Ability, Need, and Motivation), and ABRM (Audience, Business Model, and Revenue). These can help you determine whether a prospect is a good fit for your business, as well as how much they might be willing to spend on your products or services.

It’s essential to qualify sales leads before wasting time and energy on them. Otherwise, you could wind up losing a potential customer because they weren’t ready to make a purchase and got hit with a heavy-handed sales pitch. This can also hurt your reputation as a company, as customers are likely to tell others about their bad experience. By tightening up your lead qualifying process, you’ll be able to save time and focus on prospects who are more likely to become paying customers.