What is Lead Qualification?

Lead qualification is how we determine the potential value of a lead, in order to prioritize and allocate sales resources effectively. This process typically involves identifying and analyzing key characteristics of a lead, such as their industry, company size, budget, and decision-making authority, in order to determine the likelihood of them becoming a customer. The goal of lead qualification is to identify high-value leads that are most likely to convert into paying customers.

Why is Lead Qualification Important?

According to Gleanster Research, only 25% of leads are legitimate. Business who respond in 5 minutes or less to interested prospects are 100x more likely to convert an opportunity, according to Chili Piper. If you want to increase your chances of converting leads to revenue, lead qualification will help you focus on the right leads to contact. Highly engaged leads who fit your target demographic should be at the top of your follow-up list.

Building a Lead Qualification Model

Identify your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Your ICP defines the characteristics and attributes of customers that are most likely to make a purchase and generate revenue. Solidifying your target audience by defining an ICP will allow you to operationalize your lead qualification model and enable your teams to align to a unified definition. We recommend sitting down with your marketing, sales and product teams to talk through what your ideal target customer looks like. Here are a few specific qualities you might define in your ICP:

1. Industry
2. Company Size (Employees, Revenue)
3. Location (Country, Region, State)
4. Job Title
5. Department (Legal, IT, Compliance, Marketing, Sales)
6. Seniority Level (C-Suite, VP, Director, Manager, Individual Contributor)
7. Target Company

Identify High-Value Touch Points

While your ICP will define the demographic you're targeting, you'll need to additionally identify the most valuable engagements you have with your prospective customers. By identifying these activities or campaigns you'll be able to assign value to each touchpoint, resulting in an engagement score. You'll use the engagement score to find highly interested customers amongst your ICP prospects. Highly engaged and highly qualified prospects are where you'll want to spend your resources.

Figuring out the right high-value activities and scoring are very dependent on your business. We recommend interviewing your sales, marketing and product teams again to understand what signals show buyer intent. Here are a few examples of high/low intent activities we've seen in the past with some potential scores.

High Intent Activities

1. Downloading a price sheet (50 points)
2. Registering for a product webinar (50 points)
3. Requesting a demo (75 points)
4. Submitting a Contact Us form (100 points)

Low Intent Activities

1. Viewing a blog post (5 points)
2. Downloading an ebook (10 points)
3. Opening an email (0 points)
4. Unsubscribing from an email (-25 points)

Automate your Model

Once you have your ICP and scoring model identified, you'll want to operationalize it across your marketing automation, CRM and data warehouse. The exact process for how to achieve this depends on your tech stack, available resources and the complexity of your models. The following checkpoints are a high level guide.

1. Ensure your ICP and scoring model can be tracked in your CRM or Marketing Automation Platform (MAP). You may have to create new fields to support your models.
2. Evaluate how you're using Salesforce Campaigns or Activities, these can be invaluable to tracking your scoring model.
3. Ensure your MAP or forms are updated to ingest your ICP data. Additionally, ensure your forms are triggering score updates as needed.

If you need additional assistance to implement your models in your platforms, feel free to contact us.

Implement a Sales Hand-Off Process

If you've made it this far, congrats! You've created an ICP and defined your scoring model - your sales team almost has the information they need to prioritize their pipeline of leads. In order to make this information useful, work with your sales team to define a hand-off process for qualified leads. A few scoping questions to kick-off the conversation:

1. What's the current workflow for sales to find marketing generated leads?
2. Does the sales team have existing list views or a dashboard to surface leads?
3. Do you have any thoughts or feedback on the leads identified by this model? Where can we iterate and improve?