Quality over quantity might sound like a cliché, but it’s the core principle of lead qualification. It should also be the driving force behind your approach to sales and marketing. After all, having more leads doesn’t necessarily translate to increased revenue.

If your business gets lots of leads, that's great. But remember, a lead only indicates a potential sale. By working on leads who will never convert, you can dilute your impact and reduce your profits.

Being pickier about the leads you chase down is better for everyone. It concentrates resources on higher value prospects, creates a better customer experience, and ultimately a higher return on investment (ROI).

Unfortunately, refining your lead qualification process can often prove more challenging than tracking down potential customers in the first place.

If you’re struggling to qualify leads or spending too much time on prospects that never convert, don’t give up hope. We’re here to help you dig down into the details of lead qualification so you can improve your approach and achieve your business goals.

What Is Lead Qualification and Why It Matters

Once you’ve got a handle on lead generation, you might feel like you’re in the clear. You’re pulling in plenty of leads and have aligned your sales and marketing teams to improve lead generation.

However, according to a 2021 Gartner survey only 44% of MQLs that go through to sales are a good match for what the business has to offer. Sales and marketing departments that expend equal energy on every lead quickly run out of steam and strain their limited budgets.

Lead qualification is the process of evaluating each prospect. It determines how likely it is that they’ll convert to a paying customer and whether they’ll be a good fit for your offer.

Leads move through a process before converting, and your qualification process can help shift them through the customer journey. Leads are typically categorised as follows:

Information qualified leads (IQL): Also known as cold leads, these prospects are often at the start of their research process and are typically unfamiliar with your company and solutions. They will exchange their contact information, such as a name and email address, for useful information.They are a low priority for sales follow-ups, but important for initial engagement.
Marketing qualified leads (MQL): These leads show a more established interest in your company. IQLs become MQLs when they show more extensive interactions with your brand’s marketing content. For example, they might open emails, visit the website, or exchange information for more indepth resources.
Product qualified leads (PQLs): When a lead signs up for a free trial of a product or service and engages with that offer, they become a PQL. When you follow up with a PQL, they’re much more likely to become customers.
Sales qualified leads (SQLs): These hot leads are ready and willing to make a purchase and have a high closing rate compared to IQLs and MQLs. The transition to SQL status might occur after a lead attains a certain score or demonstrates specific behaviours indicating they are ready for a sales pitch. Reaching out to these leads quickly and consistently is a priority to help ensure they convert.

While every lead you identify has the potential to become an SQL, not every one of them should. The process of lead qualification sifts out the most promising prospects at each stage, so that you can focus your time and energy on nurturing them.

This makes your sales process more efficient and prevents your team from wasting resources on leads who are simply never going to become customers. They’ll have the opportunity to identify motivated buyers and focus their attention on them, increasing sales and revenue.

Using a lead qualification checklist with established criteria and a process framework empowers sales and marketing professionals to work more effectively. In addition to finding stronger leads, they’ll also offer better service to ideal customers, reducing churn rates down the line.

Knowing What Makes a Prospect Valuable

Before you can decide which potential customers to prioritise, you’ll first need to understand what constitutes a strong lead. While the answer differs based on the structure, size, and industry of your business, most organisations focus on a few essential characteristics.

Alignment with Your Ideal Customer Profile

Your lead qualification process centres around an ideal customer profile (ICP). Creating an ICP helps focus your lead generation and qualification processes. It also gives you valuable insights into what kinds of content will attract, engage, and nurture the best leads.

To develop an ICP, you’ll need to consider what types of customers are best suited to your products or solutions. This is a collaborative effort between sales, marketing, and product development teams. It defines the likely demographics, needs, and pain points of customers, focusing on those who would get the most benefit from your business.

You can also take your ICP a step further by creating buyer personas. These in-depth profiles describe the types of individuals who make purchasing decisions. Creating buyer personas requires research and a deep understanding of what types of customers you serve.

The first hint that a lead might not be a good match is if they’re a complete departure from your buyer personas. However, this shouldn't be the sole basis for disqualification. Given that markets and customer preferences evolve, some valuable leads may not align perfectly with established personas.

It's important to also consider other factors such as the lead's specific needs, behaviours, and potential business value. Relying exclusively on buyer personas could lead to overlooking promising opportunities. Therefore, use buyer personas as one of several tools in evaluating leads, not as the definitive criteria.

Disqualifying Factors

Weeding out leads can feel intimidating and counter-productive. You might worry that you’re eliminating so many leads that you’re negatively affecting your potential sales and revenue.

However, you shouldn’t be afraid to disqualify as many leads as necessary. You might be removing names from your list, but that doesn’t mean you’re missing out on sales. Instead, you’re creating space and time to focus on the prospects that are most likely to have a genuine interest in your solutions and close deals.

Knowing what makes a poor lead is just as important as understanding what counts as a good one. That means clarifying a list of disqualifying factors upfront so your team knows which prospects to eliminate from their earliest interactions.

Qualified leads have clear pain points and can form a mutually beneficial relationship with your business. You’ll help them resolve an issue or overcome a challenge at the same time that they bring in new revenue for your company.

To discover whether those things are true, you’ll need to examine a number of disqualifying factors. These might include:

Misaligned personality or values
Insufficient budget
Lack of authority
Different target industry or sector
Low urgency or timeline mismatch
Outside geographic area

Using Lead Qualification Frameworks

Lead qualification frameworks can be helpful tools to help you determine whether a lead is a priority or not.

Common frameworks are an excellent way to scaffold your lead qualification and structure your thinking about prospects. However, you shouldn’t feel fenced in by their parameters. Embrace the core elements of a framework as a starting point, then customise it to fit with the unique needs of your business.

If you’ve never used any of these frameworks, think about which one most closely matches the qualifications that you look for in your leads. Make sure the one you land on encompasses three core factors:

Characteristics

Consider a prospect’s intrinsic qualities. For example, analyse whether they’re in the right country, industry, and sector for you to serve them. This information is usually easy to gather and serves as a clear disqualifier. Whether you use automated processes or manual lead scoring, you can easily eliminate prospects that are outside of your market and service area.

Situation

When it comes to sales, timing is everything. You might have exactly the right product for a prospect, but that doesn’t mean you can sell it to them now. Think about the moment in time for each lead. Work to understand their present needs and whether they’re learning about your solution at the right time.

Behavioural

Evaluate the actions leads are taking and what that says about their intent. Are they behaving as you would expect a strong prospect to? How are they interacting with your brand? Are they visiting all your high intent pages?

Automated lead scoring through marketing automation software will capture these behavioural aspects, simplifying your lead qualification.

B2B Qualification Criteria

The qualification factors for enterprise deals are similar to those for other businesses, but there’s more to consider, including (but not limited to):

Budget: Even big businesses have limitations on what they’re willing to spend. Try to find out early on whether your solution is at a company’s price point.
Authority: To close a deal, you’ll need to engage directly with the individuals in a business who have the final say on whether to make a purchase. If you initially engage with lower level employees, consider how they can help you map the company’s hierarchy and reach the decision makers.
Buying power: The people who influence a purchasing decision aren’t always located at the top. Consider what other employees, from purchasing managers to receptionists, might have a part in determining whether to move forward with a deal.
Need: Explore what solution the lead needs and whether you can provide it. Look for opportunities to upsell by addressing pain points they may not have realised they had.
Timeline: Get a realistic idea of how quickly the prospect is hoping to move forward, but don’t permanently shelve prospects who don’t have a sense of urgency. Continue following up with them later on when they might be in a better position to close a deal.
Decision team: Most businesses have more than one person involved in purchase decisions. Identify everyone with decision making power and consider how to best engage with them.
Competitors: Gauge how many competitors might be vying for the prospect’s attention and whether any of them are offering something you aren’t. Keep an eye out for an established bias or a negative perception of your company and employees.
Procurement processes: Learn whatever you can about how purchases happen at a prospect’s business. If they have an established process that excludes your company, you can look for a way in or disqualify them from your list of leads.

Awareness of each of these factors will help you spot strong leads with a high chance of converting. It will also help you flag poor leads that will drain your time and resources with little chance of closing a deal.

Some Popular Frameworks

Over time, businesses have generated a number of tried and true frameworks that approach sales qualification from different angles. These are the most frequently used frameworks for modern businesses across every industry:

Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline (BANT) focuses on the core characteristics of a prospect.
Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority/Negative Consequences and Positive Implications (GPCTBA/C&I) tracks and responds to changes in buyers’ needs and behaviours.
Authority, Need, Urgency, Money (ANUM) prioritises authority and discourages sales representatives from speaking to anyone who doesn’t have the power to make purchases.
Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritisation (CHAMP) emphasises the problems that a lead is trying to overcome.
Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing (FAINT) is the only framework to incorporate interest, which you can create by educating prospects.
Metrics, Economic Buyers, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion (MEDDIC) takes an in-depth look at every element of a lead and their approach to purchases.

B2B Lead Qualification in Practice

In a perfect world, lead qualification would be as simple as checking yes or no next to a client’s name. In reality, B2B decision making is complex. Unlike B2C businesses, where a lead is most likely making a decision for themselves or their family, B2B organisations have to work through more qualification stages and consider a wider scope of criteria.

Lead qualification is a continuous process that involves multiple aspects of your organisation, from branding to digital marketing to software solutions.

Positioning as Qualifier

The term lead qualification puts all the focus on the lead itself, but it’s not just about the qualities of your leads. It’s also about you and how you position your brand and content.

Lead qualification starts even before your initial contact with a prospect. It begins with the leads you generate with your marketing campaigns, sales, acquisition, and product teams. Where you place your ads and who you target, how and where you network, and the way you present your business all have an effect on the value of the leads you identify.

A strategic approach to your advertising, branding, and content creates the right context to attract ideal prospects from the outset. One piece of content that reflects your brand and meets the needs of your prospects is far more valuable than dozens of meme-based social media posts.

Qualification as a Multi-Step Process

Lead qualification is never a one-and-done process, but it’s more extensive when operating in the B2B space. As you move prospects through your customer journey, you’ll continually assess their fit. The process might look something like this:

Conduct initial scoring with content and an automated system
Screen prospects with phone calls or emails
Complete a discovery call
Provide a product demo
Propose a solution for the prospect’s specific needs

Having level-specific criteria will allow you to more effectively eliminate leads at every stage of the process. For instance, develop qualification factors to identify leads that are ready for an initial call. Narrow and refine those factors to move leads to the demo and proposal stages.

Throughout the qualification process, lean into your information gathering, but be careful not to take it too far. You want to filter prospects effectively without creating friction or alienating them.

If leads feel that you’re intruding on their privacy, interrogating them, or asking for too much information too quickly, they might pull back. Let the relationship develop naturally so that prospects feel comfortable, not compelled, to make a purchase.

The Role of Content in B2B Qualification

After your initial qualification, you’ll engage in lead nurturing and continued engagement with each lead. Content assets, including whitepapers and case studies, allow you to educate leads and engage their interest in your services. They also position your company as an expert in the industry, creating a sense of trust with leads.

Content marketing strategies have a proven effect on businesses. A 2021 survey found that 62% of respondents rely heavily on content, such as case studies, to make B2B purchase decisions. Likewise, another survey found that 64% of the top enterprise respondents have a documented content marketing strategy.

Unlike with B2C businesses, B2B companies must also map each lead’s decision team and gain consensus among multiple stakeholders. Sharing content helps get every individual involved in the purchasing process on the same page and makes it easy to explain the value of your solution to multiple parties.

Consider which content types align with frameworks like CHAMP and GPCTBA/C&I which emphasise understanding and addressing the real-world challenges leads face. Then create high-quality, tailored content that attracts, educates, and nurtures the right kind of leads. Use blog posts, whitepapers, and webinars to educate leads about their challenges and potential solutions.

Share them not only on social media but also via email marketing. Use different channels to drive people back to a lead generation website where prospects can connect with your business.

B2B marketing automation also has a role to play in sharing relevant content with leads. Use automated systems to segment and target qualified leads so that you can identify the content that will be most useful to them.

Enhancing Lead Qualification with Automation

Marketing automation can revolutionise your business in many ways, particularly when it comes to lead qualification. When you use automated systems to screen, categorise, and score leads, your marketing and sales will become more efficient and effective.

A growing number of marketers are using automation to improve their overall strategy and identify ideal customers. A 2023 survey found that 35% of marketers automate most or all of the customer journey. That’s no surprise given the benefits of marketing automation, including:

Lead scoring: Marketing automation tools can score leads based on their interactions with your content and other behavioural indicators. This scoring aligns with lead qualification frameworks by quantifying aspects like engagement level (Interest in FAINT), readiness to buy (Timeline in BANT, GPCTBA/C&I), and the challenges faced (CHAMP).
Segmentation and targeting: Automation facilitates the segmentation of leads based on various criteria, including budget, authority, need, and other points outlined in the frameworks. With that information, you can run targeted campaigns to nurture these segmented leads through the sales funnel.
Behavioural tracking: By tracking lead behaviour, marketing automation helps in identifying where the lead is in the buying cycle. This information is crucial for frameworks like BANT and GPCTBA/C&I which consider the timeline and plan of a lead towards making a purchase.

Marketing automation and automated lead scoring are capable of streamlining and scaling the qualification process. A prospect’s engagement with B2B-focused content like whitepapers, case studies, and webinars can be instrumental in qualifying leads. Marketing automation tracks prospect engagement with high-intent content for lead scoring.

Combining Content, Automation, and Qualification Frameworks

When you combine a properly implemented qualification framework, content, and marketing automation software, you’ll see gains in multiple aspects of your business, including:

Engagement: Engaging content initiates interactions, discussions, and connection with leads. Their responses and interactions provide valuable insights into their authority, need, and interest, aligning with criteria in BANT, CHAMP, and FAINT frameworks.
Personalised content delivery: With insights derived from lead qualification frameworks, marketing automation can deliver personalised content. This addresses the specific needs, challenges, or interests of leads as identified by frameworks like CHAMP and MEDDIC.
Automated nurturing pathways: As leads are qualified and segmented according to frameworks, they can be entered into automated nurturing pathways designed to speak to their specific needs and move them along the sales funnel.
Data-driven insights: The combination of content interaction data and marketing automation analytics with the structured evaluation from lead qualification frameworks provides a robust, data-driven approach to lead management. This enables a deeper understanding of lead quality and readiness, aligning marketing and sales efforts effectively.

These are crucial ingredients for a successful and scalable sales and marketing strategy.

Maintaining the Human Element

With all the advantages of automation, it’s easy to overlook the importance of human assessment. However, while lead scoring gives you a solid foundation when evaluating leads, it’s also important to look at fit beyond the numbers.

A prospect might get a high score from an automated lead scorer, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they’re a good fit for your business. In addition to the automated value, consider what you’ve learned from your personal interactions, customer research, and knowledge of their needs. Don’t discount your intuition because it disagrees with what automation is telling you.

For instance, you can gain between-the-lines insights from a prospect on a call that automation won’t detect. At the same time, don’t make hasty assumptions based on a single data point. To optimise your lead qualification, try to strike a balance between what technology can tell you and what you know based on your years of experience in your industry.

Optimise Your Lead Qualification with 1827 Marketing

Implementing an effective lead qualification process takes work, but pays dividends. It concentrates your limited resources on high-quality prospects who are more likely to become long-term customers.

With the right strategies, you can streamline qualification and accelerate growth. This includes leveraging targeted content to attract and nurture leads, deploying marketing automation for insights, and establishing criteria tailored to your business.

We know that lead qualification is an ongoing and time-consuming battle. Our marketing automation tools and content strategy are designed to help you engage with quality leads that are most likely to convert.

Learn more about how 1827 Marketing can support your content goals and improve your marketing ROI. Book a demo to see what our content and marketing automation solution can do.

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How to Identify and Prioritize Leads: A Guide for B2B Marketers