How To Qualify Sales Leads: Steps To Increase Conversion Rate

We all have gone through the endless cycle where we have been stuck for hours with an aim of finding a sale but what happens if we come to know at the end that the particular prospect doesn’t have a budget or is not even looking to buy something or doesn’t have authority to sign. This is when we feel stranded into a cycle.This situation is also called the time sink in sales.When we lose time against nothing.

So to learn from where the leads are coming; how to qualify a lead in sales holds great importance. The central importance of sales leads is that it helps to save your time, which is the most valuable asset for the sales team. 

In this article, we are going to discuss the breakdown of how to qualify a lead in sales. We will discuss the most straightforward steps to identify high intent buyers from the bunch using sales industry frameworks and steps.

What does qualifying a sales lead mean?

​Qualifying sales leads are major approaches we use to determine whether a prospect is a good fit for our product. This qualification process also helps us find suited customers who are ready to buy and save time.

​Now the question arises is what is the difference between lead and the sales qualified leads SQL. There is a significant difference between lead and SQL. The lead is about a bunch of people who show interest in a product. On the other hand, SQL, also called as sales qualified leads, helps identify people with a genuine concern and who are ready to pay whatever it takes to buy our product.  

They are conversion leads with very high purchase intent. The SQLs are the leads who directly request demos and pursue pricing, not the ones we need to convince to buy a product. The SQL ensures that we get the right leads that don’t end up in the pipeline just for the week, but eventually convert into sales.

Why is lead qualification essential?

​According to research, 67% of businesses lose sales just because they are not representative or properly targeting potential customers. By using lead qualification, we can ensure that our sales team approach goes in the right direction. Lead qualification helps identify leads ready to convert into sales. So what is the point of pursuing lead qualification? Does it help to make your sales process effective and efficient?

​There are several reasons why qualification is essential, especially in sales, which we will discuss below.

• This process helps identify the ideal lead qualification, ensuring that you have received the perfect leads, which can be quickly spotted and have a high conversion and decreases churn.
• Sales leads qualification also helps personalise the sales experience. It helps mold your value proposition and feel, which, according to the most qualified leads, makes your sales pitches highly relevant and conversion friendly.
• Sales lead qualification also helps speed up our sales cycle. The SQL has a high conversion rate, quickly engaging and converting leads into sales.
• Additionally, using qualified leads will help you in making your sales pipeline and sales forecasting more accurate and effective.

These are a few basic reasons that show why lead qualification is essential to your sales and marketing teams. Lead qualification helps in making your process more effective and efficient.

​However, the question arises how to qualify a B2B leads in sales? What will be the process? So let’s dive in further details 

How to qualify a sales lead?

​Different steps and processes help in qualifying leads quickly.

Review the details of your potential customer

​This is one of the significant steps, which is also known as the ICP (ideal customer profile review). Using the ICP, we can identify the most valuable customer. This ICP covers basic demographic data, such as the company’s size and its following status, along with the goals and common objectives .​The ICP supports and helps in improving the sales strategies and enhancing the elements and timeline of your outreach.

Lead scoring criteria

​Now as we know about ICP and ideal customer attributes. It’s time to define the lead scoring criteria to proceed with lead qualification.

​The scoring criteria help make decisions about your leads. The scoring criteria must be based on both demographic and behavioural data. You can find the most essential criteria details when you are having a conversation with your customer and the sales team. 

Example: Create lead criteria, evaluate customer discussions in your list, and even set a checklist so you can build your own scorecard that ensures consistency across all your teams scoring approaches.

The lead gathering process

​The third significant step is to gather all the information you need. We all know that marketing in the sales team uses different approaches to get to their leads. However, once the lead generation processes are done, you might need to bring all your leads together through the lead databases, contact forms, downloadable resources, hosting webinars, or by checking out the visited data on your website.

​The marketing team mainly uses content resources, such as social media engagement, web forms and hosting web pages on data platforms to find qualified inbound leads. While on the other hand, the sales team primarily focuses on cold calling and cold emailing across all reference strategies to generate qualified leads.

Research about your leads

​Once you are done with the gathering process of your lead it’s time to research your leads by using the automated sales tools. For example you have a combination of leads from LinkedIn, social media online data bases and some different old emails. Now it’s time to recheck the authenticity. 

So what you can do is to use the automated sales tools to find the potential leads which is also known as the lead enrichment.

​By using automated data investment tools and a CRM, you can easily collect and analyse information and manage qualified leads. This process also helps in finding out to customers more systematically and efficiently. Additionally, the automation insights help the sales team streamline and accelerate their lead qualification process.

Scoring your leads

​Now once the step of organising your leads in CRM is done it’s time to actually score your leads. There are two main types by which we can do the lead scoring.

The first one is predictive scoring. The predictive scoring is basically based on software that analyses the sales in marketing trends and requirements. This process makes ease in  lead scoring.It is  entirely automated and brings the possible outcomes.

​On the other hand, manual scoring is based on the team’s rules and the lead’s attributes and scoring criteria.

Review the data lead and refine

Once you are done with the lead scoring, it’s time to review the lead data and refine it. To get into the refining process, here are a few major KPIs that help you in taking the qualified lead into the funnel.

• Lead conversion rate
• MQL and SQL (marketing and sales qualified leads) conversion rate
• CAC, which is known as the customer acquisition cost

Once you have identified the KPI, work on it, expand the opportunities, and add new qualification questions to improve your lead scoring process. 

Conclusion

​In the sales industry, quality sales are much better and more efficient than quantity of leads. In the article above, we discussed all the ways to qualify sales leads. Well there are different ways to qualify a sales lead. This includes the ICP environment and certain lead scoring criterias which not only makes the job easier but also increases the conversion rate.