Filtering out your next customers from the huge volume of leads is the high school of marketing. By implementing our tips and using a CRM system like HubSpot, it’s absolutely doable! Discover here how lead qualification works in practice.

Does your everyday life sometimes feel like one big hunt for leads? Then you may need to shift your focus! Lead generation is essential for new business, but it’s only one part of it. Lead qualification is at least as important.

What Is Lead Qualification?

Just because a lead clicked a link on your landing page yesterday doesn’t mean it’s worth sending an email with your sales offer today. Perhaps the person behind it comes from a country you don't deliver to at all, or maybe they don't meet the criteria of your ideal customer profile in some other way.

However, it could also be that the lead was only on your website for a few seconds because they ended up there by mistake. In either case, it would be a waste of your time to pay further attention to this lead at this point in the marketing funnel. But how can you know this?

This is where lead qualification comes into play. In lead qualification, you evaluate how likely one of your leads is to become a customer. You assess how “hot” a lead is and how much attention you should pay to it.

What Are the Benefits of Lead Qualification?

During lead qualification, you qualify leads using two criteria: 

  • Where is the lead in the funnel, and how far has it progressed?
  • How closely do they match our core target group, and how much do we want this lead as a customer?

The benefits are clear: you can dedicate your resources to the profitable leads while the rest continue to mature in your marketing and sales funnel. This saves you valuable money, precious time, and minimises the number of frustrating experiences. 

Lead qualification is a crucial step in the lead management process. Get your easy-to-understand step-by-step guide now with a free model to perfectly align your sales and marketing.

B2B Lead Qualification

How Does Lead Qualification Work in CRM?

Predicting how likely a lead is to convert? What looks like fortune telling is actually just a sophisticated method that you can apply step by step. A CRM system like HubSpot helps you look into the crystal ball.

1. Your ideal target group

If you don’t know which customers you want to attract, you’ll just end up drowning in the sea of leads. Sounds logical, but it's often the crucial pitfall in B2B marketing. That’s why you should go back to the drawing board before lead qualification by defining your ideal customer!

2. Your buyer’s journey

Very few customers just see and buy. Rather, they go through an inner and outer journey. This is known as the buyer’s journey and consists of four phases:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Decision
  • Delight

To better assess which phase your lead is at, you should arrange your leads along the buyer’s journey. The phases of the buying process are also known as lifecycle stages. During this process, it becomes immediately clear who is responsible for a lead internally: marketing, pre-sales, or sales.

3. Your lead scoring

Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, that’s not quite right: lead scoring is a subcategory of lead qualification where you assign scores to your leads in order to evaluate them.

Lead scoring in CRM makes it easy for you to see the potential of your leads. First of all, you define the criteria with which leads can score points. The system then assigns this score automatically. The score also indicates which life cycle stage the contact is currently at.

4. Your lead tracking

How you start to segment your leads using the lead status and further qualify them according to their position in the funnel. To do this, you set qualification criteria again until each individual step in the CRM is transparent, traceable, and controllable.

5. Your deal stages

The penultimate lifecycle stage “Opportunity” is where your sales team comes into play. Here again, it makes sense to qualify your leads based on deal stages. You define these stages tailored to your company. Each deal stage is assigned specific instructions for action, which the sales team can then use as a guide.

Automated Lead Qualification: There’s No Way Around It

Although lead qualification can be done manually, it would entail a lot of error-prone and tedious work. We recommend that you rely on automated workflows in CRM (preferably HubSpot).

You determine the criteria, the CRM channels your leads through the marketing and sales funnel, and then gives you specific ideas for action. This way, you focus on the really promising leads. It really can be that simple!

Want to Set Up a Clean Lead Qualification Process?

Good idea! Guides like these are helpful. However, working with the &weekly CRM professionals will lead you to even greater success.

You often just need a fresh look from the outside combined with two or three tips to really get the ball rolling. Click here to get in touch. We look forward to hearing your questions!

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Raul Sfat

Written by Raul Sfat

Raul is our growth guru. He rolls up his sleeves, picks up the growth levers and optimises as much as possible. Raul is not only an amazing tipster; he’s also a real go-getter. He helps our customers to achieve measurable results through digital marketing and sales strategies.