Here’s What You Need to Know About Inbound Lead Qualification (+ Best Practices)

Helpful Summary 

• Overview: We introduce you to inbound lead qualification and best practices to help you pull it off successfully.
• Why listen to us: We’ve helped hundreds of customers like Linear, and Reach Web Assets capture and qualify leads with intuitive multi-step forms.
• Why it matters: Effective inbound lead qualification improves sales and marketing efficiency, ensuring resources are focused on leads with the highest potential for conversion.
• Action points: Use multi-step forms to collect qualifying information, align marketing and sales teams, automate processes, and continuously monitor and refine your lead qualification strategy.
• Further research: Check out the Growform blog to better understand lead qualification, lead scoring, and effective lead generation strategies. 

Want to Learn About Inbound Lead Qualification?

Inbound leads come in all shapes and sizes, with different interest levels in your offer. Generally, we group them into three categories: 

• Unqualified Leads: Not a good fit. 
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Good fit but not ready to talk to sales.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): Good fit and ready to talk to sales.

Lead qualification helps you determine the type of lead you’re dealing with. From there, you can decide the best course of action—remove them from your pipeline, send them to sales, or let marketing nurture them more. 

This makes your sales and marketing processes much more efficient.

In this Growform guide, we introduce you to inbound lead qualification and provide some best practices for successfully implementing it.  

But first…

Why Listen to Us? 

We designed Growform to help you build intuitive, high-converting multi-step forms that capture all the qualifying information you need from leads with minimal friction.

Clients like Heyzine Flipbooks, BeMarketable, and Linear use Growform, and guess what? They’re recording conversion rate increases of as much as 300%.

What Is Inbound Lead Qualification?

Inbound lead qualification is the process of evaluating your inbound leads to determine their likelihood of converting into paying customers. 

How does it work? It’s simple:

1. Choose some qualification criteria depending on your lead qualification framework (we’ll get to this in a minute).
2. Set max scores for each criterion based on how well it predicts a lead’s likelihood to convert into a customer.
3. Score each criterion for a lead and sum the scores to get an overall lead qualification score and add or subtract from it when new info becomes available.

From there, there are a few things you can do. The most obvious is to prioritize your leads based on their qualification score. Focus on leads with higher scores before moving on to leads with lower scores.

Additionally, you can compare the scores of leads in your pipeline to an average score for your ICP to see how likely they are to become a customer. This can help you identify which leads may need more nurturing or which ones are ready to be contacted by sales.

Want to learn more? We have a lead qualification guide that dives into this process more deeply.

What Are Inbound Lead Qualification Frameworks?

Inbound lead qualification frameworks give you a set of structured criteria that help you evaluate each lead’s buying potential. 

To use them, you assign each lead a score for each of the framework’s criteria (typically based on explicit and implicit signals). Then, you score each lead by adding up the scores and comparing them to a set threshold.

Here are some popular frameworks:

BANT 

This is the quickest and easiest way to qualify leads. 

BANT stands for: 

• Budget: What’s the lead’s budget?
• Authority: What’s the lead’s decision-making power?
• Need: Does the lead need your offer?
• Timeframe: When will the lead be ready to make a decision?

ANUM

This framework is similar to BANT but places more emphasis on urgency and money.

Here’s a breakdown:

• Authority: What’s the lead’s decision-making power?
• Need: How badly does the lead need your offer?
• Urgency: Does the lead need to make a decision quickly?
• Money: What’s the lead’s budget?

MEDDIC

This is a great one for complex, high-value sales. 

MEDDIC stands for:

• Metrics: What are the lead’s key performance indicators?
• Economic Buyer: Who holds the budget and decision-making power?
• Decision Criteria: What factors does the lead consider when making a decision?
• Decision Process: How does the lead make decisions?
• Identify Pain Points: What problems is the lead facing that your offer can solve?
• Champion: Who within the organization will advocate for your solution?

FAINT

This is a good one for TOFU leads, where gauging interest and fit is important.

It stands for:

• Funds: What’s the lead’s budget?
• Authority: What’s the lead’s decision-making power?
• Interest: How interested is the lead in your offer?
• Need: Does the lead need your offer?
• Timing: When will the lead be ready to make a decision?

4 Best Practices for Qualifying Inbound Leads Effectively

1. Collect Qualifying Information From The Get-Go 

Before you can qualify leads effectively, you need information. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is not starting the collection process early on in your interactions. Doing so means you’re left scrambling to catch up later… which means lost opportunities and a slower sales process.

So, first things first—create a list of questions that’ll help with lead qualification. Ideally, these questions should align with your chosen qualification framework. For instance, if you’re using MEDDIC, ask about their pain points, decision criteria, etc.

But how do you get this info without overwhelming your leads? There are a few potential methods, but our favorite is using multi-step forms. 

Multi-step forms have a few major benefits. First, they boost completion rates by breaking down forms into sections. One of our customers was able to double the number of fields in their forms after switching to Growform without hurting completion rates.

Plus, a flexible no-code form builder like Growform allows you to dynamically show questions based on a visitor’s previous answers, integrate with marketing automation tools and CRMs, get creative with question and response types, and more.

Backed by years of UX research and psychological principles (like the sunk-cost fallacy), our forms guarantee incredible completion rates. This means leads will happily provide all the info you need for effective qualification—no arm-twisting or pestering required. 

2. Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams

Your marketing team attracts leads and gives them an initial qualifying check. Then, your sales team completes the final qualification and handles direct customer interactions. Clearly, both teams need to be on the same page to get the best lead qualification results… but this isn’t always easy.

The biggest issue here it that it’s easy for sales and marketing teams to develop different ideas of what constitutes a “good” lead. There are all kinds of scenarios where segments that are highly engaged with marketing materials convert terribly (or not at all) when sales teams get to them.

The solution? Get aligned and stay aligned through continuous information sharing.

Here are some tips:

• Create a Shared ICP: Work with both teams to define an ICP by balancing volume (i.e., how many leads marketing can produce) and quality (i.e., how many of said leads sales can actually close).
• Eliminate Data Siloes: Data siloes are a major problem. Marketing teams need sales data to understand who to target, their pain points, and what messaging resonates. Sales teams need marketing data to qualify leads and personalize their outreach. Centralize this data and give everyone access.

3. Automate Where Possible

Automating routine, tedious, detail-oriented lead qualification processes is a fantastic way to boost efficiency while reducing errors. This frees up your sales team to focus on more important things—like making connections with leads and writing killer pitches.

Start by identifying lead qualification processes and subprocesses you can automate.

A great example of an automatable subprocess? Transferring data from your lead capture for to your CRM. Growform integrates well with Vtiger, Salesforce, Hubspot, and other popular CRMs, so as you collect qualifying information, you can automatically transfer it to your CRM.

To automate the entire lead scoring process, you can then set up scoring rules within your CRM. As information is automatically added and updated, the lead scores will adjust accordingly. You can then even set up routing rules to direct leads to different sales personnel based on their scores.

4. Monitor and Refine Your Results Accordingly

Lead qualification isn’t a “set it and forget it” process. You need to constantly monitor your strategy to see how it’s performing and spot areas for improvement. 

How can you do this? By tracking metrics and making data-driven adjustments.

Here are a few metrics (and what they tell you):

Lead Conversion Rate (LCR)

LCR is the percentage of your inbound leads that are qualified. It says a lot about the quality of leads your marketing team attracts. 

If your LCR is declining, you might want to revisit your approach to lead capture—think magnets, information collected, and more. It also might mean your marketing team isn’t aligned on your ICP, so make sure you’re sharing data.

Lead Source Performance

This metric means tracking which marketing channels generate your most qualified leads. Naturally, you want to focus on the channels that bring in the best quality leads. However, volume can be important, too.

Time to Qualify

Time to qualify is the average time it takes to qualify a lead. It shows how efficient your qualification process is. You want to reduce this time as much as possible without compromising lead quality. Automation tools, as mentioned earlier, can help with this.

Streamline Your Sales Process with Lead Qualification

After all the time and effort you put into nurturing leads, it’d be very disappointing to find out they’re not a good fit. Inbound lead qualification helps avoid this issue by systematically evaluating leads based on specific criteria before they are passed to the sales team.

Looking for a powerful way to collect information from inbound leads?

Growform is a multi-step form builder that makes it easy for anyone to create and manage forms without any coding knowledge. With features like conditional logic, CRM integrations, and easy embedding, we make it easy to get the data you need.

Sign up for a free trial today.