How We Qualify Sales Leads in 5 Simple Steps

Helpful Summary 

• Overview: We introduce you to our process for qualifying sales leads and prioritizing your most promising prospects.
• Why Listen to Us: We’ve helped hundreds of customers like BeMarketable and Stax Payment capture and qualify leads at scale with powerful multi-step forms.
• Why it Matters: Sales lead qualification helps you prioritize high-potential leads, personalize your sales outreaches, and save time and resources.
• Action Points: Implement a lead qualification framework, gather necessary information, score leads based on criteria, and prioritize them to focus your sales efforts effectively.
• Further Research: Check out the Growform blog to learn more about lead scoring and effective lead generation strategies.  

Want to Learn How to Qualify Sales Leads?

Only a small fraction of the leads on your list are ready, willing, and able to buy. 

So, what happens when your sales team focuses on all your leads rather than focusing on qualified leads? It’s almost always a lose-lose. Leads get bugged with unwanted messages, and your sales reps waste time running down dead ends.

The solution is a great lead qualification system. By strategically gathering info about your leads, you can prioritize the most promising leads and direct your sales efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

In this Growform guide, we give you a simple process for doing just that.

Why Listen to Us? 

At Growform, lead qualification is a big part of our business. We help businesses gather the information they need to effectively and reliably quality leads through intuitive, high-converting multi-step forms.

Companies like BeMarketable and Stax Payments have seen some pretty impressive results with our forms, and we’re here to help you do the same.

What Is Lead Qualification?

Lead qualification is the process of slowly but surely working out whether a lead (potential customer) is a good fit for your business. 

How do you do this? By systematically collecting information that predicts whether:

1. The lead will take the action that you want them to (e.g., making a purchase)

…and:

2. They are likely to be satisfied with your product or service

As you collect this information, you begin to classify your leads into distinct categories based on their likelihood of converting and their fit with your business.

Lead Qualification Classifications

According to most experts, there are two main categories of lead qualification:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): These are leads that have demonstrated enough interest in your product or service to be considered potential customers. They demonstrate this interest by interacting with marketing materials like emails and blog content.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): SQLs or “hot leads” are leads considered most likely to convert into paying customers. Basically, through sales lead qualification, you’ve identified them as a good fit for your product or services, and your sales team is ready to contact them.  

Why is Sales Lead Qualification Important?

Boost Sales Efficiency 

Sales lead qualification helps prioritize leads by identifying those with the highest potential. This way, your sales reps can focus on prospects most likely to convert, boosting your conversion rate and overall sales performance.

Personalize Your Sales Strategies 

Lead qualification helps you understand your prospects’ needs, budget, and decision-making process. This information allows you to tailor your sales pitch to fit their specific situation. This personalized approach increases your chance of converting them into paying customers. 

Save Time and Resources

By filtering out unqualified leads early, you won’t have to waste efforts on people who are less likely to buy. As a result, you get to save yourself and your team a huge amount of time and resources. 

How to Successfully Qualify Sales Leads 

1. Choose a Qualification Framework

A sales lead qualification framework is a set of criteria that helps you identify leads close to opening their wallets. There are quite a lot of these frameworks to choose from, each one prioritizing different things.

Here are a few of the most common.

BANT (for simplicity)

The simplest lead qualification framework is the tried-and-tested BANT framework. It evaluates leads based on four criteria:

• Budget: Does the lead have the financial capacity?
• Authority: Is the lead a decision-maker?
• Need: Does the lead have a problem your product solves?
• Timeline: Will they be purchasing anytime soon?

Great leads will fulfill most, if not all, of these criteria to a reasonable extent.

ChAMP (for thoroughness)

• Challenges: What challenges does the lead face that your product can solve?
• Authority: Who has the power to make purchasing decisions?
• Money: Does the lead have the budget to purchase your product?
• Priority: How important is solving this problem for the lead’s business?

MEDDICC (for enterprise sales)

• Metrics: What metrics or KPIs does the lead want to improve?
• Economic Buyer: Who has control over the budget?
• Decision Criteria: What factors will the lead consider?
• Decision Process: How does the lead typically make purchasing decisions? 
• Identify Pain: What pain points or challenges is the lead currently facing?
• Champion: Who within the lead’s company can advocate for your product?
• Competition: Are there any competitors in the market offering similar solutions?

2. Set a Benchmark 

The next step is to set a benchmark for the criteria you identified earlier. This will be your reference point to compare other leads and gauge their level of qualification.

So, how do you set this benchmark?

• Analyze Your Top Customers: Look at the customers who generate the most sales and revenue. How well do they satisfy the above criteria? 
• Create an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): Use data from these top customers to build a working ICP. This makes it easier to spot hot leads (and score them).
• Use the ICP as Your Benchmark: For example, if your ideal customer’s budget is around $8k to $10k, set this as your budget benchmark. Then, compare other leads to this standard—can they pay right away, do they need some negotiation, or are they just not a fit? 

This will be super helpful when you get to the scoring stage. But before we get to that, you need to gather some information. 

3. Gather Leads Information

Now, it’s time to check if you have enough information to qualify your leads based on your chosen criteria. If not, gather more intel.

For leads already in your pipeline, you can get more information by:

• Checking your website analytics
• Using third-party providers like Zoominfo or Clearbit
• Tracking their social media presence
• Engaging with them directly. 

Don’t forget about incoming leads, too. It’s important to gather as much qualifying information as possible when you’re collecting their details. And the best way to do this? With multi-step lead gen forms on high-intent landing pages.

At Growform, we help you build simple and intuitive multi-step forms that capture all the info you need. Our forms use psychological principles like the sunk-cost fallacy to encourage users to complete the form and provide the necessary information.

Plus, you can link Growform directly to your favorite CRM, so all the info you collect goes straight into your system. This makes the next step (scoring) a breeze—most CRMs have automated scoring tools that handle this for you.

4. Score the Leads 

Lead scoring is a pretty big topic that we’ve covered in detail. You can check out our lead scoring guide right after this. But let’s give you an overview of what it’s all about. 

First, assign numerical values to your leads to see how closely they match your ICP (based on your qualification criteria). To do this, create a grading scale where your ICP score is the maximum. Then, score others based on how they match up. 

For example, if your ICPs are sole decision-makers. You might give them a score of 15 (max). If a lead is in an influential position with access to decision-makers, their score could drop to 10. And if they have limited influence, they might get a 5 (or even a 0).

Then, add up all the points you’ve assigned to each lead to get a single score for that lead.

There are smart ways to simplify this process.

You can use a spreadsheet like the one below to create a comprehensive scoring and grading system. Enter your maximum scores and assigned grades, and the sheet will automatically calculate a score for each lead.

You can also set up lead scoring on your favorite CRM platforms—like Hubspot or Salesforce—so you don’t have to spend too much time on it.

5. Prioritize the Leads 

After scoring your leads, set up a threshold to classify and prioritize them. Here’s how you can group them:

• High Priority: These leads have the highest scores and are ready to be handed off to your sales team for further qualification and pitches.
• Medium Priority: These leads need more nurturing or time, depending on specific criteria they fall short of. For example, they might not actively seek your solution or have enough budget.
• Low Priority: This category includes leads who are unlikely to be interested in your product at all.

Prioritize Your Sales Outreach With Lead Qualification 

Spraying and praying is a bad approach to sales. The best way forward? Qualify your leads, identify those most likely to buy (SQLs), and focus your efforts on them like a laser beam. Sure, it takes a bit of work, but it pays off in the end—both in terms of time saves and ROI.

And remember—before you can qualify leads, you need information about them. If you’re searching for a way to capture lead information without scaring them off, Growform’s multi-step form builder might be perfect.

Sign up for a free trial and see for yourself—no credit card required!