Your Ultimate Guide to Lead Qualification

Everyone is different, and that includes buyers.

That’s exactly why lead qualification is an essential part of the sales process. It allows sales teams – like yours – to work out which leads have a higher probability of purchasing a product or service, and avoid your business spending money (and we mean, lots of money) on cold leads or leads that just won’t go anywhere.

In this guide, you’ll find out everything you need to know about lead qualification; how to define it, why it’s important, the criteria you should be looking at, as well as the process to qualify a lead (or disqualify one).

What is lead qualification?

Lead qualification is the process that sales organizations use to determine whether a lead should be pursued, and how to prioritize it. This includes both inbound and outbound leads – but they have slightly different processes (we’ll go into that later).

If you want to find out more, we go into major detail in our post on What is Lead Qualification and Why is it SO important?

The 3 lead qualification steps

The lead qualification process tests whether a specific buyer from a specific company is 1) right for your business, and 2) ready to buy through three different steps of sales qualification:

• Organization-level qualification: Does the business meet specific requirements, eg. your ICP?
• Opportunity-level qualification: What is their likelihood of buying anything?
• Stakeholder-level qualification: Are you speaking to the right person to make this deal happen?

To determine whether the prospect or organization is the right target for your business, you’ll want an ideal customer profile to hand – and lucky for you, we have an ICP guide and template.

To determine whether they are ready to buy? That’s gonna require some more conversation and fresh data to figure out. And that’s when opportunity and stakeholder-level qualification come in.

Why is effective lead qualification important?

If you effectively qualify leads, you’ll benefit in a bunch of ways, including:

• Better quality leads: According to a study by MarketingSherpa, effective lead qualification can improve the quality of leads by up to 200%. This means that by qualifying your leads, you can focus your efforts on the leads that are most likely to convert into customers.
• Higher conversion rates: A study by HubSpot found that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. This shows that by qualifying your leads, you can focus your efforts on nurturing those leads that are most likely to convert, resulting in higher conversion rates.
• More cost-effective: Another study by MarketingSherpa found that by improving lead qualification, companies can reduce their cost-per-lead by up to 70%. This means that by focusing on the leads that are most likely to convert, you can reduce the amount of money you spend on leads that are unlikely to convert.
• Less time wasted: InsideSales.com tells us that sales reps spend only 35% of their time actually selling. By focusing on quality leads, you can ensure that your sales team is spending their time on the leads that are most likely to convert, reducing wasted time.
• Improved customer experience: According to Salesforce, 82% of customers say that the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services, so when a prospect is a good quality fit, they’ll have a better experience.

5 types of sales leads

There are several types of leads that get fed into the lead qualification process, including:

1. Unqualified leads: The ones yet to be qualified (d’uh) or forwarded onto a sales team
2. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): The ones that are fit for marketing comms like emails, content offers, and more
3. Sales qualified leads (SQLs): The ones that are ready to be put through to a sales rep and start their sales journey
4. Product qualified leads (PQLs): The ones that have registered an interest in your product or solution, eg. with a freemium or free trial sign-up
5. Conversion qualified leads (CQLs): The ones who came to your website and converted by clicking book a demo or similar

Inbound vs. outbound leads

We also mentioned the difference between inbound and outbound leads. The difference comes at the first stage of the sales qualification process (the organization-level stage) where the two are handled slightly differently.

Inbound leads

What is an inbound lead?

Inbound leads are prospects that come in on their own accord, interacting with content and leaving their contact details to learn more about your solution – something that your marketing automation process probably handles. In short: the brand awareness is already there, and the prospect wants to know more.

The team that uses inbound lead qualification processes is most likely the sales operations team, who would take on:

• Receiving leads
• Inputting them into your CRM
• Enriching them
• Qualifying them
• Scoring lead
• Handing over the qualified leads to the relevant salesperson

How to qualify an inbound lead

Step 1: Prioritize

When it comes to qualifying inbound leads, step one is prioritizing each organization you’ve got in your lead list. This means separating the leads that you believe fit into your ICP from the leads you’re not going to actively pursue.

Say you’re selling a solution to improve cart conversion rate, and a lead comes in that fits every single criterion except for the site category, placing them as a non-transactional site. In other words: they don’t actually sell anything on their site so don’t need to improve their cart conversion rate.

Push that ‘DISQUALIFY’ buzzer.

But maybe there’s a lead that fits all your criteria, apart from the amount of monthly traffic. You might still want to qualify them, but at a lower priority.

Step 2: Lead scoring

…and that brings us onto our next step: lead scoring. Lead scoring refers to the process of assigning a point value to an incoming leads to help you evaluate how well they resemble your ICP.

With this insight, your sales and marketing teams can better judge how likely a lead is to become a customer, and therefore know which prospects to focus on.

Here’s an example where we’ve assigned values to each criteria we set:

• (+5) Monthly Site Traffic: At least 500,000 visits
• (+1) Site Language: English
• (+1) Traffic Region: Mostly from the United States
• (+1) Site Type: Transactional
• (+1) Site Category: Lifestyle, health, women’s interests, recipes, decoration, fashion, beauty, children, ecommerce

While your ICP would receive the perfect score of 9, you might still be happy to pursue leads that score at 8.3 or even 7 – you’d just prioritize the leads with the highest scores first.

Outbound leads

What is an outbound lead?

On the other hand, an outbound lead is a lead that your sales team (hello, you) proactively reaches out to. This might mean that an outbound lead won’t necessarily know who you are or anything about your solution, and hasn’t explicitly shown an interest in learning more.

This process is done in full by a salesperson – usually the sales development or business development reps.

How to qualify an outbound lead

Step 1: Combining your lead generation and qualification efforts

For outbound leads, your lead generation efforts and lead qualification efforts become a single process; one that you shouldn’t separate. When you’re prospecting a new lead, you should check if this lead actually matches your ICP before qualifying them.

Then comes that word again: prioritize, before…

Step 2: Lead nurture and lead enrichment

The process of keeping these leads interested and engaged can be a bit manual, but there are some tools out there that can help you out with lead nurturing and enrichment.

Hint hint: Similarweb Sales Intelligence is one of those tools. In fact, lead qualification can help you with every stage of lead qualification, putting you straight in front of your key decision-maker.

How to qualify leads with Similarweb

Similarweb Sales Intelligence helps you with the automated side of things, but also with your (very human) conversation.

As an all-in-one platform for sales, it covers not only lead qualification but also lead generation, lead scoring, and lead enrichment. The features and benefits we think you’d love include:

• Lead generation tool, with over 100 filters to narrow down your search to fit your ICP
• The (proven) freshest data and insights you can find anywhere
• Finding decision-makers for your prospect companies in the click of a button
• Monitoring website performance and opportunities

All the data and insights from Similarweb Sales Intelligence gives you a deeper understanding of your prospects, making sure you have the right prospects in your pipeline and you ask the right sales qualification questions.

Lead qualification criteria

There are a huge number of criteria points that you might want to qualify a lead, but here are some of the more common ones:

• Company size: How big is the company, and are they big/small enough to require your solution?
• Company headquarters: Where is this company’s headquarters located?

Here’s an example of our list of top 100 ecommerce companies in the world, showing how you can filter the companies quickly and see an overview.

• Pain points and challenges: Does your solution solve a particular problem this lead is experiencing?
• Revenue: Does the lead make enough revenue to have a budget for or prioritize your solution?
• Industry: Is this lead in the industry you operate in?
• Geography: Is this lead operating in your territory?

You may also want to look more closely at their website performance and digital presence to qualify leads:

• User geography: Where are the people who visit their website mostly based?
• Website visits: How much traffic is the site receiving every month?
• Unique visits: How many unique visitors are going to their site?
• Device: What percentage of the website views come from mobile devices?
• Bounce rate: Can you spot a higher-than-average bounce rate and why that might be happening?
• Engagement: How many pages does a visitor open on average, and what’s the average time-on-site?

Match the filters to fit your ideal customer persona, including website performance and engagement with Similarweb

• Marketing channels: Is the majority of their website traffic driven by direct shares, referrals, social shares, organic traffic, paid traffic, or display ads?
• Website technologies: What website technologies are they using (or not using)?
• Traffic changes: Can you see an increase or decrease in traffic MoM or YoY?
• Demographics: Is their site mostly visited by males or females, and what’s the average age?

Filter your lists down to your demographic of choice, too.

☝️All those bullet points, just a few examples of the information that Similarweb can give you. Just so y’know.

6 lead qualification frameworks you need to know

BANT

Stands for: Budget, Authority, Need, Timing

What is this lead qualification methodology?: A simple lead qualification framework where you will determine whether the prospect meets any of the four criteria, and to what degree.

Qualification stage: Organization-level

GPCTBA/C&I

Stands for: Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timing, Budget, Authority, Consequences, Implications

What is this lead qualification methodology?: Take a deeper look at your prospect, its resources, and requirements of execution to understand if they’d be a good fit for your company.

Qualification stage: Opportunity-level

ChAMP

Stands for: Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization

What is this lead qualification methodology?: This framework determines if a prospect is ready to close a deal using those four measures.

Qualification stage: Opportunity-level

MEDDIC

Stands for: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion

What is this lead qualification methodology?: Here’s where you can work out if your prospect is actually a potential buyer, rather than just a good fit for your offering.

Qualification stage: Stakeholder-level

ANUM

Stands for: Authority, Need, Urgency, Money

What is this lead qualification methodology?: This is actually a restructured and more customer-centric version of the BANT framework, where authority – or your rapport with the prospect – is prioritized over budget.

Qualification stage: Organization-level

FAINT

Stands for: Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing

What is this lead qualification methodology?: This one’s built under the assumption that decision-makers will always have budget, so your aim is to engage, invest, and convince them with your solution.

Qualification stage: Stakeholder-level

Your lead qualification checklist

Make sure you’re ticking every box next time you qualify a lead with our handy sales qualification checklist.

5 steps to sales qualification success.

Qualify leads more efficiently with Similarweb

We touched on how you can qualify your leads with Similarweb, but in short, you’ll achieve:

A higher quality of leads, and a higher qualify(ing) rate.

Similarweb can support your lead generation and qualification efforts in a bunch of ways, with features including:

• Advanced search: Our lead generator tool with over 100 filters (inc. website traffic performance, website technologies, industries, revenue, company size, and more)
• Contacts: Download the contact information for your whole prospect list straight to your CRM
• Insights generator: Get relevant data and insights to fuel your lead enrichment, outreach and conversations to boost engagement rates
• Competitor analysis: Keep an eye on industry trends and competitors for your prospects to help with your consultative selling approach
• Sales signals: Stay up-to-date with cross-sell and upsell opportunities, as well as other news updates for prospects

To find out more about how Similarweb can work specifically for you and your business, book a demo today:

FAQs

What is lead qualification and why is it important for my business?

Lead qualification is the process of evaluating potential customers to determine whether they have the characteristics and behaviors that indicate they are likely to become a paying customer. Lead qualification is important for businesses because it helps them focus their resources on the most promising prospects, which can lead to more sales and higher revenue.

What is lead scoring and how does it work?

Lead scoring is a method of assigning a numerical value to a lead based on certain criteria, such as their job title, company size, or engagement with your website. The higher the score, the more likely the lead is to become a paying customer. Lead scoring helps sales teams prioritize their outreach efforts and focus on the leads that are most likely to convert.

What is lead enrichment and why is it important for lead qualification?

Lead enrichment is the process of adding additional information about a lead, such as their job title, company size, or contact information. Lead enrichment is important for lead qualification because it helps sales teams better understand their prospects and personalize their outreach efforts. With more information about a lead, sales teams can tailor their messaging and approach to be more effective, which can lead to higher conversion rates.