You’ve landed hundreds of leads from your latest campaign, but how do you ensure you are not chasing the wrong ones? Lead qualification is the process that helps you skim out the prospects with the highest chances of doing business. It helps you separate the tire-kickers from the real decision makers and the actual buyers from the window shoppers.

Aside from saving time, effective sales lead qualification ensures minimal loss in sales. In fact, Spotio reveals that over 67% of lost sales in the B2B industry result from sales reps failing to qualify leads properly.

Effective lead qualification saves time, targets the right customers, and maximizes sales opportunities —- while focusing on criteria like company size, industry, location, pain points, and purchasing power.

How B2B Businesses Effectively Qualify Sales Leads

The entire process of B2B lead qualification is dependent on two primary factors — Fit and Behaviour.

Technically, Fit assesses how close the lead is to your Buyer Persona in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). As Membrain founder George Brontén says, “Too many salespeople cram any problem into a shape they can claim to have a solution for.” Creating an ICP for your business can help your sales team avoid this trap.

For every business, ICP is developed through structured analysis of the company’s most valuable customers. Based on qualitative, quantitative and predictive data collected from key stakeholders, ICP is used for reference during lead qualification. It is like the qualifying primer, which can streamline your downstream sales and marketing efforts while creating better tactics to convert the highest-value accounts.

Meanwhile, behavior can help you understand how engaged and invested a particular prospect is in your business. For example, someone checking out your product page might just be browsing. But someone checking out your pricing pages multiple times exhibits a higher intent of buying.

The first level to qualify is Fit. If Fit matches with your ICP, proceed to prioritize your leads based on Behaviour. One easy and surefire way of doing this is through lead scoring.

From Data to Deals: How To Excel In Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the method of ranking your sales qualified leads based on their fit with ICP, behavior, sales readiness etc. It comes into the picture once you’re done with inbound lead qualification. A study by Marketing Sherpa reveals lead scoring can offer over 77% higher lead generation ROI.

Let’s picture a scenario. You are hosting two webinars — one introduces your leadership team via an informative chat, whereas the other one is demoing a use case for your product. Of course, the people attending the second one show a higher intent of buying. You can thus prioritize them by assigning a higher lead score.

The most popular mode of lead scoring is based on a points range of 0 to 100. Ideally, you assign a set of points to each step of engagement. Example, you can allot 5 points for 3 page visits within a span of, say, 5 days.

Pro Tip: Always keep a higher negative score for disengagements, like unsubscribing from emails, to weed out unresponsive or dead leads.

Automated Lead Scoring Vs Manual: Which One To Choose?

For years, lead scoring has been done manually in the B2B sales space, based on ‘hunches’ or ‘gut feeling’ of top salesmen. The old school methods worked optimally up to a point. But with the advent of newer lead generation avenues, there was an imminent need for data driven methods in lead qualification.

The table below compares the pros and cons of manual and automated lead scoring in the present B2B sales scenario.

Did you know? Decision Tree says that though it is highly effective, only 44% of companies use lead scoring systems.

Automated lead scoring works best when you have a crystal clear understanding of your ICP and Buyer Persona. Your lead scoring tool will work effectively only if you feed it the right inputs.

Lead Scoring plays a crucial part in picking out leads who show an interest in purchase, and broadly match the ICP. However, B2B sales, especially those with higher ACV, have multiple decision makers. Plus, there are factors beyond buying intent that help close a deal. So, we need more than just a score to efficiently pursue and close a deal.

Once a lead is qualified using lead score, a qualification framework can be used by the sales rep to better understand what other factors would come into play for closing the deal. Accordingly, they can get other stakeholders involved, asking questions to understand whether there is a competitor in the picture or something else.

All You Need To Know About Lead Qualification Frameworks

Lead qualification frameworks help bring a repeatability in understanding what it would take for the buyer to effectively say yes and sign the contract.

The most widely used ones include:

BANT

B – Budget

A – Authority

N – Need

T – Timing

Arguably the most popular type of lead qualification framework, it analyzes leads on the basis of the prospect’s budget, authority, need and timing, in that order of priority.

It emphasizes targeting prospects with the right Budget and Authority, addressing their Need and bottlenecks, and assessing the importance of the solution at the current Time. However, BANT has been criticized for being seller-centric and often disqualifying leads with genuine need and intent.

ANUM

A – Authority

N – Need

U – Urgency

M – Money

ANUM, a seller-centric framework developed by Ken Krogue, prioritizes Authority (A) and Need (N) similar to BANT. Urgency (U) is considered to assess the prospect's need for a solution right now. Interestingly, Money (M) is placed last, making it suitable for leads without a fixed budget. ANUM heavily relies on the salesperson's rapport with the Decision Making Unit (DMU) within the prospect's organization.

MEDDIC

M – Metrics

E – Economic buyer

D – Decision criteria

D – Decision process

I – Identify pain

C – Champion

Much more detailed and rigorous than BANT or ANUM, MEDDIC has been used as a sales lead qualification framework for decades.

“Metrics” evaluates the benefits a prospect can gain from your solution while “Economic Buyer” determines if your prospect can authorize the project expenses.

“Decision Criteria” are the terms and conditions your lead has to finalize on a solution. “Decision Process” involves the steps they follow to make the final decision. It is important for an SDR to know these two attributes of a lead out and out.

“Identify Pain” - is a more sensible way to assess your lead’s urgency for a solution. This way, your SDR can also prioritize companies with a pressing need for your solution.

Finding a “Champion” for your product/service within the lead’s organization is the ultimate win. The best way to do it is to demo your product to the ones who will actually use it everyday, and allow them to organically drive the decision-making.

Apart from these, there are other frameworks like FAINT, ChAMP, or NOTE. Choose the one that works the best for your industry, keeping in mind the ever-evolving nature of the B2B business landscape.

Creating A Lead Qualification Checklist

Using the frameworks mentioned above, create a foolproof checklist for inbound lead qualification specific to your business. According to HubSpot lead qualification tips, your checklist must include the following 6 principles.

Awareness

Before proceeding with a lead, find out if they are well aware of your industry and product.

Budget

Figure out if your lead can afford your product/service.

Authority

Verify if your lead is the ultimate decision-making authority on the expenses or finalization of the deal.

Need

Check if your prospect’s team unanimously agrees that your solution is a must-need for their business.

Roadblocks

Find out specific pain points of your lead and convey how your product can overcome all of those.

Timeline

Subtly establish a tentative timeline for closing the deal with your lead, to ensure the conversion process does not linger on indefinitely.

To Qualify Or Not To Qualify: These Are The Questions

According to experts at HubSpot, this is the 5 questions you should ask your prospects to qualify or disqualify them:

1. What specific problem will our product/service solve for your business?

2. Does your business have a budget allocated for this project?

3. Are you in charge of the purchase approval? If not, can you redirect me to the final decision maker?

4. How urgently do you need a solution for your problem?

5. How will our solution improve daily work at your organization?

Lead Qualification Before Assignment: Why Is It Necessary?

Lead qualification before territory assignment ensures that sales representatives are assigned leads that align with their expertise and target market. This helps streamline the entire sales process.

It increases the chances of successful conversions and improves efficiency by reducing time wasted on irrelevant leads.

This approach enhances sales productivity, maximizes revenue potential, and strengthens customer relationships.

Once you have qualified your inbound leads, a CRM tool like HubSpot can help you assign them to your sales team.

The Need for Lead Qualification

To sum it up, if you’re investing your valuable time and resources on qualifying leads, there has to be more than one benefit of the process. Be it B2B or SaaS, lead qualification can ensure:

• Higher conversion rates

• Better quality leads

• Less wastage of time and resources

• Increased cost-efficiency

• Alignment with sales & marketing efforts

• Enhanced customer experience

Conclusion

In a competitive B2B landscape, lead qualification serves as a strategic tool to bring focus to your already over-stretched sales team and pursue prospects most likely to close, ultimately contributing to your revenue growth and business success.

By investing time and effort in sales lead qualification, you can adopt a faster, more targeted approach to engaging with prospects, ensuring that your valuable resources are directed towards the most promising opportunities.