One word that every business owner loves all the time in their life is “leads."
Whether it’s a young startup or a unicorn, everyone is chasing leads at any time for their business to sustain and grow.
But will all the leads that come along the way convert? Unfortunately, nope.
Does every qualified lead in the pipeline make sense for our business? That’s also a big no.
Do you know? A whopping 67% of the lost deals is the result of taking unqualified leads into the sales pipeline. That’s why qualifying leads or scoring your qualified leads is a very significant aspect that can make or break your revenue.
In this article, you’ll get to know all about lead qualification, scoring, the difference between qualifying and scoring, the top questions to ask your prospects, and more importantly, how to automate this lead qualification process in this modern sales era. Let’s dive in.
As the term implies, lead qualification is a multi-stage process of identifying whether the prospect has a greater likelihood of making a purchase or not. In simpler words, it’s simply evaluating how valuable a particular lead is and prioritizing based on their willingness to make a purchase.
It can be helpful to check with the prospects to see if they fit into our ICP category, as well as their level of willingness and budget to purchase the product. The end goal of lead qualification is to filter and sort out highly convertible prospects and focus sales efforts on them in return for maximum ROI.
This qualification is a multi-stage process that often starts from the top funnel, which boils down to MQL (marketing qualified leads) for the sales team. These MQLs were filtered based on their engagement and activities with the marketing resources, like contact submissions for gated content, etc. During the sales discovery process, sales reps evaluate the MQLs using appropriate questions to determine which leads have the potential to warrant further sales efforts for conversions.
The best sales teams are the ones that qualify well. Period. Without the right qualifications, whatever sales efforts take place in the bottom funnel will result in a cliffhanger.
The below chart is a typical example of how lead qualification works throughout the sales funnel. Meanwhile, the qualifying process varies for different companies. But this is a basic underlying framework to understand how qualification works at every stage.
Lead scoring is simply a subset of processes that fall under lead qualification.
Understanding when a lead scoring system is necessary can help you understand what lead scoring entails.
Now you’ve already done the lead qualification process, and you've got a handful of potential leads. But still, the problem is that not all qualified leads are going to convert. Many of them are going to drop out in the subsequent stages for a variety of reasons.
Also, if the number of qualified leads exceeds your sales resources, then it is a no-brainer that your sales resources don’t have enough bandwidth to focus on all the qualified leads. In this case, you need to prioritize and sort out the qualified leads who have more chances to convert, and that’s where lead scoring helps.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning a numerical score value for a certain information type or attribute that you gather during the buyer journey of every prospect.
Basically, the information covers two types: demographic information and behavioral information. The demographic information covers the fundamental attributes like job function, role, company size, location, industry, etc. Behavioral information documents every engagement that the prospect has with your website, including marketing collateral, sales collateral, responses to discovery calls, etc.
These attributes may vary between companies depending on the industry and product type you are selling. At the end, you are the one who knows well who is most likely to purchase your product. It’s better to frame the attributes based on that core knowledge and iterate in consecutive stages.
The scoring criteria should include both behavioral and demographic data. Here, we are sharing a basic lead scoring system with key factors to consider. Using analytics tools, you can discover other important criteria in your buyer journey and include them in this scoring system. Make sure to set a threshold score for each stage of the funnel.
Once you have fixed the attributes, assign a numerical score value based on weight and impact, which directly connects to the final conversion. You can also extract this data from your previous conversions and lost deals, enabling you to assign specific factors and scores based on the gathered common data points.
At the same time, don’t forget that the lead scoring system is to uncomplicate the process of prioritizing your leads, not the other way around. So, don’t include too many attributes and factors that you find in the buyer’s journey, which will eventually add more complications to classifying your qualified leads. Adding the right impactful attributes with the right scoring system can only give fruitful qualification results.
As mentioned earlier, lead scoring is a subset of the qualification process. The objective of the qualification and scoring processes is the same: to identify and prioritize the potential leads who have more chances to convert.
Qualifying leads is a fundamental first-level filter that every B2B seller must do by asking the prospects a few right questions. Then only the scoring process comes into play, where it is executed between the qualified leads you’ve already filtered out from the first step.
If your pool of qualified leads surpasses your sales resources, you need to implement the scoring aspect. But anyway, as business and growth mature, every business needs to incorporate both processes into their sales funnel to filter and actively focus on the potential leads that drive revenue.
First and foremost, the need for lead qualification arises when sales teams encounter irrelevant prospects and experience ghosting during the bottom funnel stages. So, they coined the concept of qualifying by asking a set of questions and eliminating prospects who were not on their sales radar.
There are hundreds of questions you can ask every prospect to identify. But it’s impractical to execute in real-time sales. For that, several qualification frameworks are there with a set of effective questions that instantly help you uncover potential leads.
Some of the widely used qualification frameworks were
These frameworks worked well and yielded the expected results of qualifying leads who are worth enough for the further sales efforts. Every B2B company across worldwide were implementing these frameworks and it helped a lot to get rid of bad leads.
Unexpectedly in the last few years, B2B purchasing behavior changed over time, which resulted in a sudden downfall for these traditional systems that worked well years ago. Earlier, prospects had patience and were open to answering questions about whether it’s a BANT, MEDDIC, or anything. However, as a result of the core behavioral changes in recent years, most prospects are unwilling to take calls and answer for 15–30 minutes.
They’ve already done all their research about the product, features, and necessity, and then only reached out to the companies they are interested in. So, if companies are doing the same old framework of questions and adding more friction to these well-researched incoming prospects, it disappoints them utterly, which results in turning down the ‘discovery calls’ or ‘no-shows’ after the discovery stage.
Does this imply that companies should avoid the entire qualification process? Absolutely, not.
Therefore, the key to coping with today's sales and adapting to their new mode of B2B purchasing is to implement a pre-qualification process that is simple, easy, and quick, fitting well into the modern B2B buyers' journey, rather than obstructing them with gateways and adding friction. Most B2B buyers have the clarity to opt-in for a call with SDRs once they’ve gathered enough data from their own research.
The key takeaway here is that the traditional qualification process was so rigid and more likely to be 'seller-centric’ without considering the buyer’s journey at all. It was simply a get-in or-out gateway to eliminate irrelevant prospects. However, this friction has a severe impact on your potential leads. Your modern lead qualification process should be flexible, simple, and more ‘buyer-centric’ that aligns with their journey and adapts to their new behavioral pattern.
These prospects are surely not going to be your ideal, qualified leads. It’s best to frame questions for these answers and prioritize them in your lead qualification efforts. As a result, you can get the most out of asking a few effective questions in the first place, allowing you to eliminate up to 80% of bad leads on your way.
The leads are unqualified if the answers are
The respective questions are:
You can add these questions to the automated lead qualification module inside a digital sales room. To learn how to automate this entire pre-qualification process, refer to the section below.
In today’s sales approach, it has become a necessity to be ‘buyer-centric’, if you want to drive revenue from your sales efforts. If not, the winners are those who are buyer-centric and take better care of their buyers.
The companies are shifting more toward this approach; the use of digital sales rooms in the sales process has become more common today. Here, the digital sales room acts as an organized and condensed space for the buyers to do their research and studies about the product more efficiently, instead of skimming across different websites, reviews, and platforms.
In the end, effective lead qualification is all about asking the right few questions that are more relevant to the buyer’s background and behavior, which will result in a decision about whether they are really qualified to make a purchase or not. So, with the current sophistication of implementing digital sales rooms along with behavioral data, it’s so obvious that we can automate this whole modern-day lead qualification process.
Automated pre-qualification is an interactive questionnaire module that asks a few relevant questions at the right times based on their behavior and interactions inside the digital sales room in their first-time interactions. Based on the collected answers, just like at the end of the survey, you can easily classify and identify the potential leads for your sales efforts. By automating this process, sales teams can save a huge portion of their time and effort spent on discovery calls, most of which are no-shows and irrelevant leads today.
The lead qualification process is very essential for every sales team to achieve sales effectiveness throughout the pipeline. But the key question is: does your qualification process fit in with the buyer’s journey with ease, or is it adding more complexity and friction to their purchase journey? Once you clarify that this is in your existing qualification process and add automation on top of it, you can be easily 10x ahead of those who are still following the traditional qualification frameworks.
Automate your lead qualification process today with buyerstage by signing up for 30-day free trial.
Sell the way your buyer wants, and close more deals faster.
One word that every business owner loves all the time in their life is “leads."
Whether it’s a young startup or a unicorn, everyone is chasing leads at any time for their business to sustain and grow.
But will all the leads that come along the way convert? Unfortunately, nope.
Does every qualified lead in the pipeline make sense for our business? That’s also a big no.
Do you know? A whopping 67% of the lost deals is the result of taking unqualified leads into the sales pipeline. That’s why qualifying leads or scoring your qualified leads is a very significant aspect that can make or break your revenue.
In this article, you’ll get to know all about lead qualification, scoring, the difference between qualifying and scoring, the top questions to ask your prospects, and more importantly, how to automate this lead qualification process in this modern sales era. Let’s dive in.
As the term implies, lead qualification is a multi-stage process of identifying whether the prospect has a greater likelihood of making a purchase or not. In simpler words, it’s simply evaluating how valuable a particular lead is and prioritizing based on their willingness to make a purchase.
It can be helpful to check with the prospects to see if they fit into our ICP category, as well as their level of willingness and budget to purchase the product. The end goal of lead qualification is to filter and sort out highly convertible prospects and focus sales efforts on them in return for maximum ROI.
This qualification is a multi-stage process that often starts from the top funnel, which boils down to MQL (marketing qualified leads) for the sales team. These MQLs were filtered based on their engagement and activities with the marketing resources, like contact submissions for gated content, etc. During the sales discovery process, sales reps evaluate the MQLs using appropriate questions to determine which leads have the potential to warrant further sales efforts for conversions.
The best sales teams are the ones that qualify well. Period. Without the right qualifications, whatever sales efforts take place in the bottom funnel will result in a cliffhanger.
The below chart is a typical example of how lead qualification works throughout the sales funnel. Meanwhile, the qualifying process varies for different companies. But this is a basic underlying framework to understand how qualification works at every stage.
Lead scoring is simply a subset of processes that fall under lead qualification.
Understanding when a lead scoring system is necessary can help you understand what lead scoring entails.
Now you’ve already done the lead qualification process, and you've got a handful of potential leads. But still, the problem is that not all qualified leads are going to convert. Many of them are going to drop out in the subsequent stages for a variety of reasons.
Also, if the number of qualified leads exceeds your sales resources, then it is a no-brainer that your sales resources don’t have enough bandwidth to focus on all the qualified leads. In this case, you need to prioritize and sort out the qualified leads who have more chances to convert, and that’s where lead scoring helps.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning a numerical score value for a certain information type or attribute that you gather during the buyer journey of every prospect.
Basically, the information covers two types: demographic information and behavioral information. The demographic information covers the fundamental attributes like job function, role, company size, location, industry, etc. Behavioral information documents every engagement that the prospect has with your website, including marketing collateral, sales collateral, responses to discovery calls, etc.
These attributes may vary between companies depending on the industry and product type you are selling. At the end, you are the one who knows well who is most likely to purchase your product. It’s better to frame the attributes based on that core knowledge and iterate in consecutive stages.
The scoring criteria should include both behavioral and demographic data. Here, we are sharing a basic lead scoring system with key factors to consider. Using analytics tools, you can discover other important criteria in your buyer journey and include them in this scoring system. Make sure to set a threshold score for each stage of the funnel.
Once you have fixed the attributes, assign a numerical score value based on weight and impact, which directly connects to the final conversion. You can also extract this data from your previous conversions and lost deals, enabling you to assign specific factors and scores based on the gathered common data points.
At the same time, don’t forget that the lead scoring system is to uncomplicate the process of prioritizing your leads, not the other way around. So, don’t include too many attributes and factors that you find in the buyer’s journey, which will eventually add more complications to classifying your qualified leads. Adding the right impactful attributes with the right scoring system can only give fruitful qualification results.
As mentioned earlier, lead scoring is a subset of the qualification process. The objective of the qualification and scoring processes is the same: to identify and prioritize the potential leads who have more chances to convert.
Qualifying leads is a fundamental first-level filter that every B2B seller must do by asking the prospects a few right questions. Then only the scoring process comes into play, where it is executed between the qualified leads you’ve already filtered out from the first step.
If your pool of qualified leads surpasses your sales resources, you need to implement the scoring aspect. But anyway, as business and growth mature, every business needs to incorporate both processes into their sales funnel to filter and actively focus on the potential leads that drive revenue.
First and foremost, the need for lead qualification arises when sales teams encounter irrelevant prospects and experience ghosting during the bottom funnel stages. So, they coined the concept of qualifying by asking a set of questions and eliminating prospects who were not on their sales radar.
There are hundreds of questions you can ask every prospect to identify. But it’s impractical to execute in real-time sales. For that, several qualification frameworks are there with a set of effective questions that instantly help you uncover potential leads.
Some of the widely used qualification frameworks were
These frameworks worked well and yielded the expected results of qualifying leads who are worth enough for the further sales efforts. Every B2B company across worldwide were implementing these frameworks and it helped a lot to get rid of bad leads.
Unexpectedly in the last few years, B2B purchasing behavior changed over time, which resulted in a sudden downfall for these traditional systems that worked well years ago. Earlier, prospects had patience and were open to answering questions about whether it’s a BANT, MEDDIC, or anything. However, as a result of the core behavioral changes in recent years, most prospects are unwilling to take calls and answer for 15–30 minutes.
They’ve already done all their research about the product, features, and necessity, and then only reached out to the companies they are interested in. So, if companies are doing the same old framework of questions and adding more friction to these well-researched incoming prospects, it disappoints them utterly, which results in turning down the ‘discovery calls’ or ‘no-shows’ after the discovery stage.
Does this imply that companies should avoid the entire qualification process? Absolutely, not.
Therefore, the key to coping with today's sales and adapting to their new mode of B2B purchasing is to implement a pre-qualification process that is simple, easy, and quick, fitting well into the modern B2B buyers' journey, rather than obstructing them with gateways and adding friction. Most B2B buyers have the clarity to opt-in for a call with SDRs once they’ve gathered enough data from their own research.
The key takeaway here is that the traditional qualification process was so rigid and more likely to be 'seller-centric’ without considering the buyer’s journey at all. It was simply a get-in or-out gateway to eliminate irrelevant prospects. However, this friction has a severe impact on your potential leads. Your modern lead qualification process should be flexible, simple, and more ‘buyer-centric’ that aligns with their journey and adapts to their new behavioral pattern.
These prospects are surely not going to be your ideal, qualified leads. It’s best to frame questions for these answers and prioritize them in your lead qualification efforts. As a result, you can get the most out of asking a few effective questions in the first place, allowing you to eliminate up to 80% of bad leads on your way.
The leads are unqualified if the answers are
The respective questions are:
You can add these questions to the automated lead qualification module inside a digital sales room. To learn how to automate this entire pre-qualification process, refer to the section below.
In today’s sales approach, it has become a necessity to be ‘buyer-centric’, if you want to drive revenue from your sales efforts. If not, the winners are those who are buyer-centric and take better care of their buyers.
The companies are shifting more toward this approach; the use of digital sales rooms in the sales process has become more common today. Here, the digital sales room acts as an organized and condensed space for the buyers to do their research and studies about the product more efficiently, instead of skimming across different websites, reviews, and platforms.
In the end, effective lead qualification is all about asking the right few questions that are more relevant to the buyer’s background and behavior, which will result in a decision about whether they are really qualified to make a purchase or not. So, with the current sophistication of implementing digital sales rooms along with behavioral data, it’s so obvious that we can automate this whole modern-day lead qualification process.
Automated pre-qualification is an interactive questionnaire module that asks a few relevant questions at the right times based on their behavior and interactions inside the digital sales room in their first-time interactions. Based on the collected answers, just like at the end of the survey, you can easily classify and identify the potential leads for your sales efforts. By automating this process, sales teams can save a huge portion of their time and effort spent on discovery calls, most of which are no-shows and irrelevant leads today.
The lead qualification process is very essential for every sales team to achieve sales effectiveness throughout the pipeline. But the key question is: does your qualification process fit in with the buyer’s journey with ease, or is it adding more complexity and friction to their purchase journey? Once you clarify that this is in your existing qualification process and add automation on top of it, you can be easily 10x ahead of those who are still following the traditional qualification frameworks.
Automate your lead qualification process today with buyerstage by signing up for 30-day free trial.
Sell the way your buyer wants, and close more deals faster.
