Leads are the lifeline of any successful sales organization. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling or who you’re selling to – in order for a company to be successful and generate revenue, it has to have a number of leads that will convert into customers.

With an abundance of leads, however, comes a curious caveat – what sales organizations don’t want is a plethora of leads that aren’t going to convert into customers. That just wastes their time on poor-quality leads.

Consequently, one has to first qualify leads to ensure that they are actually serious about becoming a potential customer, before spending a lot of time trying to engage with and close that lead into a sale.

In this article, we’ll teach you how lead qualification works.

Persona Fit

The first thing to consider with lead qualification is persona fit. One thing that your marketing team should already have built out is an ideal customer persona. Think of this persona as a profile of your most ideal customer that is ready to buy on the spot.

The persona will include a variety of factors stretching from geographic location to gender to age. In the event that you sell to businesses (a B2B company), then your buyer persona would be of a company and encompass things like headquarters location, company size, company industry, and the like.

To qualify the lead, it should meet some minimum requirements in the persona. For instance, if you only work with customers in the United States, no lead that comes in from Europe can be considered a marketing qualified lead.  

Interest Demonstrated

Another way to qualify leads is to take a look at the interest that they have demonstrated. You don’t want to spend a lot of time following up with leads that simply don’t have a lot of interest in the product or service that you are selling.

There are a few different ways to gauge interest, and the ones you employ will vary based on your industry. You could leverage marketing automation to track their browsing history – have they spent a lot of time on your website? In addition, if you add them to an email list and send them email broadcasts, email opens and link clicks could be an indicator of demonstrated interest.

Last but not least, another way someone could demonstrate interest is by reaching out to initiate sales conversations. These are likely to be your hottest leads.

Budget Existent

Finally, your lead also has to have the budget to buy your product or service. It doesn’t matter how interested they are if they don’t have the capacity to pony up the cash. But you get qualified leads that fit your general customer profile, have demonstrated interest, and are willing to come up with the cash, then you’ve got deals just waiting to be closed.

How to Qualify Leads

There you have it! Now that you know how to qualify leads, your sales team can be much more effective in chasing the deals that they know have a high chance of closing.

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