If you’re a more recent sales or marketing manager at a B2B company, you’ve probably considered how to strengthen your team’s lead qualification procedure. If you want salespeople to be thorough and consistent in their lead evaluation, a checklist is the best option. But the true challenge is coming up with a checklist that generates higher-quality sales leads and is utilized by your reps.
Our five-step lead qualifying process is simple to use, exhaustive, and supported by data from Gartner, a top global research company. [1-4] It also includes our worksheet for qualifying leads, which assists in sorting leads according to their demographics and level of interaction with marketing materials. We go over the checklist’s usage instructions and the significance of each item for efficient lead qualification.
Table of Contents
A Lead Qualification Checklist: Why use one?
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL) through an efficient lead qualification procedure. Given that, only a tiny portion of marketing-generated leads convert to closed sales, and that roughly a third of sales reps see alignment between marketing and sales teams as a challenge affecting lead quality, successful conversion of MQLs into SQLs is extremely crucial. Our lead qualification checklist is one tool that can assist with these efforts.
STEP 1: Checking if The Lead is Interested?
This first step may seem like a no-brainer. Someone who has viewed your pricing page or downloaded your eBook is clearly interested in your product or service, right?
Not so fast. Research shows that B2B buyers spend an average of six months exploring options before meeting sellers. [3] This can make it tricky to determine whether you’re a finalist in your prospect’s shortlist or simply an early-stage contender.
Luckily, there are tools that can give you a better sense of a lead’s interest and likelihood to buy. Lead nurturing tools determine a prospect’s funnel stage by analyzing the amount of time they spend on your site. Marketing analytics tools with website analytics and engagement tracking are another option. The image below shows an example of one of these platforms.
The following qualifying inquiries can be asked by phone, email, or live chat to determine a sales prospect’s interest even if you don’t have software that can track a customer’s behaviour:
- Are you interested in investing in a [insert your preferred good or service]?
- Could I make a pricing recommendation that will work for you?
- Would you like to know more about our offering?
- You don’t always have to exclude a prospect right away if they respond negatively or don’t answer the question. Consider them a cold lead and come back to them later.
Step 2: Can You Meet The Leads Needs?
It’s time to see if your offering matches, or could possibly match, what your lead is seeking after establishing that they are interested in your product or service. This stage is crucial because if you can’t show how your solution will solve your lead’s problems, both your time and theirs will be wasted.
To ascertain if you can meet their demands, you should ask the following questions:
- What are the short- and long-term objectives for your company?
- What prevents us from achieving these objectives?
- What is currently causing problems for your company?
- What actions are you taking to address these issues?
Instead of first asking your lead about the specific goods or services they are interested in, start by learning about their objectives and obstacles.
You can tailor recommendations using your position as a brand expert. By doing this, you may expand their options rather than forcing them to focus their search on a single item.
It’s crucial to find out what your lead needs before bringing up the topic of the budget. Once you know what your lead needs, you may focus your search by inquiring about necessary versus desirable qualities. By doing so, you’ll be able to give them a selection of solutions that fit their criteria and a more precise notion of what they may anticipate paying.
Step 3: Is The Lead Able To Afford Your Goods or Services?
Our discussion of your lead’s financial capacity to purchase your good or service will come up next. There’s no reason why this conversation can’t be awkward for both you and your potential consumer. Here are some qualifying inquiries you can use to get a lead into the budget discussion:
- Which goods and services do you now use?
- Do you consider the cost you’re paying to be fair?
- What would you consider the best price range for this good or service?
Naturally, asking the lead is the greatest approach to learning about their budget. As you research leads, there are other context cues to be aware of, like as such as the size of their business, earnings, and compensation ranges. You may determine whether a lead should be able to invest in your offering using these numbers.
You can discuss more cheap options with your lead if their budget is incompatible with what they’re looking for and you have those options. A misaligned budget, however, will frequently provide an unqualified lead. You have two options in this scenario: either leave or come back later to see whether their budget has altered.
Step 4: Is the lead ready to make a purchase at this time?
Another crucial consideration for qualifying leads is the timeline. Typically, if a potential customer contacts you, they have done their homework and are There are a few exceptions, such as subscription services, where a lead might not be ready to commit quite yet because they’re still under their contract with another business. Ask the following inquiries in situations like these and others when leads aren’t ready to buy yet:
- Your other provider’s contract expires when?
- Why are you switching service providers right now?
- Do you have any other time restrictions that you have to deal with?
- What happens if you miss your deadline?
The sales procedure may occasionally be prolonged by fulfilment limitations on your end. Be honest about any potential delays and be ready to make concessions with substitutes or discounts.
Step 5: Does this lead to the organization’s decision-maker?
The ability of your lead to make purchase decisions on behalf of their company is the subject of our final phase. Similar to budget, you can occasionally determine this from context cues while researching your lead: Compared to a bookkeeper or office manager, a person in a leadership position is more likely to have the power to make purchases.
However, occasionally a person with purchasing authority will assign someone else the responsibility of doing product or service research. If your lead lacks this authority but can put you in touch with someone who does, you can still qualify them. But before, consider these queries.
- Who selects which goods or services your company should utilize?
- To discuss solutions for your company’s needs, who should I talk to?
NOTE REGARDING LEAD SCORING:
Some sales teams might decide to use this checklist’s contents as a scorecard rather than as an ordered list. You can compare leads to one another based on their propensity to make a purchase using a strategy known as lead scoring. If used in conjunction with a checklist like ours, provided that
Conclusion
Your sales team will gain a deeper understanding of each item on our lead qualifying checklist as a result of the evidence-based advice we’ve offered, helping them to understand why each step is essential for successful lead qualification.
Your download also includes our lead qualification worksheet, which your salespeople can use to document their findings for each prospect. This worksheet contains engagement- and ideal customer profile-based lead qualification criteria.
We advise adding this blog article to your team’s library of materials for future use as well as using it to augment your team’s sales training.
