Lead Qualification

What is Lead Qualification?

Lead is your potential customer who has expressed interest in your product or services. You can acquire leads through various channels like blogs, website, landing pages, social media, customer referrals or mobile. The lead source becomes an important aspect in determining whether the particular lead is fit to become your MQL or marketing qualified lead. Each business has set criteria based on which leads are filtered as qualified and not qualified. Leads that are not qualified are automatically discarded from the funnel, while the rest are put into various marketing and sales automation nurturing campaigns. The process of identifying marketing qualified leads and converting them into sales qualified leads is called lead qualification. There are often multiple rules that come into play in determining qualified leads.

Why your business needs to qualify leads?

Every business needs leads that will convert into happy customers later in the funnel. Without leads, there will no customers and your business will stop flourishing. Getting leads is not the most challenging part after all. When your marketing team implements marketing campaigns across multiple channels, you drive in a large influx of organic leads. Add to this, if you have paid ads running, you get leads from these too. Essentially, your leads go through various buying stages before they become sales qualified leads: Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), Sales Accepted Leads (SAL), and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).

Marketing Qualified Leads

Lead that is considered qualified by the marketing team.

Sales Accepted Lead

Lead that is accepted by the sales team for further evaluation.

Sales Qualified Leads

Leads that are qualified by the sales team and are going to be converted.

How to qualify your leads into MQL, SAL, and SQL?

Let’s start from the very first stage. The first stage is visitors. Most marketing teams will agree upon getting a high number of visitor impressions. However, these are not your leads yet. Your marketing team needs to track and monitor these visitors and convert them into leads. Aritic PinPoint has browser fingerprinting technology to help marketers monitor visitors’ behavior and accordingly nurture them with retargeted campaigns. When these visitors convert into leads, they enter your marketing-sales funnel. Based on the lead source, lead behavior, demographics, and other details, leads are first segmented into qualified and not qualified. Each marketing team has a set buyer’s persona which is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer. Leads that inhibit buying intents and also match with the ideal buyer’s persona are categorized as the marketing qualified leads or MQL.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are the leads that your marketing team has qualified for further marketing activities and nurturing campaigns.

Sales Accepted Leads (SAL)

Once the leads start showing strong buying intents, they are passed to the sales team and are accepted by the sales team as valuable.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) are those leads whose needs match with the product or services offered and those that are ready to buy.

Key Lead Qualification Criteria

Need of the Lead

The need of the lead should match with the product or services that you are offering. It should help them solve their impending issues with your offerings.

Interest of the Lead

The lead should show proper interest in exploring your products or services. Activities, like signing up for a trial or taking a demo or browsing through the pricing page, ensure that the lead is indeed interested.

Budget of the Lead

The lead must have a sufficient budget to use your product or services continuously. Factors like lead’s financial details, job details, demographics play a pivotal in determining the budget of the lead.

Timing of the Lead

dentify when the lead needs your product or services. Is it immediately? Or is it after a week or later? This helps in determining the timeline the lead might require to get converted.

Role in Decision-Making

This is one of the most important key pointers in qualifying a lead. Is your lead the final decision maker when it comes to purchasing? If yes, then your lead qualifies as a SQL.

Lead Qualification Practices that Matter for your Business

Lead qualification has essentially two broad qualifications to be done: MQL SQL. The SAL stage that we discussed is more like a sub-stage of SQL. As a result, qualifying leads relies heavily on the degree of willingness and readiness to buy. Usually, this degree is identified as warm, hot and cold leads. In an ideal situation, the total number of marketing qualified leads should coincide with the total number of sales qualified leads. But often sales team discard many MQL leads as non-potential for various reasons, like an optimum budget of the client or the timeline needed to convert. Determining the ideal criteria to qualify your leads can be challenging. You must always know that there is a mandatory balance between the desired quantity of leads and the quality of the contacts you want to get. The stricter you become with the criteria, the lesser junk leads you to get. As a result, you drive your resources towards interested leads more. Often, many cold leads eventually turn warm or hot as a result of marketing campaigns. So, there is no fixed rule but it is essential that you strive to find a balance between these two. Testing, correcting, and again repeating is your key here. Lead qualification methods have come a long way. From BANT B2B sales qualification method, today we have more practical key practices to qualify our leads better. BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timescale. While critics have marked this approach as extremely rigid, the true fact is BANT has evolved to fit into our modern marketing-sales scenario.