What is Lead Qualification?

Before we dive into the advanced side of things, it’s important to understand the basics of qualifying leads. Your team is probably fielding prospects from several different channels like website traffic, social media, newsletters, and professional networking. Lead qualification is the process of taking your prospects and determining which are viable sales targets.

A successful company understands not every lead is going to be a good fit for their products, and that’s completely okay. Lead qualification helps limit the time your salespeople waste on nonviable prospects, enabling the sales team to hone in on high-quality leads. By focusing on leads that are most likely to convert to a purchase, your team will drive revenue and increase ROI.

Your team should have a solid understanding of your ideal client profile before getting started with advanced lead qualification tactics. These, along with data analysis, will play a large role in the success of this strategy. Data is extremely valuable, and using it to its fullest potential can help set your company apart from your competitors.

Rather than allowing your sales team to simply guess about lead viability, data-driven qualification can help with the process. Incorporating this with automated software will boost your ROI by eliminating repetitive tasks while freeing up your salespeople to do more selling.

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Closing a deal is your sales team’s primary focus. This means you need a comprehensive strategy and the tools to handle most of the labor around lead qualification. 

At the beginning of the sales cycle, prospects may be pushed into the funnel from a variety of sources. Your company will want alignment between the sales and marketing departments to determine who is the target audience and what your ideal customers look like. 

This helps your team push the leads who are most likely to convert through the pipeline promptly. While your marketing team can’t control the quality of every inbound lead coming through, they can try to target based on your specifications to reach ideal prospects. Once a lead is captured, your team can rely on data to qualify and score it, which will help prioritize their efforts.

Qualifying leads can be based on several factors, and your team will need to determine the criteria that best align with your company and the solution it provides. This should include things like contact information, website engagement, and buying power. 

Adding to your tech stack for this work can be extremely beneficial. Lead qualification sounds like something that would take up resources, but with the right software, it can be automated. Using lead qualification software can also cut down on human clerical error as well as boost the overall quality of the leads being passed to your salespeople. 

A team with a basic understanding of lead qualification would most likely consider a high-quality lead to be one with accurate contact information that expressed interest in your products. This is a great start, but with such a broad scope, if your team only adhered to these standards, you may be chasing down nonviable leads without even realizing it. 

Breaking Down the Process of Advanced Lead Qualification 

Advanced lead qualification helps your team dive further into your leads by collecting and analyzing data, which is used to assess the prospect based on predetermined criteria. The goal is to better understand the likelihood of a lead converting to a purchase. This is where the right lead qualification software can make a huge difference for your team.

Leadboxer features qualification within the platform, which focuses on collecting important information about a lead as it comes into your funnel. This information can include a company profile, timeline, and even interests. While contact information is great, utilizing advanced lead qualification tactics takes it a step further by providing your salespeople with a robust picture of each prospect.

Capturing leads and creating profiles by using data is one way to pull ahead of the pack in a competitive industry. Chances are several B2B companies are providing similar solutions and trying to reach out to the same prospects. By allowing Leadboxer to help with data enrichment, your team will be able to work off the most up-to-date information when reaching out to leads. 

This valuable data can be used in multiple ways by your team, which will play a role in bettering the sales process and helping to generate high-quality leads. Enrichment helps your company make data-driven decisions, especially for things like marketing campaigns and sales outreach. Using automation to create a comprehensive view of your target audience can guide your efforts in identifying the best prospects.

You’ll also be able to determine the stage your leads are at in the process. This is incredibly important for your sales team since it will help them time their outreach. Not every lead is going to be ready to convert immediately, but that doesn’t necessarily disqualify them from your sales funnel.

Knowing the stage of the cycle for your leads includes understanding their buying ability as well as the timeline needed for their solution. For example, a prospect may say they’re in the market for a product immediately, but their financial situation doesn’t meet the requirements for purchase until the next quarter. This means your team would need to focus on nurturing the lead and then closing the deal when they’re ready.

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Using advanced tactics helps your team better understand the sales cycle of your leads, which can pinpoint when leads are ready to convert. This allows your sales team to plan their strategy, including the nurturing and outreach needed to close the deal. All of this data is assessed against predetermined criteria, which your team will have the ability to create based on your company’s needs.

What are Filters and Segments?

With Leadboxer, the goal isn’t to add more leads to the top of your pipeline but rather to convert more prospects into opportunities. This means closing more deals, driving revenue, and seeing a higher ROI. It also leans on lead management to help nurture these potential clients until the time comes for them to make a purchase.

Starting with the lead qualification process, Leadboxer uses filters and segments to determine if a prospect should move forward or not. Your team sets these parameters to narrow down the leads in your pipeline and prioritize those that best fit your business.

Filters can be used in the Leadboxer Leads view to help search your current pipeline. The filters are based on data in the lead’s profile, which can then be utilized to score the prospect. These filters include profile data like company name, employee count, and location. They also include activity information like website visits and which channel was used to enter your site. 

From here, your team can combine filters and save them to create a ‘segment’. This allows you to use this data to qualify your leads based on the criteria your team sets, and you can create multiple segments. Leadboxer creates default Top Leads, which filters out leads without a known company, and Target Audience, which is set based on the values your team chooses when onboarding.

There are also quick segments, which allow your team to create a list of predefined criteria to easily sort based on commonly used filters. All of these functions can be used to qualify and manage your leads effectively, which will help improve the overall customer journey for your prospects.

Utilizing these features from Leadboxer also helps your sales team stay aligned with their goals. If you have multiple salespeople, you’ll want software that can be combined with your tech stack to make sure everyone stays on the same page. Leadboxer can integrate seamlessly with your CRM to help enrich and qualify leads while also allowing your entire company to have access to the captured data. 

To learn more about Leadboxer’s advanced lead management tools and all the platform offers, sign up for your free Leadboxer trial today!