Always prefer quality over quantity. When a buyer chooses to get something for themselves, they always look for a better quality product. The same thing happens with leads as well. When a business organization wants to buy leads, they look for high-quality and credible leads. This is why it is essential to qualify the leads to make sure that they are relevant to a business. Qualifying leads is about gaining insights that are important to make a sound judgment. The question is, how to qualify leads so that you know which one is worth the time and effort to sell to a prospect. A lot of inexperienced salespeople jump into the pitch too quickly without gaining a proper understanding of the intention of the lead — this blog from Leadrop shares best practices on how to qualify leads.

Details on How to Qualify Leads

Knowing the Lead Profile: The first step is, go beyond what your prospect's record lists. To do this, you need to understand how important it is to communicate with your sales team. You have to inquire whether you are dealing with a B2B or a B2C company. How long is their sales cycle? Is the lead a director or an executive? Double check the facts so that it reduces headaches later on. It will help you to be sure that you are selling it to the right person. When you check the lead profile, you will also know to whom you are offering the responsibility, whether it is an intern or an experienced closer. The lead profile gives you a fair idea whether it requires an experienced one or an intern to influence the lead.

The Difference between Interest and Intent: Take a quick look at your prospect records. The records will tell you the activities of the lead. In this way, you shall know what they have been doing on your site. Are they looking at the white papers, webinars or blog posts? Once you see the activity of the lead, you will get to know what interests the lead. However, that doesn’t indicate that the lead is ready to buy. On the other hand, the leads that check the pricing page, or if they request a quote, or product demo on your site then it indicates the intention of buying. The second type of lead has more chances of conversion.

Checking Out their Website: Since we are discussing how to qualify leads, if they have a website, checking out their website is also an essential factor. Checking their site helps you in knowing many things about the lead. Will your services/products integrate with their website? Are you using forms to collect information? Whether they are using a shopping cart or not? What kind of products or services are they offering? Checking your lead’s website is the best way to determine whether they are fit for your business or not.

Inbound vs. Outbound Lead Qualification: Considering how to qualify leads, this one is a pretty fundamental way. Qualifying the leads according to their origin is like sorting the leads whether they are inbound or outbound. This determines how you are going to talk to them and close. You have to learn more about handling leads that have both inbound or outbound origin. Leads that were acquired through cold emails are more straightforward to qualify. There are three categories of leads obtained through cold emails. That includes the following:

1. Interested (“please tell me more”)
2. Potentially interested (“not right now, but why don’t you reach out to me in X time?”)
3. Not interested (“no, thanks”)

Visit LinkedIn: Once you have made it by the initial screening, then it is vital to visit LinkedIn profiles to get more details about the leads. There is no better destination than LinkedIn if you want to get more information about a lead. The prospective customer’s profile will present you with all the relevant data, eradicating all the marketing blabber. The location of the lead is another critical factor to consider while qualifying the leads. Once you know the location, you can identify the cultural differences and time differences as well. Also, you shall have an idea about the position of the person to which who you are talking.

Checking Social Media Platforms: Speaking of how to qualify leads, monitoring the lead's social media platforms is essential to collect additional information. By visiting the lead's social media platforms, you are sure to have more information. When you are speaking to the leads, bring up the additional information but don’t creepily do that. While viewing the social media profiles of different leads, it is important to pay attention to the details.

Research about the Competition: This is possibly the most ignored practice on how to qualify leads. If implemented correctly, this strategy can prove to be extremely useful. You have to know whom you are working with. What are the vendors they have worked with? If you know this, you will get a clear idea on whether the lead is a qualified prospect or not. All you have to do is create a simple, one-page document listing all the critical questions that you want to ask.

Create Quality Landing Pages: Oli from Unbounce says,

Most people will tell you that the fewer form fields you have, the higher your conversion rates will be. This is true in the simplest interpretation of conversion, but who are you actually converting?

Your goal with lead gen shouldn’t be to acquire leads. It should to acquire your ideal and most highly qualified leads.

And sometimes – believe it or not – you need to insert some extra friction to make sure only the very best make it through your form.

Here it is very clear that in order to convert a highly qualified lead from your landing page you need to have enough fields to make sure your lead has actual intent. Here is an example of Leadrop's Personal Loans landing page. You can see the variety of info that we collect before calling it a real qualified lead.

What Happens If You Don’t Qualify Leads?

Now that we have discussed how to qualify leads, let us have a brief idea on what will happen if we don’t qualify leads.

The first thing is, you will be wasting much time following up and trying to sell to the prospects that are not fit for your company. If you spend this time on valuable opportunities, then you can bring more useful deals to the table.

Another reason why it is essential to know how to qualify leads is you will not miss out on opportunities. Some of the prospects only become customers if they see the effort that you are putting to get them on board.

You cannot deny that if you don’t know how to qualify leads, you will not know what they do and how to provide value to them through your services. Moreover, if you don’t know that, you won’t be able to close any deals.