Let's start off by remembering what we mean by B2B lead qualification.
B2B lead qualification is a process by which salespeople, usually
outbound or
inbound sales representatives, determine if the lead or prospect is a good fit for your product or service. If they are likely to become an actual paying customer.
By doing this early on in the
sales funnel, salespeople are able to narrow down their focus to the actual possibilities in their
pipeline that have higher chances of converting.
For outbound salespeople, this can happen when they're in the process of building their contact list based on the
ideal customer profile. Because they are targeting specifically, and they have control of the process from the get-go, it is a lot easier for them to qualify from early on via
tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator. They then begin the prospecting process via cold calling,
cold emailing, and other avenues,
such as LinkedIn.
For inbound sales teams, a good idea is to have your
lead-generating form on your landing page be fairly exhaustive. A good example is this
form by SalesPipe because there is lots of information there that would help inbound sales reps know if it is a realistic prospect. For instance, employee size is a great tell to see if the company would actually need and be interested in purchasing your product or service.
But sometimes, to increase lead generation, companies may decide on a more minimalistic approach to building inbound leads. This means sometimes sales teams for inbound may only have an email to go on. These can be sometimes easy to figure out: if several forms with the same email address with little variation are coming in, or when you add them to your newsletters the email is nonexistent, you can then tell they are not qualified leads.
It does make it difficult and time-consuming, however, as does having a calculator on your website to obtain the information of these leads. One person can calculate your pricing several times, so your inbound sales team has to be careful when picking the messaging to follow up.
So how do you go about qualifying leads more firmly? Let's take a look at some tips for how to successfully qualify B2B leads.