Lead qualification in B2B – the complete guide with a checklist

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A post from the POLISH YELLOW PAGES® blog (formerly DATABOT.PL), originally published on 10.11.2022. Some information (tools, prices, regulations) may have changed since then.

The complete guide to lead qualification in B2B (+ checklist!)

It should come as no shock that not everyone in your database is ready to buy. Statistics show that 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales, which means you may be wasting valuable time and resources. That is why identifying and nurturing B2B leads that fit your B2B business is more important than ever. In fact, it is a key part of your B2B sales.

But here comes the dilemma: quantity versus quality. And while more seems tempting, fewer but higher-quality B2B leads should be your gold standard. In fact, consider generating high-quality B2B leads the most important part of the lead generation process.

Among many other things, this may involve tailoring your marketing campaigns to the target group, i.e. the decision-makers for a particular solution. After all, you don’t want your sales reps talking to people from companies that are not going to buy from you. You want to chase the leads most likely to fill your sales funnel and turn into loyal customers, right?

So if you want to learn the best practices and effective ways to qualify B2B leads, stay with this article to the end.

What is lead qualification in B2B?

Lead qualification (or sales qualification) in B2B is the process of analysing whether a prospect fits your ideal customer profile (ICP) and has the potential to become a long-term, successful customer in the years ahead.

Sales qualification is an integral part of the sales funnel, because it lets you gather relevant information about prospects and identify the most promising ones. At first, potential B2B customers enter your funnel, ideally attracted by organic or paid marketing tactics. Then you need to decide whether your sales team should invest time and energy in outreach — whether by phone, LinkedIn or otherwise.

Lead qualification therefore sits between lead generation and lead nurturing. At the end of the lead qualification process you decide whether to keep or discard that specific lead.

Often lead qualification is mentioned in the same breath as lead nurturing. If you work in B2B sales, think about both topics to optimise your lead process when it comes to new prospects in B2B.

Why lead qualification in B2B matters

Without proper lead qualification your company would be groping in the dark, and in the long run you would be wasting time. Why should your sales team pursue a company that doesn’t really need your product? Or why should they prepare a long sales call only to find out the company doesn’t fit your solution or the decision-maker has already said “no” to buying?

Your ultimate goal is to close a deal, but that opportunity doesn’t come up as often as you think.

Research shows that:

“92% of companies, marketers and sales professionals give up after the fourth touchpoint with a customer, and 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes”.

You can prevent this, however, by gathering the right information about your B2B leads and qualifying them properly. There are of course even more compelling reasons why qualifying B2B leads matters.

These include:

1. Qualifying leads early lets your marketing and sales team focus their energy and time on prospects more inclined to buy your product.
2. It helps prioritise high-value leads that will bring the most business benefit and shorten sales cycles.
3. Lead qualification lets you uncover customers’ problems, challenges and needs, enabling you to improve your product.
4. It helps ensure a more personalised approach to communicating with prospects.

Lead qualification glossary (MQL, SQL, PQL)

Now that we understand how important B2B lead qualification is, we need to dig into the different segments that can be assigned to B2B leads. Lead profiling lets companies define the individual stages of the sales funnel. That is why we have several names for different types of leads. Ready for a bit of technical jargon and acronyms? Don’t worry, it’s not that complicated!

Source: Hubspot

What is an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)?

At the top of the funnel we usually find so-called unfiltered leads — names captured when someone signs up for a newsletter or downloads a white paper on your website.

A marketing qualified lead, on the other hand, is considered a lead with a high probability of becoming your next customer. For example, there will be people who claim a trial version of your tool, visit your website, attend webinars, fill in contact forms in general or talk to you at trade fairs — this above all shows their interest. But if they also fit your ICP and buyer persona, they are MQLs. The magic combination is interest plus ICP fit, which together give a high probability that these leads will become customers.

MQL delivered by your B2B marketing usually occupy the middle of the funnel. This means they are usually curious about your product or service and interact with your marketing across various channels. The MQL is handed over by the marketing team to sales.

What is an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)?

Ideally an MQL becomes an SQL. Sales Qualified Lead is a company that has not only shown strong interest in your solution but has also signalled a willingness to buy in one way or another.

So an SQL really needs your product and shows it! Your sales team can classify the prospect as “sales qualified” after contacting them, for example by phone. Once the prospect has been verified, sales can mark the lead as an SQL. If an MQL reaches sales but does not respond to any attempts by the salesperson to make contact, it will not get SQL status.

Source: Intelus Agency

Indeed, pre-sales, marketing and sales teams must work in tandem to have the best chance of converting prospects. In fact, aligning sales and marketing increases the chance of closing a deal by 67%. Make sure all teams are aligned on the buyer persona and ideal customer profile.

How does it work in practice?

Usually marketing starts collecting leads through organic or paid marketing campaigns — ads, blog content, webinars and more. Focus on an ABM strategy if you want to generate leads that really fit your ICP.

Then, once these marketing campaigns have generated leads (or you have invested in a prospecting tool to provide you with B2B leads), the pre-sales team is usually responsible for taking a closer look at these companies. Do they fit your ICP? Then let’s nurture and qualify them!

Pre-sales then hands its MQLs over to the sales team.

Lead qualification techniques

There are many lead qualification methods and frameworks you can use to determine a prospect’s likelihood of converting. They all work on the basis of certain indicators that help determine whether a prospect should be qualified or not. Here are the three most popular.

What is the BANT sales framework?

Introduced in the 1960s, BANT is a four-dimensional lead qualification framework widely used across industries. BANT stands for:

B – budget (Does your prospect have enough budget to buy your solution?)

A – authority (Who makes the final decision in the organisation’s sales cycle? Identify the decision-makers!)

N – need (Is the solution you offer an answer to the prospect’s problems and needs?)

T – timeline (What is your prospect’s purchasing timeline? How does the purchasing decision process work?)

Companies can use the BANT method to gather relevant information about their prospects and distinguish between qualified and unqualified leads. So if your prospects answer positively to at least three of the four questions, they are considered qualified.

Pro tip: with some prospecting tools you can answer these questions yourself, because you can see important financial data, sales triggers indicating current demand or other indicators for the relevant companies.

However, this lead qualification framework is often criticised as too rigid because of the strict criteria for the “timeline” dimension. Just because your lead isn’t warm enough at the moment, you shouldn’t reject them completely. Instead, you should keep them in your pipeline and approach them when they are ready.

What is CHAMP selling?

CHAMP selling, an acronym for challenges, authority, money and prioritisation, is another sales qualification technique in which the prospect’s challenges have top priority when considering their fit.

Sales reps can use this framework to dig into a prospect’s priorities and problems, determining how the product can help them. With a better understanding of the prospect, sales can identify unique opportunities to help the customer.

Conversely, this methodology puts customers’ business problems ahead of budget, which can be problematic if you sell a high-end product at a premium price. So it can be pretty tricky to adapt it to small businesses or start-ups .

What is MEDDIC?

Finally, MEDDIC is a lead qualification framework that sales teams can use to qualify prospects. The key advantage of the methodology is its intuitive “checklist” design, which allows you to obtain the information corresponding to each stage of the MEDDICsales process. In addition, this sales framework is comprehensive; it is therefore useful for industries and companies that sell products with high average selling prices and want to disqualify poorly fitting leads early. On the other hand, because of its thoroughness and in-depth questioning, MEDDIC can unnecessarily lengthen the lead qualification process and demand extra hours from sales reps.

Source: Meddic.academy

You probably think all is well. There are many proven methods and tactics for qualifying leads, but they are time-consuming and rely on manual data collection. The good news is that with lead qualification and prospecting tools such as Echobot you can speed up and improve the lead qualification process without spending endless resources looking for the best solution. Let’s see one by one how these tools can help you!

DataBot

DataBot is a sales intelligence tool that can raise the level of your prospecting and lead qualification like no other solution.

With DataBot’s smart database of companies and contacts you can effortlessly obtain deep company data such as demographics, financials, company size or location. Many other AI features, such as sales trigger events or B2B lookalikes , take your prospecting to the next level.

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Want to raise your B2B qualification game?

Download our lead qualification checklist to make sure you gather the right information and use it to turn the lead management process to your advantage.

Mariusz Biniak – creator of the POLISH YELLOW PAGES® brand (formerly DATABOT.PL) and author of a blog on B2B sales. Disclosure: the author is connected with the publisher of THE BUSINESS TIME.

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• POLISH YELLOW PAGES® (databot.pl) – original blog post

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