Quick Tip: 5 Criteria to Consider When Qualifying Leads

How does your marketing department decide when to transfer a lead on to sales? Hopefully, you aren’t like the marketer I refer to in this video, sending every lead straight to sales.

Unfortunately, it happens all to often. In fact, more than 60 percent of marketers send all leads directly to sales. As a result, sales teams waste 97 percent of their time on prospects who aren’t ready to buy.

Instead of just passing everyone on, use an automated lead nurturing program, and only transition leads to your sales colleagues when they are giving the signals of being ready to talk with a rep.

The criteria to consider:

• Need: Does the prospect need our product or service?
• Fit: Are the challenges something we can solve?
• Budget: How much is this prospect able and willing to invest?
• Influence level: Does this individual have the authority to make a purchasing decision?
• Timeline: How soon does this prospect expect to make a purchase?

This blog post gives you more details: 5 Ways to Improve Your Lead Qualification Process.

Our advice: Considering your specific company and customer characteristics, defined what a qualified lead looks like for you and identify the trigger points that would show a lead is ready to move to sales.

Download our Lead Qualification Checklist to put these criteria to work streamlining your process.