The Definitive Guide to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

How to create a successful lead qualification strategy & framework

Your company development strategy must include a strong lead qualification mechanism. Lead qualification’s ultimate purpose is to give each lead a score, and if a lead has a high enough score in comparison to your ideal buyer profile, sales should be able to contact them.

Step 1: Create buyer personas and segment leads

You can distinguish between two types of leads that are crucial for boosting prospect conversions by using lead qualifying. Sales prospecting will help you identify buyer personas and define new segments for them.

• Lead qualified for marketing (MQL)

  • A lead who interacts with your company, whether through your website, social media, webinars, or advertisements, is known as a marketing qualified lead (MQL). While these are encouraging signs that people are considering your goods and services, they do not necessarily indicate that they are prepared to make a purchase or consent to receiving sales calls. When a MQL is prepared to speak with the sales staff and is considering making a purchase, they transform into SQLs.

• Lead qualified for sales (SQL)

  • A lead with the highest level of purchase intent is called Sales qualified lead (SQL). This type of lead browses several pages on your website, looks at the product pages, downloads brochures, attends webinars, chats with chatbots, subscribes to your newsletter, and potentially does more.

    Your sales staff should concentrate on sales-qualified leads as they have demonstrated the greatest interest in purchasing your goods or service. You can choose which leads you should contact by using the following procedures.

•  Segmenting Leads

  • Gather the leads that your marketing and sales efforts have produced first. The next step is to divide them up into a number of lists depending on the criteria that indicate purchase intent. What ought these classifications be? Every organization has its own high-level segments, but typical ones include leaders that fall into the following categories.
  • Geographic
    • For instance, a nation, a region, a state, and a city.
  • Demographic
    • Age, education, and gender are a few examples.
  • Attitude
    • Examples include product preferences and interests.
  • Technology
    • Desktop, mobile, applications, hardware, and software, as examples.
  • Behavioral
    • For instance, past interactions with competitors and product or service usage.
  • Needs
    • Consider the concerns and values of a product.
  • Value
    • For instance, financial worries and ideals.

• The secret to segment planning is to start broad

  • Do this prospect’s characteristics match those of my industry and demography, for example? You can then build segments around it. Next, think more specifically and consider issues like firm size, industry job description, and previous purchases.

• Keep in mind that you can only receive this information via leads

  • When developing landing pages and gated content that requests lead to fill out forms, keep that in mind. Consider adding a few extra fields that are relevant to your lead qualification strategy in addition to the standard variables you expect, such as name, address, industry, and email address. For instance, “Have you ever used products from the XX industry?

    At the end of the day, this will allow you to target your leads depending on how they view the worth of your goods and services. When your leads are broken down into manageable chunks, you will find it easier to score them and get practical feedback on what makes a good leader and what makes a terrible lead.

    As you gain more knowledge about each sector, you will be able to examine your marketing tactics and improve your messaging.

• Customer personalities and traits

  • The next step is to develop buyer personas using the information points from your segmented data.

    The prospect who performs well on your lead scoring system is the consumer you anticipate will be most likely to convert into a buyer. Depending on how many products and services you offer and the type of lead qualifying platform you use, you probably have many buyer personas.

    Analyze your segmentation to find traits that can be used as crucial data points for lead scoring and use that information to build a buyer persona. You may quickly identify the elements that correlate with a high conversion rate by outlining the obvious features of your ideal customer.

    Even though buyer personas can alter and grow over time, evaluating your ideal client based on both implicit and explicit criteria is a smart place to start.

    Based on marketing involvement and discernible behavior, this standard is implicit. For instance, if the lead accessed a product page, downloaded a report, or took part in a webinar. Implicit lead scoring is crucial because it indicates a customer’s intention to buy and is excellent for tracking interest in your offering.

    Typically, implicit scoring is set up to consider every possible action a prospect might take along the buyer’s journey. For instance, requesting a demo is worth 20 points, whereas actions like downloading a report may only be worth 10. In the meanwhile, skipping a month of marketing emails could cost you 10 points.

• Explicit criteria

  • This compares potential customers to your buyer personas and groups the demographic information you gather from leads – typically through web forms into categories.

    Explicit lead criteria are more difficult to misinterpret. For instance, explicit criteria that are simple to segregate are name, email, job title, and firm name.

Step 2: Score your leads

Each of the criteria listed in the preceding sections is given a value, or “point,” in the process of lead scoring.

Instead of ranking leads according to how much revenue they will bring in for your company, consider which are most likely to convert into customers.

Every lead scoring model you develop should focus on a specific set of characteristics based on your target buyer persona. While many lead scores are based on a point range of 0 to 100.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lead-scoring strategy that works for everyone. Additionally, assessing tens of distinct variables might be a difficult task. Making sure the lead qualification platform you choose has a scoring system that is compatible with the traits of the ideal buyer persona you have developed as well as your lead segmentation efforts are the key to making this work.

For instance, if you discover that prospects who attend webinars convert at a high rate, you might give them 20 points if they did.

However, for a separate company, webinar participation may not be strongly correlated with buyer intent, in which case the lead scoring algorithm will only provide 5 points. It may seem difficult to assign ratings to all the touchpoints, therefore it is advisable to start with the data points that yield the highest score and work your way down in increments of, say, 5 or 10. Your scoring will be predictable and consistent if you do this.

Step 3: Question the lead qualifying process

The following stage is for sales to confirm the preceding procedures during a sales call.

Sales staff should have a clear idea of the prospect’s need or desire for your company’s products thanks to lead scoring. Sales can find out if a lead is ready to buy and how much they know about your goods and services by asking lead qualifying questions.

One important piece of advice is to ask questions that encourage the lead to discuss their main struggles and obstacles. If your goods and services can address these issues, you might have a customer on your hands.

Ask questions to ascertain the situation, problem, the implication of inactivity, and need, or SPIN inquiries. With the use of these inquiries, you can tell whether a lead is actually ready to take quick action to address their problems or if they are only looking to alleviate their pain spots.