What does Lead Qualification mean?

Are you effectively funneling enough qualified leads to sales, given your database's size?
Issues in coordinating lead qualification and insufficient data sharing can restrict your ability to capitalize on the full potential of your database.

What is Lead Qualification?

Lead qualification is checking if potential customers (leads) match your product or service well. It's a part of lead management, which helps you figure out which leads are most likely to buy, so you can focus your sales and marketing efforts on the right people.

Lead Management Process. Source: Zapier

Lead Management is the process of capturing, tracking, and nurturing leads through the sales funnel, to convert them into customers. It includes:

1. Capturing Leads: Collecting contact and behavioral data (explicit and implicit) through forms, emails, and website interactions.
2. Lead Qualification: Assessing which leads are most likely to convert based on their interest, needs, and readiness to buy.
3. Nurturing Leads: Engaging leads with targeted content and communications to move them further down the sales funnel.
4. Converting Leads: Closing the sale and turning qualified leads into customers.

HubSpot helps streamline lead management by tracking, scoring, and segmenting leads, allowing you to focus on the most promising opportunities.

Capturing Leads

Defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is key to collecting the right data on your leads. Start by capturing essential information, HubSpot can help by enriching your data later with tools like Breeze AI.

For details you can’t capture upfront, use techniques like dependent fields or progressive profiling to gather more information over time. This helps you better identify leads that match your ICP and improve your qualification process. 

The information you want to gather can come from Explicit or Implicit Data:

1. Explicit Data:

   • Information that leads provide directly.
   • Examples: Name, email address, job title, company size.
   • Source: Form submissions, survey responses, or chatbot interactions.
   • Use: Helps categorize leads based on demographics or firmographics.
     
     

2. Implicit Data:

   • Information is gathered through behavior and actions, not directly stated.
   • Examples: Website visits, content downloads, email clicks, demo requests.
   • Source: Website tracking, email engagement, or product usage analytics.
   • Use: Helps assess a lead’s interest level and buying intent

What are the key elements of lead qualification?

As you can see, after generating leads and capturing their essential data, such as email and name, the next step in Lead Management is to qualify those leads. Qualifying your leads involves understanding:

1. Who They Are: Do they match your ideal customer (job, company size, location)?

2. What They Need: Does your product or service solve their problem?

3. Interest Level: Have they shown interest (visited your site, opened emails)?

4. Buying Readiness (BANT):

• Budget: Can they afford your solution?
• Authority: Are they the decision-maker?
• Need: Do they genuinely need your product or service?
• Timeline: Are they ready to buy soon?

5. Actions Taken: Have they done things like signing up for a demo or free trial?

And how can you discover all of that? This comes with the step above, by capturing data to analyze their behavior and characteristics.

Various tools can help you qualify your leads, and a good starting point is using your own CRM. From there, you can build and integrate your customer journey within your platform, making it easily accessible to your marketing and sales teams.

 How to qualify your Leads in HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the leading CRMs nowadays, and we, as a HubSpot Gold Partner, are fans of all its features and possibilities for qualifying leads inside the platform.

In HubSpot, lead qualification involves capturing data through forms, chatbots, website tracking, and email interactions.

First, make sure you and your Sales and Marketing teams have clear definitions for each stage in your Lead Funnel. What counts as a Lead, MQL, and SQL in your company? Use the template below to work together and define them clearly.

Once you have the criteria well defined, you can configure your Lead Settings In HubSpot by following the steps on this HubSpot article.

This article explains the meaning of Lead Qualification and how to set up lead management in HubSpot for users with Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise subscriptions. It covers how to manage lead properties, set lead ownership, customize lead forms, and configure lead stages and qualification settings. You’ll also learn how to automate lead progress, create workflows, and sync lead activities.

The guide includes steps for using advanced features like pipeline rules and custom lead pipelines (beta) to keep your data organized and improve reporting. Clear instructions are provided to help streamline your lead management process.

Techniques and Resources for Your Lead Qualification

Here are three key techniques for lead qualification:

1. Lead Scoring

• Assign numerical values to leads based on specific criteria like demographics, behavior, and engagement.
• HubSpot Feature: Use HubSpot’s lead scoring tool to create rules that automatically assign scores to leads based on their interactions (e.g., email opens, form submissions, or specific page visits).
• Example: Leads who visit your pricing page or download a whitepaper might score higher.
• Helps prioritize high-quality leads that are ready for sales outreach.

Learn more about Two-Dimensional Lead Scoring.

2. Lead Segmentation

• Group leads into segments based on shared characteristics such as industry, company size, or job role.
• Use AI tools (e.g., HubSpot AI, Thalox) to predict and automatically segment leads based on engagement level.
• Enables personalized communication and more effective targeting for marketing and sales efforts.

Example: AI can identify patterns in data and segment leads into categories like "high engagers" or "Dormant potentials."

3. Behavior-Based Qualification

• Track lead interactions with your content, emails, and website to gauge intent.
• Example: A lead booking a demo or responding to a follow-up email signals strong interest.
• Focuses on active leads showing clear purchase intent.
• You can create lists and workflows to keep nurturing the leads who are engaging with your content.

These techniques can facilitate lead qualification and ensure you focus on the most promising prospects.

HubSpot Curses for Lead Qualification

To learn more about Lead Management and Lead Qualification, check out these courses on HubSpot Academy:

Lead Management and Lead Qualification are key to keeping your lead funnel running smoothly and ensuring your sales team gets the right leads. If you're not sure what Lead Qualification means or need help getting started, we're here to assist you.