Guide to Sales Qualification

Therefore, for understanding this filtering process and ensuring that you effectively use your time on each lead, you should sell strategically by determining whether a prospect is a good fit for your project/service or not - this is called qualifying leads. That’s where sales qualification comes in.

So, is the sales qualification as vital for successful sales as experts say? What is the sales qualification definition? How to qualify leads during the lead qualification process? Can you qualify sales leads without specific tools? Is qualifying sales leads a difficult task and what stages does it include? Are sales qualification and lead qualification process different or synonymous?

Let us find it out together.

What is the lead qualification?

Lead qualifying, or lead qualification process is one of the most important stages of any successful sales strategy. This is a process of understanding your product/service and customer market, as well as buyer personas, deep enough to know whether a lead fits your ICP (ideal customer profile), has a chance to become a customer, and, what is more important, can be converted into a long-term customer or not. Thus, before calling a potential client, take time and make research on them, their business, market, the size of their company, geography, needs, etc. Lead qualification is absolutely crucial as it helps you with the next points:

• You definitely will not waste time on prospects that will never buy.
• If you complete sales qualification correctly, you will know what to expect from qualified leads and what the deal size will be.
• You will not close the deals that can have a really damaging effect not only on your career but also on your company (people can write bad feedback about your product or ask for a refund).
• You will know who your real target audience or target company is, so you can adapt your sales strategy and marketing efforts based on data you got by sales qualification and process qualified leads in a more comprehensive way.
• You will understand how to sell to your qualified leads because they are already qualified to the degree where you have a clear understanding of what kind of organization/person they are and how your product can solve customers’ pain points.

Levels of sales qualification

1. Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). For optimization of the sales process, every company should develop its ideal customer profile - the best way to ensure that you are focusing on high-quality qualified leads. While creating ICP, you should keep in mind next things:

• To determine whether your qualified leads have a need for your product and are willing to pay for it.
• To understand what benefits from your product will qualified leads have and whether it will solve their challenges ( i.e. to reduce expenses, to increase productivity, to improve the overall performance of the business, to win the competition, etc.).

Sales qualification (lead qualification process or qualifying prospects) will help you to define an ideal customer and will help not only to target the right type of qualified leads but also to make the buying process much easier and much more effective.

To avoid any questions for the future, before we start discussing sales qualification frameworks, let’s define some vital terms. Such popular definitions as “lead” and “prospect” are, surprisingly, not synonymous. Leads are those people who remain at the top stage of a sales funnel, so they know about your product and can become customers in the future, but they haven’t been processed via the sales qualification framework yet. Thus, prospects are those who have already passed through the sales qualification process, and therefore, they are very likely to purchase from your brand. Some experts also say that the term “qualified lead” is identical to a sales prospect, but there is also a dissimilar point of view - qualified leads could be processed by sales qualification, but not be prospective customers because they don’t feel a current need for purchasing your goods or just don’t have enough budget at the time. Nonetheless, they are still very valuable qualified leads, because they have a high potential of becoming your buyers in the near future, so the lead qualification process is also vital as a long-term strategy.

1. Applying the right lead qualification framework. Establishing the right lead qualification framework is an essential part of the qualifying process. With the help of it, a sales representative is able to determine if a prospect is likely to become a successful customer or not. There are different methodologies for qualifying sales leads such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing), MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identifying pain, Champion), CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization), ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money), etc. For a better understanding, let’s have a closer look at the first and most popular one.

BANT is a sales qualification framework used by a vast number of companies in a variety of markets. It stands for:

• Budget. At this stage of sales qualification, you determine if a prospect has the proper budget for purchasing your product or service.
• Authority. At this stage of sales qualification, you should not only qualify for authority, but also fully understand a decision-making process, i.e. who signs a contract, authorizes it, and who writes the PO (purchase order) - so who is the decision-making authority?
• Need. You need to define the prospect’s challenges and needs and whether you can provide them with a solution when it comes to the “need” phase of sales qualification. The purpose of the following point is to single out your prospect’s goals, work out what has already been done to achieve them, and make suggestions for improvement by offering your product or service.
• Time. Asking your prospect questions about their deadlines and the time they are planning to buy a product, enables you to maintain proper control of your sales process and create a bit of urgency.

MEDDIC is a sales qualification technique that also allows you to provide sales qualification quickly and with a deep understanding of your qualified leads. It can be described as:

• Metrics. This part of the sales qualification process requires you to understand what metrics can be used to describe the real benefits of your offer for the buyer. For instance, a buyer wants to reduce operational costs by 15% and improve the productivity of the marketing team and sales team by 20%. These metrics can be used to describe the value of the solution offered.
• Economic Buyer. You have to define the person who is the true economic buyer in the company you want to become your client at this initial stage of sales qualification. In other words, this person should have enough authority to make a buying decision on their own to ease the work. Thus, try to reach out to this person from the early beginning to build rapport, and define the personal preferences of this person and the communication style they prefer.
• Decision Criteria. You are not the only one who reaches out to decision-makers with offers. It is highly likely that even your direct or indirect competitors also try to sell their solutions to the same prospect, and that’s why such prospective buyers have a few solutions to choose from and often spend time comparing them to find the best fitting one. Therefore, you have to find out what are the criteria of their choice. Yes, all companies are different, but in most cases, it all depends on money - potential Return on Investment (ROI), saving of operational costs, but it could also include ease of use, integration capabilities, speed of setup, SLA conditions, scaling up opportunities, and your readiness to update the solution in accordance with customer’s individual needs and requirements.
• Identify pain points. For instance, you know that customers lose their clients due to poor customer service that can’t handle all existing complaints. It is difficult to make a sales pitch based on this data if you don’t have exact numbers. But if you identify during the sales qualification process that your prospect loses around 4-5% of clients per quarter, it can be a very powerful thing to use - if your solution is truly capable of reducing customer churn to appreciated rates. This lead qualification process phase is necessary to process.
• Champion. This part of sales qualification is, perhaps, the most challenging, but also one of the most essential. You have to find a man inside the organization who will be your advocate and promoter as well. This is the man who suffers the most from the problem you are trying to resolve (as we mentioned customer service issues in the previous paragraph, let us say it is the customer service department chief) or the one who is most likely to get all the benefits from implementing your solution. This man can convince other decision-makers to make a final purchasing decision in your favor, and that’s a very powerful factor that should not be ignored.

Mastering questioning techniques. Best sales qualification queue to ask

Every salesperson needs to learn how to ask the right sales qualifying questions in the right way to reach sales targets. By using questioning techniques, you will be able to engage a prospect in the conversation and, thus, get more valuable information. There are three types of questions:

• Open-ended questions. For avoiding mere “yes” or “no” answers, use questions that start with what, who, where, when, why, and how. For example, “How long have you been facing this issue?”
• Closed questions. They are used to follow up on open-ended questions and qualify the responses. An example of it can be “Taking into consideration all your requests, would you like me to find the best solution for you?”
• Conditional questions. This type of question creates a sense of urgency and helps to clear up doubts. Make an offer providing a special benefit and requiring immediate purchase. For example “Will it work for you if we offer a 10% discount?”

But to make it more comprehensive, let's find out what are the best questions to ask for sales qualification.

1. What is the problem you are going to solve? This vital sales qualification question is needed to understand how the lead understands and explains the issue or pain point. That will also let you find out what is the best way to present your offer and learn if it is a real solution to customer problems. This is where sales qualification starts in most cases.
2. Why is now the time you have decided to deal with the issue? The sales qualification process also requires you to understand why the prospect decided to start the issue resolution process at this exact moment, not earlier or after. It can point to vital changes in management, key positions of decision-makers, marketing changes, or actions of competitors. Whatever it is, it is also useful data for you for further sales qualification and the successful close of a deal.
3. Have you already tried to resolve the problem earlier? If yes, why was not this attempt successful? This is a vital sales qualification question, at least because it helps uncover the previous steps of the prospect focused on problem resolution and understand what is their current stage of the customer journey and what kind of customer experience they would like to get. If that was a solution that was similar to yours, you can seek the weak sides of that solution to explain why your offering is better and will work as it has to for sure. If that was an alternative way to solve the trouble, you can now easily overcome most customer objections and prove that your offer is the only working solution available.
4. What are the deadlines you want to set for the problem-solving process? This sales qualification question helps in two ways: it allows a sales manager to learn what is the urgency level for the issue - it is significant to know it because if there is a hurry, you have a very high chance to close the deal successfully within a few meetings or even calls. Another benefit of this sales qualification question lies in its ability to show you your time frames for setting up and providing solutions - it is especially essential for SaaS (Software as a Service) providers who often update or configure software tools based on the personalized needs of every customer.
5. Who are the decision-makers and stakeholders involved in making the final choice? This is a direct and important question to find out who you have to convince. Moreover, at this sales qualification stage, you have to discover who has the right to the final word and reach out to this person directly or try to influence his or her opinion.
6. What is your budget? Very important sales qualification question to define if there are any issues with the budget. It is absolutely normal to discuss the budget in B2B sales, and that’s also how you can understand the following facts: maybe, the prospect will have the yearly budget defined only in the next month, so you have enough time to convince the main decision-makers. Also, if the budget is too low or the company needs to allocate it for some other purchases, you can offer a discount to show your readiness to seek compromise.
7. What are the other solutions you also review as potentially suitable for you? This will help you to understand what your strong sides can be used as an advantage, and what potential objections you may have to handle. Knowing what the competition looks like is better than coming into it with blind eyes.

Use tools to automate and enhance the sales qualification

When it comes to a sales cycle and sales frameworks, you can’t deal with all the work manually and without specific tools. First of all, you need a tool that will allow you to reach out to all your potential customers to use all the sales opportunities. Your sales reps need to have access to all customer data by using a single interface tool that will include all vital information needed to get sales qualified and close sales deals successfully.

As sales qualification means that you're the party that comes to potential prospects, you need a tool that will ease this process. It can be an auto dialer, in either Power or Preview mode to make sure that you are going to reach out to all qualified leads (qualified prospects can be used as a synonym too). This is an auto-dialing tool that automates the calling process, and in the case of the Preview dialer, it is also a tool that will show all customer data before each call. Moreover, it will let you get higher conversion rates - over 2,5% compared to less than 1% manually, and higher success rates (connection rates) - from 50% up to 75% compared to less than 30% manually.

Power and Preview dialers are integrated with a call center solution, so it means that you can also process inbound leads without any effort - your sales professionals can switch between inbound and outbound lines in a few clicks to service all prospects. Also, you get a CRM system integration with this solution, so all customer information can be easily gathered, qualified, and processed. Thus, you can also gather all qualified leads in the CRM software after the sales qualification process is completed.

Sales success depends very much on effective sales qualifications. Therefore, the ability to find appropriately qualified leads that will not only increase the revenue of your company but also bring referrals and the possibility of cross- and upselling. Start following our sales qualification tips and get on top of sales. Moreover, we are going to describe other sales qualification frameworks in more detail in our upcoming articles. But what you need to know is to learn the capabilities of an all-in-one call center solution that will drive your sales qualification efficiency forward and help you generate much more sales than ever before.