How Does Lead Qualification Work in B2B Sectors?

For women leading B2B businesses, strong lead qualification can save time, protect energy and help sales conversations feel more focused, aligned and effective. That means that lead qualification has a vital role to play in allowing a B2B vendor to discern the best prospects.

A good lead qualification system needn’t be complicated, but it does need to involve all relevant stakeholders, especially in the marketing and sales departments.

The lead qualification process typically rests on a set of fundamental frameworks and criteria that allow a vendor to understand if a lead is about to buy.

Below, we explain how the lead qualification works in practice.

Three Stages of Lead Qualification

1. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A warm lead who has engaged with a company’s marketing material, i.e. downloaded a whitepaper or signed up for its weekly newsletter, but may not be quite ready to buy yet and needs further nurturing.
2. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): An MQL typically becomes an SQL in the next stage of the lead qualification process, with the lead checked out by the sales team and considered someone who is on the verge of making a purchase / are showing strong purchase intent.
3. Product Qualified Lead (PQL): Common in software lead qualification circles, a PQL is a user the company knows has derived value from a free trial or ‘freemium’ version of a software product, and therefore is likely to upgrade to a paid version.

Ideal Customer Profile 

At the heart of the lead qualification process is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), the benchmark or series of criteria against which leads are judged.

The ICP will typically feature:

• The definition of the company’s best-fit customer
• The baseline criteria for qualification as a lead

A B2B vendor will often use the ICP in tandem with a framework to qualify a lead and understand if they meet the criteria set out in the ICP.

The original – and still popular – lead qualification framework is BANT, which stands for budget, authority, need, and timeline.

• Budget: Does the prospective lead have the budget and funds to afford the product or service?
• Authority: Which of the company’s employees or stakeholders is charged with or capable of giving the green light to buying decisions?
• Need: Does the lead have a real-world problem that the company’s product or service can address?
• Timeline:How long is the prospective lead expected to take before making a purchasing decision?

Buying Signals

Lead qualification is also about keeping tabs on buyer signals across a multiplicity of channels, both online and offline. The most robust lead qualification processes tend to combine old-school lead discovery with real-time account listening and monitoring.

This means a vendor will track if a prospective lead has recently:

• Visited the company website, especially the pricing or product pages
• Engaged with content published via a content syndication specialist like Headley Media
• Booked a product or service demo
• Responded to marketing emails or other outreach
• Interacted with the company across several digital channels.

Conclusion

Lead scoring in the B2B world is a multivariable and multistakeholder endeavour. When the stars align, and the qualification process suggests the buyer has the intent, pain point, authority, and timing, the lead can be qualified as worth pursuing.

It’s then that the hard yards of sales engagement and conversion begin – where hopefully a qualified lead becomes a paying customer.