How to Qualify Leads

Lead qualification is the process of determining whether a prospect has the demand, budget, and authority to buy during their current purchasing cycle. This is the information that you want to uncover during the lead qualification process. Thus, there are four questions to answer during the lead qualification process:

1. Does the prospect have demand for your offering
2. Does this individual have purchasing authority
3. Does the prospect have budget to afford your offering
4. What is the prospect’s purchasing cycle

Technologies have emerged to improve and shorten the lead qualification process. These Search tools include AlphaSense, Tegus, and Bloomberg Intelligence.

Search platforms have significant information about prospect demand. News articles, shareholder calls, press interviews, and marketing campaigns are available and summarized on the platform so you can determine if your offering is among the prospect’s priorities.

A Search platform can tell you about the likely purchasing authority of your prospective buyer. They disclose where the buyer sits on the org chart and what outcomes are assigned to him or her. Search platforms also shed light on the prospect’s budget. The financial statements are provided and disclose how much the company usually spends per budget line, including the professional services budget line.

Search platforms may provide less information about a prospect’s purchasing cycle. That’s because purchasing cycles tend to vary based on the offering. For example, a prospect’s purchasing cycle for accounting services tends to be determined by government filing deadlines. The purchasing cycle for legal services is sometimes driven by external factors such as a lawsuit. Still, you’ll be able to glean some information about timing from leadership’s business priorities, which is available on Search platforms.

You can qualify a lead without using a Search platform, but it will take considerably longer, and you may run into pay walls protecting some of the information that you wish to access. But the questions you need to answer are the same: demand, authority, budget, and timing.