How to qualify marketing leads before sending them to sales

Fit is about the organisation or household: industry, size, location, the kind of business you have served well before. It is the easiest to check and the most often ignored, and it is why sales spends afternoons with prospects who could never buy. Need is the problem in the buyer’s words: what they asked for, and whether it is something you actually solve. Authority is who you are speaking to: the owner, the plant head, a junior asked to collect quotes — the last is not a rejection, it is a nurture lead with an introduction to be earned. Timing is when: now, this quarter, this year, no idea. Engagement is behaviour: they read three pages, they asked a specific question, they replied to the follow-up, they came to the site twice — evidence of interest that a form field cannot give.

Score them simply. A tick for each signal present, a note where it is unclear. A lead with four ticks goes to sales today; two ticks with timing missing goes to nurture; fit missing goes to a polite decline. Elaborate scoring models are for volumes an SME does not have.

The form asks one qualifying question, at most — the one that checks fit or need most cheaply: “what do you need made?”, “which treatment?”, “roughly how many units a month?”. More questions lose the serious buyers along with the unserious ones. Behaviour is read from the tracking: which pages, how many visits, which source — a visitor from a specific search who read the pricing page is a different lead from one who arrived from a general social post and left. A person checks the rest in a five-minute call within the hour of the enquiry: the need in their words, who decides, when, and what they have tried — asked plainly, because most buyers answer honestly when asked early.

The call is the method that works for SMEs, because the volume allows it and because it is also the response the buyer wanted. Qualification and first contact are the same conversation.

Routing: a sales-ready lead is assigned to a named salesperson in the CRM within the hour, with the qualification notes attached — need in the buyer’s words, who decides, timing, what marketing promised — and the salesperson acknowledges it the same day. If the salesperson is out, it routes to the next; a lead waiting for someone’s return is a lead lost. Rejection: a lead that fails fit is told so kindly and, where possible, pointed somewhere useful; a job-seeker gets the careers page, an out-of-area enquiry gets a referral. Recorded, so the marketing that attracted it can be adjusted. Recycling: a nurture lead gets a follow-up rhythm matched to its timing and a review date; when it engages, it comes back through qualification and on to sales.

Feedback closes the loop: sales reports weekly which qualified leads turned out to be real and which did not, and the standard and the campaigns are adjusted. Qualification is a living definition, not a form.

The mistakes: no written standard, so “qualified” means whatever the last argument decided; a nine-field form doing the qualifying and losing the buyers; passing every enquiry to sales, so they stop calling any of them; rejecting the “not now” leads instead of nurturing them, which throws away a third of next year’s customers; and never feeding back, so marketing keeps attracting the same wrong crowd. A safeguard: once a month, read ten leads that were rejected and ten that were passed, and check the standard was applied.

Good qualification produces fewer leads reaching sales, a higher share of them becoming quotes, a salesperson who trusts what arrives, and a nurture list that quietly produces customers every month. This is the lead-lifecycle design we do with SMEs: the standard written with both teams, the form question, the behaviour tracking, the qualification call script, the routing and recycling rules in the CRM, and the weekly feedback — and the free audit starts by sorting your last fifty enquiries against it.