What is Lead Qualification in Marketing - and Why is it so Important?

No matter what kind of business you run or the types of products or services you sell, your ability to generate qualified leads will be a large contributor to your success. 

So just because you’re generating a large list of leads after learning how to use an email scraper, it doesn’t mean a whole lot if they’re not qualified and could actually convert to potential buyers. 

Continue reading through this guide as we go deeper into what lead qualification entails, and why it’s so important during the lead generation process for your business. 

What is Lead Qualification in Marketing?

First let’s discuss–what is lead qualification in marketing? The term is a little self-explanatory, but it involves the business process of assessing and ranking leads to determine their likelihood to buy. 

This process can help you identify who your best sales targets are, because not everyone who is interested in your products or services may actually end up buying them. 

Although lead qualification can be very important during the sales process for a business, it can often go overlooked, which could end up being quite costly as we’ll discuss in more detail below. 

Why is it so Important to Qualify Leads?

Now that you know what is lead qualification in marketing, we can talk about why this is such an important thing to do in business. The great thing about the tools available today is that you can learn how to find any email address for someone, though the outreach process doesn’t stop once you get a list of email addresses. 

If you devote a lot of your marketing spend and outreach trying to move all leads down the pipeline, you’ll likely be wasting a lot of time and resources with a certain portion of them who are not ready to convert. 

In fact, a recent study found that only about a quarter of your B2B sales leads are actually qualified. As you can imagine, the businesses that don’t engage in lead qualification could waste a good chunk of their resources by engaging with the wrong prospects who won’t bring you an ROI. 

Plus, qualifying your emails for leads is another important factor that business owners may underestimate. If you are running faulty or incorrect email addresses in your email campaigns, you could harm your domain’s reputation and end up with high rates of deliverability and delivery to spam inboxes for your actual qualified leads. 

How the Lead Qualification Process Works

Clearly, qualifying the leads you gathered with the best email scraper tool can be a crucial aspect of the sales process that ensures you’re being smart and efficient with your resources, and know your customers who are ready to buy. 

Continue reading below as we walk you through the process you can take to qualify your leads. Plus, you’ll probably gain some valuable insights into your customers’ pain points during this process that can help you improve your messaging or offerings. 

Profile Your Customers

The first thing you’ll want to do when you have a compiled list of leads is to first profile them and put them into different categories to assess whether they’re a fit for your target audience or existing customer persona. 

You can start identifying the customers who are unqualified leads, meaning they aren’t a good fit for your product or service, and likely won’t make a purchase in the near future. This may take some time to investigate the leads and learn more about them, but it is worth it. 

On the other hand, you may start to recognize the leads who are qualified and ready to learn more about your business and its products or services. These are the leads that you should be focusing your outreach efforts on to see more sales conversions. 

Have a Sales Call With Your Prospects

After you’ve determined who are the qualified leads on your contact list, you can set up a sales call or demo with them to showcase your brand and your offerings. 

This is the clearest way to see who is actually interested in you and is ready to close the deal, meaning you should keep pursuing the sale with them. 

While on the call, your sales representatives should be getting to know the prospect and assess their readiness to buy by asking a number of helpful questions like: 

  • Are they interested in your product or service?
  • Do they have a real need for what you’re offering?
  • Is the price within their budget?
  • Is the timing right?
  • Are they the decision maker who can authorize the deal?

Make Your Determinations

With the key information you’ve gathered from the above steps, you can have a better idea of how likely the leads are to make a purchase from your business, and if you should keep them in your sales pipeline. 

If they don’t close the deal during the call, it could be for a number of reasons that could still mean they’re a qualified lead, like if they aren’t the key decision-maker for their company. In this case, further contact points could help you reach a sale. 

Conversely, your sales call may enlighten your team that they are unqualified, like if they don’t have a real use for your product or service or it’s way out of their budget, in which case you should disqualify them. 

Overall, this is a great process that all businesses should employ so that they can know where to devote their sales team should devote their time and resources for more conversions. 

Tips for Adding Lead Qualification to Your Email Lead Generation Process

Now that you’ve seen the basic steps you can take to qualify your leads, let’s go over some additional tips and suggestions for adding lead qualification to your existing email lead generation process for maximum efficiency. 

Narrow Down Your Target Audience

The first thing you should do to add lead qualification processes into your email lead generation is to have a good and clear idea of who your target audience is. 

If you know the type of customer persona you’re trying to reach before you even start scraping for emails, the better chances you’ll have of finding the emails of interested leads that could end up as qualified prospects. 

You may think that having a wide scope may leave you with more sales conversions. However, as you’ve seen demonstrated throughout this guide, this could actually cause you to waste your valuable resources on unqualified leads. 

Use a Good Scraping Tool

The biggest key here is to use a good scraping tool that will only provide you with vetted contacts that you can trust, like Klean Leads. 

Some email scraping tools won’t take the added steps to see if they’re giving you a legitimate email address for your desired contacts. As we’ve discussed, sending bulk emails to a lot of addresses that are faulty could have your future campaigns ending up in the spam folder. 

So for the best efficiency with your lead qualification during email lead generation, you need to use the best email scraper out there. 

When using Klean Leads, you can know that our easy-to-use scraping tool can provide you with millions of email leads of direct decision-makers in just minutes–helping you to become more efficient with your sales processes and get more sales conversions, quicker. 

What is Lead Qualification in Email Marketing? Wrapping Things Up

So after you figure out what is an email scraper and start using it in your sales processes, there are still a few more steps you need to take in order to be efficient with your outreach. 

Qualifying your leads during the sales process will ensure you’re sending campaigns to actual decision-makers who are ready to buy your products or services–not wasting your sales team’s time. So by implementing the above processes and using a top-tier email scraper like Klean Leads, you can set yourself up for success when it comes to qualifying your email marketing leads. 

We give users many different ways to find email addresses online, like our LinkedIn email extractor which will pull the contact information from anyone’s LinkedIn page that you’d like to target. Or, if you know the name of the company you’d like to reach but don’t know the specific names of decision-makers within their organization, you can also use Klean Leads to find email addresses by domain in just a few clicks. 

Start your free 7-day trial with Klean Leads today to see how you can close more deals with greater efficiency.