Now that your marketing team is well equipped with segmenting their leads. The next question is which leads should be passed to your sales team? Because both marketing and sales are involved with managing leads, determining who is responsible for each lead can get confusing. To determine which leads may need further nurturing from your marketing team and which leads are ready to hand off to your sales team, you'll need to incorporate lead qualification into your lead management process. Lead qualification is the process of identifying leads that are ready to enter the sales process. If we think about the leads path to purchase most leads that enter your database will need further nurturing before they're ready to buy. That's why segmentation is key to providing the right leads with the most relevant lead nurturing campaigns. Sometimes all it takes is an outreach from a salesperson to realize the benefits your product or service provides and become ready to buy. This is how lead qualification can help your sales team discover new sales opportunities for your company lead qualification will help you identify these sales qualified leads, so your sales team can respond to them quickly. However, there will be a number of leads that enter your database and are ready to enter your sales process. These are considered sales qualified leads. Lead qualification will help your sales team discover new sales opportunities for your company. So how do you qualify your leads? There are two major steps. First, you need to define what a qualified lead looks like for your company, based on that. You need to then use automation to help identify those qualified leads. In order to define a qualified lead, you need to ask the question, what makes someone a good fit for your offer? You can answer this by creating an ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile is a set of criteria of the basic attributes that a person or a company needs to have to be successful as your customer. Let's say you run a pet day care company in San Diego. Your ideal customer Profile may incorporate these four requirements. Lives in San Diego, owns a dog or cat makes at least $50,000 per year and has proof of current vaccinations for their pets. These are clear requirements, a person either meets them or they don't. If someone meets all four of them, they are a great fit for your pet day care company. If your business is new, focus on the problem you're trying to solve and identify the type of individuals your services will solve for. If you have an existing customer base, identify those that are your most ideal customers and determine what traits or behaviors they share. As much as possible, it's best to keep this part of lead qualification binary. Someone is either a good fit or they're a poor fit. This isn't to say though that anyone who isn't a perfect fit for your offer is automatically disqualified, It simply means the people who are a great fit should be your top priority. Once you've determined what makes someone a good fit for your offer, the second question to ask yourself is what actions demonstrate that someone is sales ready? Someone might be a great fit for your product, but if they're focused on other priorities now might not be the right time for sales outreach. However, if you wait too long to pass a lead to sales, you might miss the opportunity for a purchase. Let's use the pet day care company example again, actions that demonstrate someone is sales ready could include, visiting their services page at least three times, downloading a comparison guide of other pet daycare services in the area or booking a personal tour of the facility. While none of these actions indicate a promise, the lead will invest in your services, each of these actions do indicate its likelihood. If there are leads that are likely to make a purchase, your sales team will want to know who they are. So by determining your ideal customer profile and what actions demonstrate someone is sales ready, you should have a sufficient list of traits and behaviors that make a lead sales qualified. The next step in successfully qualifying your lead, is to use automation to help identify those leads. Rather than manually checking whether a lead meets the qualified criteria, your sales team can use HubSpot to build a list or create a saved view. Using the traits and behaviors you've determined for qualified leads, you can identify leads in your database who meet this criteria by entering those traits and behaviors into your list or save you filters. This way every time a new lead enters your database or demonstrates a qualifying behavior, they'll be flagged for your sales team immediately. But you may be wondering when should you use a save you or when should you use a list. While both features are great for identifying qualified leads, each has their own capabilities and limitations. Let's compare the two, save views are limited to pulling property values. However, save views would work great for identifying your ideal customers whether you're pulling contact or company records, you can also filter your view by property values that matter most, such as industry, company size, job title and more. As for lists, these are great for identifying qualified leads based on both traits and behaviors. You can also pull contact or company records based on property values and behavior type filters such as page views or email interactions, lists can also be used as an enrollment criteria for workflows that automatically notifies your sales team of a new qualified lead. By implementing lead qualification, you'll create more clarity on which leads are ready to be passed to your sales team and thus identify more opportunities for your company segmentation, helps you organize and nurture leads that aren't ready to speak to a salesperson. Whereas lead qualification helps identify those that are by incorporating both strategies into your lead management process, your marketing and sales teams can work together to provide a seamless experience for each of your leads. [MUSIC]
