Create a Lead Qualification Model

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how to create a lead qualification model.
  
• Determine the criteria that define the qualified prospect for their company.
  

Get Cloudy

Remember our friends at Get Cloudy? Get Cloudy is a high-tech consulting firm specializing in CRM implementations. It has built a successful business as a Salesforce SI partner, and it’s also an ISV partner with several apps and solutions on AppExchange. Get Cloudy’s implementation experience includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Communities.

Alan, the sales manager, and Lueng, the marketing manager, could use your help! The sales reps are frustrated with the leads they’re getting. Simply put, they do not feel the leads are qualified or sales-ready. Each company is different and therefore requires a different lead qualification process and model.

Get to Know Lead Qualification

If you’ve already completed the Lead Qualification: Quick Look, you’re familiar with the term lead qualification. It’s the process of evaluating prospects and identifying those ready to purchase your goods or services that should be passed on to sales. In the interest of saving sales and the prospect a lot of time, effort, and frustration, you need a lead qualification model in place. This ensures you nurture quality prospects that eventually move on to your sales team.

Qualify Leads with Scoring and Grading

Lead qualification blends two measurement indexes—scoring and grading—to create a full picture of a prospect’s interest and suitability. You define how important various interactions with your marketing content and website are by assigning point values to activities with a score. You define how valuable specific information about a prospect is with a grade. In this way, defining an ideal score and grade to identify your ideal prospect creates a lead qualification model for your business.

[alt text: A person with scores associated with activities on a computer and a person with grades associated with activities on a website.]

Every business is unique, and building a lead qualification model for your business is unique too. But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are existing lead qualification models that can be adapted to your needs. Check out the Lead Qualification: Quick Look for an overview of the most common models you can start building from.

Lead Qualification Process

Let’s look at how Get Cloudy creates a lead qualification model for its business. To create the model, the team will go through the following steps.

• Discovery: Align with Sales and Marketing teams.
  
• Data: Collect and integrate data.
  
• Define: Develop ideal prospect and profile thresholds.
  
• Engagement Metrics: Set up an automated marketing process.
  
• Monitor: Monitor, fine-tune, and iterate on data.
  

[alt text: Lead qualification model creation steps including discovery, data, define, engagement metrics, and monitor.]

Discovery

The first step Get Cloudy takes when creating a lead qualification model is getting its sales team and marketing team together to determine the criteria for the company’s ideal or qualified prospect.

First, the teams need to decide what should trigger a lead assignment. To assign based on score, they need to create a list of all the ways prospects interact with their company, then determine the importance of each of these items. To assign based on grade, the teams need to brainstorm what the ideal customer profile is for their company. If they want to assign based on a specific form completion, they can add the action in the final stages using a form builder.

The best strategy for lead assignment is one that incorporates a number of the options mentioned above and allows for different methods for determining when a lead is qualified. As they build their lead qualification model, it’s a good idea to involve sales leadership to get an accurate picture of important information. The leadership team has anecdotal data and tracks purchasing trends year over year. They probably also created benchmarks and profiles to determine what makes an ideal prospect. This is extremely valuable information, and it increases their buy-in.

To kick off the Discovery phase, Alli, the Get Cloudy Salesforce admin, meets with Alan, its sales manager, to determine their lead qualification model and strategy. Alan’s goals for his sales team guide the ideal prospect profile creation, which can be used to grade prospects for fit. And Alli’s engagement goals for her team’s marketing content can be used to set a scoring framework. Both Alli and Alan have some ideas to blend scores and grades into a comprehensive model for their company’s objectives.

Alan has the following criteria.

And Alli has the following criteria.

Once they determine the criteria, they set lead scoring and grading thresholds for each metric that show a lead’s interest level. That leads us to step 2.

Data

This step helps build the foundation for a lead qualification model. There are two pieces to this: data collection and data integration. Both focus on the importance of integrating your marketing channels and your Salesforce connector to automatically capture customer interactions and engagement data.

• Data collection includes website tracking, social media tracking, and any other area where marketing data can be collected. Data synced from Account Engagement to Salesforce will give Get Cloudy’s sales team insight into the prospect before they reach out. This includes generic fields like name, company, industry, and so on. There may be custom fields that are applicable to your industry, and those should also be synced.
  
• Data integration involves setting up Get Cloudy’s connectors. If Get Cloudy set up its Salesforce connector, their reps can also view the prospect’s activities within Salesforce, which helps drive a better understanding of what content piqued the prospect’s interest. Ensure all relevant data sources are integrated into Salesforce to collect engagement data. This includes website analytics, email marketing tools, social media tracking, and so on.
  

Lastly, it’s important to integrate this data with the Get Cloudy CRM. Get Cloudy needs to ensure that the lead qualification data integrates well with its CRM system and aligns with its sales processes for a seamless handover to the sales team when the prospect is ready. With the Salesforce connector set up, the reps can also view the prospect's activities within Salesforce, which will help them better understand what content piqued the prospect's interest.

Lead qualification with Salesforce Account Engagement involves using the features available to track and analyze customer interactions to determine the lead’s interest and qualification level. You’ve completed the first two steps in building a lead qualification model. Next, you see how Get Cloudy creates a lead qualification model.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Scoring Prospects
• Salesforce Help: Grading Prospects