Qualified Leads: What they are and How to Generate in 2024

Lead generation isn’t just about creating a big list and calling it a day; there’s more to it. For sales to happen, you need to work with a qualified lead.

This is where most marketing departments fall short. The lead generation plan is so extensive that often what to do with those leads takes a back seat.

Companies concerned about their digital marketing strategies and the results they generate always strive to generate qualified leads, as these are the leads that represent the biggest opportunities.

That’s what this article is about. Do you want to understand more about this strategy and gain access to 11 ways to generate qualified leads? You’re in the right place.

What is a lead?

We can call any potential consumer who has provided their contact or personal information to your company a lead.

And of course: they’ve allowed you, as a company, to contact them via email, text, WhatsApp, or any other media.

Your website generates visitors, who are all the people from anywhere who have visited your page at some point.

The goal of all digital marketing teams today is to turn these visitors into leads. Offer an irresistible offer at the right moment and encourage these visitors to leave their contact information and allow for follow-up.

Every time a visitor to your website, page, blog, or other communication channels fills out a form, chats with a chatbot, contacts your team to ask a question, and provides personal data such as name, email, phone number, or others, they cease to be a visitor and become a lead.

The issue is that there are various types of different leads. The first branching happens here, at the qualification level. Let’s learn more:

What is a non-qualified lead?

Before we discuss what a qualified lead is, it’s worth illustrating the opposite: what is a non-qualified lead.

Well, the explanation is quite simple. What we just talked about is an example of a non-qualified lead.

To define the concept well, a non-qualified lead is one that only provided you with their most basic contact information at the time of conversion.

In other words, you don’t know much about them. You don’t know the information that will determine if they’re really a good sales opportunity, there hasn’t been any interaction between you two, nothing.

At this moment, the lead is just a line in your database. A potential opportunity, should you decide to develop it.

The term “non-qualified lead” can also refer to a lead not considered ideal. Take Leadster’s example: if during the qualification process the lead informs that they don’t have a website, they become disqualified.

This development occurs in the form of lead qualification. This qualification happens through the gathering of information and interactions between you and them.

What is a Qualified Lead?

Not all these visitor-to-lead conversions represent people with real interest in making a purchase or hiring.

Some people may not be looking for the solution you offer.

Others may just be curious and will research a lot before deciding.

Others may still be interested but not have the purchasing power to close the deal.

Many times, a lead won’t progress through the marketing and sales funnel.

And many other times, the lead isn’t ready for the purchase and needs to go through what we call, in Inbound Marketing, nurturing and qualification processes.

So, the qualified lead is the one that has gone through this process and is closer to the purchase moment.

The qualification of this lead happens in different ways in each company, but the main way is through Lead Scoring. Let’s talk a bit more about that?

What is Lead Scoring?

But then we need to move away from theory and dive into practice: what are the criteria that qualify a lead?

Well, first of all: these criteria are determined by the brand itself. Each one will have its own information that qualifies a contact.

But the system to catalog this information and determine with mathematical precision if a lead is qualified or not has a first and last name: Lead Scoring.

Lead Scoring is the method that formalizes lead qualification. Through it, you establish a system that scores the various interactions your lead has with your brand.

Something like this:

Downloaded an e-book for the first time: conversion moment;
Downloaded another e-book, but this one is Middle of Funnel: 3 points;
Downloaded another e-book, this one is Bottom of Funnel: 5 points;
Signed up for the newsletter: 2 points.

And so on. You define this scoring, by the way, according to the most common interactions of leads with your brand.

You will also set a scoring threshold that determines if a lead is qualified or not. Passed 15 points, for example, or 20, or 50.

You determine it. But Lead Scoring exists precisely not to leave this question of what is a qualified lead and what is not in the air.

If it didn’t exist, each person could have a different idea of what a qualified lead is, harming the strategy as a whole.

Lead Scoring, then, is a very accurate index: the lead is qualified because their score indicates qualification.

This strategy is part of the Lead Nurturing methodology. We have a whole article talking about it. Access it right below:

➡️ What is Lead Scoring and How to Apply It to Optimize Sales

What are the types of qualified leads?

In addition to qualified and non-qualified leads, there are a few more qualifications.

These developments are extremely useful for the marketing and sales department.

Because understanding what a qualified lead is and starting to qualify them is one thing. But understanding what to do with these leads is a whole different story.

The types of qualified leads are actually an indication of what to do with them. This is even evident in their names.

In theory, a qualified lead is one that is more likely to close a sale. But thinking about Lead Scoring, there’s a big difference between a qualified lead with 30 points and one with 80 points, right?

Or in more general terms, between the lead who read Bottom of Funnel e-books and the lead who has already requested a quote.

Below is a quick explanation of the types of qualified leads. After that, we can continue in the article:

Marketing Qualified Lead – MQL

This is the lead that has just passed the marketing team’s scrutiny and is already determined to be a lead ready to be approached by the sales team.

In this case, the marketing team devised the Lead Scoring and will monitor the development of your lead base. Leads that exceed the scoring threshold that determines qualification become MQLs.

The marketing team will create various triggers and scores associated with them, seeking to increase the lead base and qualify those already in it.

Then, the qualification continues, but now with a “different” team:

Sales Approved Lead – SAL

Sales Approved Leads are not universal: some companies use them, others don’t.

Basically, they are MQLs that have just been handed over to the sales team.

This team, in turn, will do a quick review to understand if the leads really meet the qualification criteria to continue in the Sales Funnel.

It’s an intermediary stage, just for analysis. The qualification continues in the next step:

Sales Qualified Lead – SQL

The next level of lead qualification is done directly by the sales team.

When this team receives the MQL, they will start working on a specific Funnel, different from the previous Marketing Funnel: it’s the Sales Funnel.

🤔Questions? I got you: What is Lead Nurturing and How to Create Your Nurturing Workflow

Many people use the term Sales Funnel and Marketing Funnel as if they were the same thing. But they’re not and can’t be.

They can’t be because there’s work to be done after the lead goes through the Marketing Funnel — that is, after they become an MQL.

This work is done right here, with commercial emails, calls, meeting scheduling, offering demos, price negotiation, etc.

All of this is part of the Sales Funnel and culminates in creating an SQL — the highest level of lead qualification, the one that is ready to receive a personalized proposal and close their path through your pipeline.

Product Qualified Lead – PQL

Many SaaS companies work in the PLG — Product Led Growth model.

These companies have a greatly reduced sales team, sometimes nonexistent, and focus mainly on product development and presentation.

In these cases, another type of lead arises: the PQL, or Product Qualified Lead.

In these cases, lead qualification happens when they interact directly with the product in some way.

They may sign up for a demo, or they may subscribe to a free plan, or they may have watched a guided demo, etc.

Well, now we’re almost at the end of the theoretical part of the text. We just need to talk about one more strategy to wrap up the topic and move on to practice:

What is Inbound Marketing?

It’s important to talk about Inbound Marketing because discussing a qualified lead also requires discussing why generating leads in the first place is necessary.

Inbound Marketing is a marketing technique that gained popularity in the early 2010s, between 2010 and 2013.

The concept, coined by Dharmesh Shah (co-founder of Hubspot), determines that brands should not interrupt potential customers with ads, commercials, or anything else that disrupts content.

In fact, according to Shah, the brand needs to produce content that works to attract people to it.

In other words: instead of using external content to promote the brand, it produces its own content that naturally promotes it.

The idea is that this production brings more people to the site, and these people convert, becoming leads.

This is the basic strategy of Inbound Marketing, but it takes on a variety of forms, including using paid media and ads as well.

How Inbound Uses Qualified Leads to Sell More

Inbound Leads are those generated from an Inbound strategy, usually organically and through Content Marketing.

What happens is that many companies start seeing Inbound as a “Plan B”, not seeing it as a really viable strategy capable of generating sales every month.

For these companies, what really generates leads and sales are ads in Paid Media. And that’s fine!

The issue is that Inbound usually works alongside this strategy, and although it ends up generating fewer leads, it also requires smaller investments to start and maintain the strategy.

Qualified leads generated by Inbound, then, work as support for all the other strategies you have, including Outbound and Paid Media.

It’s very worthwhile to invest in Inbound Marketing, and even if you don’t invest, its fundamental concepts of Middle of Funnel — such as Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring — are essential in any strategy.

Why Generating Qualified Leads is Important?

Transforming your contacts (leads) into qualified leads means focusing your sales team’s efforts on opportunities more likely to become a customer of your brand.

With lead qualification, in addition to focusing on who is ready to receive a contact from a salesperson, you avoid wearing out contacts that may become interested in the future but would be turned off if they felt bothered by a commercial contact at the wrong time.

Qualifying your leads means approaching them at the best moment to close a purchase or hire.

You may also be interested in – MQL and SQL: what are they and how to classify your leads in 2021

11 Ways to Generate Qualified Leads

If you understand the importance of working through all stages of the buying process until handing over the warmed-up lead to your sales team, you must be eager to implement this type of strategy, right?

Don’t worry, let’s start with 11 tools you can use to generate qualified leads.

Offer downloadable content

The basis of Inbound Marketing for lead generation is Content Marketing.

This is a way to increase the number of visitors, bring potential customers closer to your brand without making a purchase, and offer your audience information they are looking for.

First, you attract visitors with relevant content and then offer more in-depth or exclusive content.

And the currency of exchange is visitor data.

You can generate leads by offering materials on Landing Pages, with signup boxes on blog pages to receive similar content via email, chatbots, or forms on the website for visitors to speak with a consultant or request a demo.

Do co-marketing

If you still have a lower reach, joining forces with other brands can help increase the number of visitors to your site and, consequently, the number of leads generated.

Co-marketing is a way to partner with companies that have the same audience as yours.

It can be put into practice through your network, with suppliers of your brand, or with companies that end up selling to the same customer profile.

For example, a makeup company can partner with a skincare products company to create content together and distribute it through both brands’ communication channels.

The format can vary: explore videos, e-books, reference guides, tools, etc.

Host Webinars

Another type of content that can be part of the lead generation strategy and has become even more popular in recent months is Webinars.

Webinars are live video broadcasts or recorded videos.

With low production costs, easy distribution and promotion, more personal and dynamic content, webinars are an excellent way to spark interest in your audience and generate leads.

You can even generate more qualified leads with more in-depth topics related to the solution your company offers.

Automate B2B prospecting

Customer prospecting is one of the most labor-intensive steps for the sales team and also one that offers a lower conversion rate, as many prospecting contacts don’t evolve into a purchase or hire.

Today, there are tools like Ramper that automate part of this process, such as email outreach, follow-ups, report filling, and metric tracking.

Explore this type of tool and put your salespeople in touch with warmed-up leads.

Keep the dialogue

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, a visitor can become a lead by filling out a form or contacting your company through a message box.

So, explore contact hooks, include this type of space on all your communication channels, encourage visitors to ask questions through customer service channels, and keep the dialogue open.

Conversational Marketing

And what if, besides facilitating your visitor’s service, you could also gather relevant information right from their first contact with your company?

That’s what conversational marketing proposes, with tools like virtual assistants and chatbots.

With automated and yet personalized service, you can work more dynamically than with static forms, capture data from your lead, and start qualifying this contact from the beginning of the interaction.

Turn customers into brand promoters

Delivering good service or product ensures an important phase of post-sale: enchantment and customer loyalty.

If your customers are more than satisfied, the chances of them recommending your company to someone with a similar need are much higher.

And, you know the power of a direct recommendation from someone you trust.

Want to generate qualified leads?

Maintain a good relationship and deliver excellent results to your current customers.

The referrals that come from there already arrive with another level of qualification.

Make room for comments and reviews

Testimonial marketing carries a lot of weight today!

People like to research and trust the reviews of other users or buyers of your product or service.

So, to boost your results, leave room for reviews and comments from those who have already consumed from your brand.

Be open to dialogue, receive feedback, and focus on making improvements if they are pointed out.

Facebook Ads

Did you know you can generate leads directly through ads?

Facebook Ads even offer the possibility for users to provide information and personal data without even leaving the social network.

Therefore, creating campaigns for your audiences in this way can be an interesting way to start.

Invest in remarketing

Remarketing is a strategy used to target your online ads to people who have already had contact with your brand, whether through your website, Landing Pages, or your social media.

To generate better-qualified leads, you can target even more specific remarketing campaigns based on the visitor’s behavior and with ads tailored to their demonstrated interests.

Promote your success stories

As we mentioned, consumers like to hear from other consumers.

And if you can also show the results achieved with the use of your product or service, even better!

Creating materials that showcase these results, with testimonials and numbers from your clients, will help create leads more interested in the solution you have to offer.

What questions to ask to qualify leads?

Well, so far we’ve understood that there are different ways to qualify leads, and there are different qualified leads from each other.

One way to qualify leads is through the history of interaction between your lead and your brand. The more they interact, the more qualified they become within the Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring strategy.

The other way to qualify leads is based on the questions they answer in your chatbot or through your forms.

This method is useful for qualification done through ads, for example.

In any case, both approaches require questions for the overall lead qualification. Questions that will determine not only if the lead is interested in your brand but mainly if the sale is possible and if it is worth it.

Let’s quickly talk here about lead qualification questions, but we’ll delve deeper into the topic in the article linked below, check it out:

➡️ 50 Lead Qualification Questions and Where to Use Them

Geographical qualification

Determines where the lead is located geographically. It is important for companies that work with locally provided services or deliveries, for example.

These questions typically include:

Where do you live?
Do you live and work in different cities?
Where is your company located?
How much time do you spend in traffic?
Do you use public transportation to get to your company?
Do you work remotely?
Do you frequently use hotels?
Do you receive gas or transportation allowance?
What’s lacking in your city?

Professional qualification

Indicates what the lead does for a living. These are good questions to separate leads interested in content from leads interested in the brand.

For example: a small business where the owner does marketing reads e-books from a company specialized in working with marketing agencies.

This business owner wouldn’t be a good client for the company, but they still read their content frequently, so they are a lead and are qualifying in the nurturing process.

However, a professional qualification question can show the company that this lead is not interesting because they do not work in the digital marketing field.

These questions typically include:

What is your job title?
What is your department?
Are you responsible for purchases in the company?
How many people do you manage?
How many people work in your company?
What is your industry?
Does your company have branches?
How many people are in your team?
What is the best service your company provides?
Do you work in retail or services?

Commercial qualification

These are questions typically asked in the Sales Funnel stage, when the qualified lead is already an SQL and now moves to the treatment by the commercial team.

They are related to the lead’s commercial reality, how ready they are to close the sale with you.

They typically include:

Which of our products do you know?
How did you hear about us?
What is the biggest challenge in your company today?
What is your best contact channel?
Do you already know any of our products?
Do you use services from another company?
Are you satisfied with the service you currently receive?
What are your plans with our product?
What is your budget?
What are your biggest challenges for next year?

Time and money

These are questions related to the lead’s available time for hiring and the budget they are allocating for the hiring to happen.

They typically include:

How urgent is your hiring?
When do you expect results?
How long does a sale in your company take to happen?
How long does your department take to develop a new product/service?
How long does your product take from development to sales?
How long have you been looking for a solution to your problem?
What is your annual revenue?
Which of our pricing plans best describes you?
How much does your company spend on [service]?

Decision-makers

These lead qualification questions will demonstrate if this individual lead, this person, has the power to close a sale.

Often, people within companies download your content and interact with it, but they themselves do not have the power to hire your tool.

They are:

Which of our products do you know?
How did you hear about us?
What is the biggest challenge in your company today?
What is your best contact channel?
Do you already know any of our products?
Do you use services from another company?
Are you satisfied with the service you currently receive?
What are your plans with our product?
What is your budget?
What are your biggest challenges for next year?

What tools to use to qualify leads?

There are some tools that will help you qualify leads, most of which come as part of a suite of products within a marketing platform.

These platforms can be various. Some examples include:

Leadster;
ActiveCampaign;
Hubspot;
Salesforce.

And any other marketing platform. In general, these platforms offer you the possibility to generate leads, organize them, nurture them, qualify them, and sell to them.

The way these platforms work doesn’t differ much. It’s interesting to talk a little more about them to understand how leads are qualified in practice.

Take a look:

Emails and marketing automation

One of the most basic and common ways to qualify leads is through emails. This is how a lead nurturing strategy works in practice.

Your lead comes to you normally with little information and just one interaction. How do you learn more about them? How do you offer more materials and move them through the Marketing Funnel?

With the most democratic tool in digital marketing: email.

The qualification of most leads happens here. Brands separate their base, understand what the qualification needs are, and send out emails.

This happens through marketing automations, which these platforms I mentioned above also do.

When a lead converts, brands that create automations already have a path prepared for them. There are already emails ready and a determination of when these emails will be sent.

And even which will be the next emails based on the lead’s interaction. Did they complete the action that the email asked for? If yes, they receive that email. If not, they receive another.

But email and marketing automations, despite being the most popular ways to qualify leads, are not the only ones.

Learn more:

Landing Pages

Landing Pages are the pages where leads will convert and, in many cases, leave more qualification information.

Email and marketing automations will take the lead somewhere. And that place usually is a Landing Page with another offer that encourages the lead to leave even more information.

The most common Landing Pages come with forms where lead qualification questions are presented. The marketing platforms that offer Landing Pages also offer data organization in each lead’s profile.

But these Landing Pages with forms are quickly losing their dominance over lead generation. More on that below:

Chatbots

Chatbots are tools installed on your website that allow lead conversion at any time, even without Landing Pages if you want, or even within them.

Their operation is absolutely simple. You install them, choose what they will say on each page of your site, determine the materials you want to provide, and that’s it: they are already converting leads.

They work on lead qualification by offering the possibility to ask different questions to users of your site who have already converted, increasing your information about them.

Chatbots can also offer personalized materials in the same style, also acting on lead qualification.

For example: here at Leadster, you can configure lead qualification questions at the time of conversion, understanding which leads are qualified and which are not worth having on the list.

It is also possible, with our Chatbot, to assign scores to each lead in a Lead Scoring system of our own and integrate with your marketing platform or sales CRM.

Is buying qualified leads a good idea?

To wrap up the text, I’d like to talk about this topic that is one of the most searched on Google when searches are directed towards how to generate qualified leads: is it worth buying leads?

The answer is short and simple: no. It is not worth buying any type of lead list, especially qualified leads, outside of an ABM — Account Based Marketing strategy.

And even in the ABM strategy, the “leads” you are buying are completely different.

They are leads in the commercial sense of the word, not marketing. They are lists of businesses that are within your target audience.

Buying leads is a complicated situation and, most of the time, it is an effort in vain. Instead of spending on generating people who are genuinely interested in your brand, you are spending to have a list of people who have never heard of you.

We have two texts that talk about the subject. Check them out:

➡️ Lead Lists: Is It Worth Buying? Cost-Benefit and More

Generating qualified leads is a difficult task, which requires integration between marketing and sales teams and, of course, a lot of planning and hands-on work.

But we are confident in saying that generating interested leads brings much more significant results to your company than buying mailings or generating leads in bulk.

And remember: you don’t have to explore just one of these ways.

On the contrary, combine different tools and functionalities for lead generation and see your company’s results grow even faster.

That’s what happened with Isaac Educacional. They found out with Leadster how personalizing interactions with leads via chatbot increases conversions and qualifies more leads.

Through A/B testing and intelligent calls functionalities, Isaac began to understand their lead’s behavior much more, which greatly facilitated qualification and made this effort simpler and more accurate.

You can see today how our functionalities increase your lead qualification and of course: your generation as well. Try Leadster for free now by clicking on this link.

I’ll be waiting for you. Thank you for reading and until the next article!