Filtering qualified leads out of the huge pool of random contacts is one of the biggest challenges B2B companies face daily. Did you know that 61% of B2B marketers send all of their leads to their sales reps even though only 27% are actually qualified? This means that when your marketing team transfers lead information to the sales team, six out of ten contacts have no potential to convert into a successful deal.
Each of these unqualified prospects requires weeks of occasional interactions and hours of attention from SDRs until they say their final “No.” Emails, calls, follow-ups, and LinkedIn messages—so much time and effort wasted in vain at the very top of the sales funnel, achieving nothing but frustration.
To figure out either the prospect is a good fit for your business, you should do one simple thing—ask them! By adding sales qualifying questions in the email template or cold calling script, you secure yourself and your team not to waste valuable resources on something that doesn't bring results. Besides that, your sales team can shift their attention to things that matter more, like contacting qualified prospects three times faster or following up with leads who are stuck further down the sales funnel more often.
To help you understand how to qualify a customer in sales, we’ve gathered thirty-two qualifying questions examples that serve different functions. But first, let’s figure out how to include the lead qualification step in the sales prospecting cadence.
Lead qualification is an inevitable part of the lead nurturing process: It helps to determine if a certain lead is worth your further attention, to evaluate how much you can benefit from each other, and define who needs to still be warmed up and who would never be ready to sign a deal with you.
There are numerous methodologies on how to use sales lead qualification questions depending on your company’s needs and values. Some of them, like CHAMP, ANUM, FAINT, BANT, and NOTE were discussed in our Ultimate Lead Qualification Guide. In the same guide, we have elaborated on why we at CIENCE prefer to use the last one, a more buyer-centric and less-salesy methodology. NOTE stands for need, opportunity, team, and effect. Each of the four blocks is used to cover different qualifying perspectives.
To give you a more practical understanding of how the NOTE methodology can be applied to your outreach process, we have prepared the best sales qualifying questions to ask at each stage of the qualification process.
When contacting a prospect for the first time, you need to figure out to what extent they are interested in your services: Are they in denial of the challenges they face, have they already established a plan that solves their needs, or are they already actively searching for someone like you?
All these questions and more should be answered in the NEED section of the qualifying process. In simple words, its main purpose is to help you understand the level of interest of the prospect to your offer and define at which stage of the buying cycle they are in. Here are the first eleven qualifying questions examples that can be helpful at this stage.
Defining prospect’s pain points and formulating them into the needs won’t make the sales happen right away. You still have to prove to the prospect that your collaboration will be beneficial for both of you. However, this shouldn’t be achieved with scripted speeches but rather a natural dialogue with the lead.
At this stage, sales qualifying questions are used to demonstrate the solution your offer can bring to the prospect’s company in their words, coming from them, not from you. By asking correct lead qualifying questions, you can navigate them toward finding the answer to their needs and realizing the window of opportunity you are offering. Here are the best sales qualifying questions to help you achieve it:
There are a few more things to clarify before you can get to the final stage of the lead qualification process. Of course, you might convince the person over the phone that your solution is worth giving a shot. But is this person the right one to talk to at all?
Before pushing the lead down the sales funnel, you have to make sure that you are talking with the right person whose decision regarding your offer will be taken into account in the end. To find out if the lead is a decision-maker, ask the next sales lead qualification questions:
Besides that, you should remember that your product might affect the work process of an entire team and a group of decision-makers, not just a single individual who picked up the phone. That’s why you should be aware of the concerns other teammates might have about your offer:
If this is the first-time collaboration with your company, your prospect might have fake expectations about its results. Make sure to discuss all the details, leaving no room for misunderstandings between you and your potential customer.
Talk about the timeline, outcome, and scale of your offer. After all, your job is not just to sell the product but to convert the lead into a loyal customer. Here's how lead qualification questions can sound at this stage:
Lead qualification doesn’t require much time to apply but saves hours of worktime for your entire sales team. It serves as a filter for setting aside leads with the least potential of becoming a loyal client and helps to define those who will gladly collaborate with you at the right price.
Take advantage of the lead qualifying questions examples presented above and put them to use right away. Otherwise, contact CIENCE sales experts to qualify leads for you instead.