A prospect is someone who has the potential to become a customer. If your team is not able to qualify a lead, meaning determine if they are a true prospective buyer of your product or service, then your team members may be wasting their time on a customer who does not even want to make a purchase. That is the reason why lead scoring helps sales representatives to only talk to people who are interested in buying your products.

To qualify your leads, you must determine if they are in the market for your particular product or service, if they can make the purchase (i.e. can pay for it and is authorized to do so), and if they plan to do so in the determined time period. Firstly, get to know who your buyer is. You’ve created your buyer personas — determine where this lead falls within those personas. Ensure they’re part of your target audience. Next, examine what actions the leads are taking on your website. Are they looking at products in your ecommerce store, attending your webinars, looking at your blog posts? This will help you identify the interests of your lead, which helps you understand if they’re a qualified lead.

When using social media channels, utilize the marketing analytics given for each social media platform to understand the traffic that is coming for your services. This will help you to understand the interests, needs, and problems of every lead that is clicking your ad, landing page or website. The end goal of the business should be to convert these leads into marketable sales that can benefit the company and the marketing team as a whole.