4 Sales Qualification questions to ask every lead

In any organized B2B or B2C sales team, Sales Development Representatives (SDR) are assigned the task of generating new pipeline of opportunities by qualifying the leads from their database. But most of the time, SDRs are little unsure on what kind of questions should they ask in order to qualify their leads.


In this post, let me tell you 4 important things you should check while having the first conversation with them in order to check if they are qualified to be pursued further or not.

Remember that your screening or the so called Lead Qualification is critical to the operational output of your quota carrying Sales Executives, because they should work on only the valid leads so that it increases the chances of conversion at the end.

Being in SDR team, you should also measure your KPI by taking into consideration the final conversion of the leads which you qualified earlier. Never measure your metrics only with the mass numbers of leads you qualified if the Sales Executives are not able to convert them later, wasting your organization's productive time and energy.

When you get a Lead from a database, networks, conference or through inbound channels while a customer tried reaching you or subscribed to your newsletter, you should first log them into your CRM as a best practice. It will help you organize your sales effectively.

You may checkout Toolsoncloud CRM if you are looking for a Sales CRM.

Once you add your leads, start reaching out to them via their preferred medium may be Email or Call. It is preferable to have a telephonic discussion so that you understand their context in detail.

While you probe them further for qualifying, focus on the following 4 areas:

1. Fitment of Customer Pain point against your Offering.

In the qualification call, always understand the pain point of client first. Let them speak first about their challenges which they are trying to solve instead of going big bang with a pre-recorded & rehearsed Sales presentation of your product.

Once you understand their problem, try to assess from your own understanding whether your organization is equipped with solving the challenges of the prospect. If the answer to this is "Yes", then go ahead for the next question.



2. Customer Budget

Many a times, you would find that you can solve the customer's problem, but not within the low budget of the Client. To be frank & practical, When you have a lot of leads lined up, It is unproductive for a sales team to spend too much of time and resources to convert a deal where the Customer do not have the required budget to purchase your offerings. You shall simply lose the other potentially qualified leads with budget over the ones who do not have the required funding.

It is good to acquire new customers with some lower budget in the beginning if you are looking for more business from them in future and they do have that much of wallet to give the expected scale of business later.  But the decision of how much of sales executive time should be allocated on those deals, should be taken with the joint decision of your internal sales team leaders.

Do not be hesitant to ask the budget related questions to your Client. Go ahead and explicitly ask details regarding the budget they have planned or allocated for the deal or purchase. If the budget is not worth the effort, then move on or mark the lead on low priority.


3. Timeline for Purchase

Before you pass on a lead to your Sales Executive, he should be apprised on the expected timeline of closing that deal, so that he can align the meetings and follow-up accordingly.

You can ask your lead:

  • What are the processes or steps they need to do internally to complete the purchase?
  • What is lead time for each step of the process? 
  • What kind of challenges might be expected in some stages so that the executive can proactively coordinate to solve them and take it to logical closure.


4. Stakeholders associated with the Deal.

Every purchase whether it is small or big, involves a decision maker and some associated stakeholders like influencer, gatekeepers, actual users, etc. Always ensure you know them in advance so that the Sales Executive can do some homework researching about the stakeholders in order to present a solution which works best for their context. 

When you are asking the lead for the timelines for the purchase process, you may add another question on who shall be the decision maker or stakeholders involved in each stage of the purchase process.


Disclaimer: Funny Images sourced from Multiple Internet sources, No copyright claimed


I hope you liked reading this post, do comment below and let me know your thoughts.

If you are looking for a Sales CRM to manage your sales leads, why don't you check out ToolsonCloud CRM?

Complete Guide to Lead Management
Hey there, Welcome back to our blog.

In this blog, we wanted to share a complete guide to Lead Management for Startups founders and newbies who are new to Sales. Let's get started with some basics:

Who is a Lead?

Lead is a person who you think might be interested in buying your products or would be interested in what you offer such as information related to the products or services you sell. It is also alternatively called Business Enquiries in some organizations.


What is Lead Management?

Lead management refers to the process of capturing sales leads, qualifying them and nurturing them in order to make them sales ready to handover to sales executives to take it forward for deal opportunity closure.

Steps in Lead Management process:

  1. Identify your Lead profile/persona.
  2. Get the list of leads as per your expected lead profile (Marketing Qualified Leads)
  3. Establish Lead assignment rules.
  4. Assign Leads to Sales reps based on assignment rules.
  5. Prioritize Lead follow-up and activities based on Lead scores.
  6. Nurture your leads based on their engagement status as Cold, Warm or Hot.
  7. Update the engagement status periodically based on lead nurturing and follow up discussions.
  8. Track and Analyze sales progress, incorporate feedbacks and iteratively improve process.

Challenges faced by Sales reps while managing Leads


  • With increase in the number of leads, manual or spreadsheet based tracking often leads to missed follow-ups and delayed sales activities leading to lost opportunities.
  • When the sources of capturing leads increases, manual tracking leads to missed lead capture leading to lead leakage and missed opportunity.
  • Many important data points get missed in manual tracking such as contact information or any specific point discussed with the lead around his requirement.
  • Without using a streamlined Lead Management system, sales reps find it difficult to decide which lead to prioritize for improving lead qualification.

What is a Lead Management System?


A Lead Management system is a software application which helps you manage your end to end Lead Management process. It helps you capture leads from multiple sources into the CRM, view and update their stage in your lead funnel, nurture leads with contextual campaigns, educate them to make them sales ready. Once a lead successfully traverses through a lead lifecycle, the next step is to create a deal or opportunity out of the lead, which is taken forward by the Sales Executives.


Benefits of using a Lead Management System in CRM:

  • Consolidated 360 degree view of a Lead to help the reps for better Lead Nurturing.
  • Lead Scoring to help Sales reps to decide the lead priority.
  • Clean and Validated data points in the CRM to avoid unnecessary clutter to help focus better.
  • Sales workflow automation of multiple operational tasks such as scheduling a meeting, follow-up reminders and alerts on planned activities, lead assignment, etc.
  • Complete history of past interaction of Sales rep and the Lead on multiple mediums such as Email, Messages, Chat, Phone calls, Social Media, Digital Document interactions, etc.
  • Consolidated data points in a single CRM platform helps you get meaningful insights on your Lead management data and provides you with recommendations for improvement.
  • Increase in Lead Conversion rate and sales revenue. 
  • Reduction in sales cycle duration.
  • Increased ROI on Marketing investment for capturing leads



Ways to perform Lead Management:

1. Ways to Capture Leads in CRM

  • Manual Entry: If the Lead addition frequency is less, then you can add the Lead’s record manually in the CRM 
  • Import from External List: If there are lot of leads to be added from an external list, Import it into the CRM via Bulk Import function.
  • Lead Capture Forms on Website: If you have a landing page from your digital marketing advertisements or website contact forms, then you can embed the Lead Capture form from the CRM into the Website which will automatically capture your leads into the CRM.
  • Lead Capture Integration with Social Media: If you get leads from Social Media, then there are lot of social media plugins or integrations available in CRM systems to help automatically capture the leads into your CRM.

2. Ways to Manage Leads in CRM

  • Data Validation: Use field Validation rules to capture data uniformly to keep database clean
  • Lead Scoring: Define the criteria for lead scoring in the CRM to automatically give Lead scores in order to prioritize leads.
  • Lead Assignment: Assign the active leads to respective sales reps either manually or through assignment rules.
  • Labelling: Label or categorize the leads correctly based on their engagement level such as Cold, Warm or Hot.


3. Ways to Nurture Leads

  • Personalized Email Marketing: Run contextual and personalized email marketing campaigns for the leads. You may want to run different type of campaigns for leads in different stage of the funnel say Cold, Warm or Hot leads.
  • Free Educational Content: Periodically, try sending free educational contents to the leads without asking them for any favors. Based on the interaction to view or download the content, you may gauge their updated stage in the lead funnel. If you are helping the lead in educating them in their buying journey, surely they may show some interest in your products at a later stage.
  • Webinars: Invite them for online webinars and conferences on some topic of generic interest. This shall help you improve your brand imagery in the minds of the leads. The leads would be more interested in associating themselves with brands which try newer ways of marketing compared to conventional ways. This shows that the Organization is serious about their business and leads.
  • Social Media Groups and Updates: Create a group of interested leads in social media. Regularly answer their day to queries by commenting on their posts. This is one of most effective way get more visibility since social media comments are viral in nature. Keep posting regular updates on your social media fan pages so that your fans know that you are alive.

If you liked reading this post, Do share it with your friends. 

Are you looking for a Lead Management System? Try ToolsOnCloud Sales CRM for free!
Tracking Deals with different Sales processes and sales teams
Often we find that, if an organization is involved in selling two or more different kind of products or product types, they would often come across situations where using excel to track the deals having two or more different sales processes becomes a lot complex or unmanageable in an Excel tracker or a conventional old school CRM.

What should you do?

This is one of the common problem in B2B sales and reason can be many:

  1. Probably the company sells to two or more different kind of clients wherein the sales processes or sales stages differ significantly.
  2. Probably the company sells two or more different kind of products which has sharp demarcation in the sales process for each of them.
  3. Or it might be based on the strategic interest of sales department to track the deals of different types separately to gauge the progress in a focused manner when sales team for different types of deals are different.

The solution to this problem is easily solved by using a professional sales management CRM software which comes with Pipeline Management features.



To explain more, the CRM which you choose to use should equip you with power to:

1. Create a New Pipeline

As a Sales Lead, This functionality shall enable you to create a new pipeline within your CRM, so that you get two or more separated deal tracker pipeline to manage your deals with clear demarcation in some or the other ways.

2. Create or Modify Sales Stages of Pipeline

If you follow a different sales process or sales status/stages for closing the deals in different pipelines, this functionality will give you the power to easily customize the sales stages in each pipeline so that whenever your sales executive adds a deal in a particular pipeline, it goes through the particular sales process which you have defined for that pipeline of deals.


What are the Benefits you get with this?

1. More control over the sales process of different types of deals with significantly different ways of closing the deal.

2. Complete control on the visibility of the Sales deals in one pipeline to another, you get to configure who was visibility and access to your pipeline A vs your pipeline B. Cases of two different sales team complexity gets resolved with deals with demarcated boundaries now getting focused attention from the respective assigned team.

Are you looking for a Sales CRM with complete Deal Pipeline control for your sales tracking?