What is lead qualification?
Lead qualification is the process of deciding whether a lead is worth a salesperson's time, by checking them against criteria such as need, budget, authority and timing. Leads that pass move to a rep or get a meeting booked; leads that do not are nurtured, recycled or closed out.
Qualification usually happens in two steps. Marketing scores leads on data it already has, like company size or pages visited. Sales, or an SDR, then confirms the details in a conversation. The second step is where most of the cost sits, because it takes a person reaching the lead by phone and asking the same handful of questions every time.
Write the criteria down as questions with clear pass and fail answers. That makes qualification consistent across reps, easy to audit, and possible to hand to an AI agent that asks the same questions on every call and writes the answers to your CRM. Frameworks such as BANT are a starting point, not a script.