How do you qualify a lead as a sales opportunity?
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Qualifying moves a lead into the pipeline as an opportunity, while also creating an account and a contact. The action itself takes less than a minute—but what happens behind the button depends on how the administrator has configured the experience, so it is worth knowing what to look for.
- 7 steps
- Total time: 10 min
- Preparation: 5 min
- Result: A sales opportunity in the pipeline, with an account and contact in place
Required tools
- Access to Sales Hub or Sales Professional — You need one of the primary sales roles to qualify.
Qualify the lead
1.Open the lead
Select Leads on the area map and open the lead you want to qualify. If you need to process several at once, you can instead select multiple leads in the list view and qualify them together.
2.Complete the Qualify section first
In the Qualify section of the process bar, you can link the topic to something that already exists. If the inquiry comes from a customer you know, select them in the Existing business relationship field and select the person under Existing contact. Also enter the purchase timeframe and estimated budget if you have the figures.
3.Select Qualify on the command line
From here, the process depends on the configuration. If everything is set to be created automatically, the system displays a Processing message and opens the opportunity when it is ready. If anything is set to manual creation, the Qualify lead side pane opens, where you can choose to create a new record, use an existing one, or skip it for each record.
4.Handle the duplicate warning deliberately
If a similar business relationship or contact already exists, a duplicate warning dialog box will appear. Select the existing record unless you are certain that this is in fact a new business. It is much quicker to make this choice now than to merge records later.
When one inquiry covers multiple needs
5.Add more sales opportunities
If the feature is enabled, you can create up to five opportunities from the same lead. Select + New opportunity in the Qualify lead side pane, complete the quick create form, and save. Split them when the needs are expected to close at different times—otherwise, the forecast will be misleading.
Check the result
6.Confirm that the sales opportunity actually exists
This is the most important checkpoint. If no sales opportunity is created, the business process flow will not proceed to the next stage—even if the lead is given the status Qualified. On the surface, the job appears to be done, while the deal is missing from the pipeline.
7.Check that the item has moved
A qualified lead disappears from the My Open Leads view and appears under Closed Leads. If it is still in the open view, the qualification was unsuccessful.
Discussion
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