Lead Qualification

Overview

Most founders treat every inbound lead like it's a $500K deal. It isn't. The cost of that mistake is real: your best SDR spends 2 hours qualifying a lead that fails your ICP on three dimensions, and by the time they realize it, the deal is already dead in your pipeline. Here's the system: the moment a lead lands (form submission, API call, Slack notification), it triggers a qualification workflow. The workflow runs five checks in parallel—company size, industry, use case fit, budget signal, and timeline—against your explicit ICP rules. Each check returns a score. Leads that hit your threshold (usually 70+/100) get routed straight to your SDR queue with a pre-written context card. Leads below threshold don't disappear; they enter a nurture sequence designed to either warm them up or disqualify them cleanly. The key is *explicit rules*. Not "seems like a good fit." Not "the founder's gut." Rules. If your ICP is "B2B SaaS, $5M–$100M ARR, US-based, using Salesforce," then a lead that's B2C, $2M ARR, and in Singapore gets a score of 15. No debate. No SDR time wasted. You'll also set a human approval gate: every week, your Head of Sales reviews the bottom 20% of qualified leads (the 60–70 range) to catch false negatives. This is where you learn that your rules are too strict, or where you spot a pattern (e.g., "all our best customers came from this one vertical we thought was bad fit"). The result: SDRs focus on leads with 70%+ close probability. Nurture sequences warm the rest. And you get a weekly signal about whether your ICP is actually working.

Flow

Trigger: Inbound lead submission (form, API, CRM webhook, or Slack notification)

1. 1
   Trigger

   Lead created

2. 2
   Integration

   Enrich (optional)

3. 3
   Action

   Score fit

4. 4
   Condition

   Qualified?

5. 5
   Action

   Route to owner

6. 6
   Action

   Else enroll nurture

7. 7
   Manual

   Weekly scorecard review

Setup instructions

1. Define your ICP in five dimensions: company size (ARR or headcount), industry vertical, use case/product fit, budget signal (self-reported or inferred), timeline (immediate, 3–6 months, exploratory). Assign each a weight (e.g., size = 30%, fit = 40%, budget = 20%, timeline = 10%). 2. Build the scoring logic in your automation tool (Zapier, Make, or native CRM workflow). Each dimension gets a 0–100 score based on rules you define. Example: ARR $5M–$100M = 100 points; $1M–$5M = 50 points; <$1M = 0 points. 3. Set the routing threshold (usually 70/100). Leads above threshold → SDR queue with a context card showing their score breakdown. Leads 50–70 → nurture sequence. Leads <50 → disqualify or archive. 4. Create a weekly review ritual: your Head of Sales spends 15 minutes reviewing the 60–70 band to catch false negatives and spot patterns. 5. Connect your scoring output to your CRM so every lead has a visible ICP score and reason code (e.g., "Budget signal unclear" or "Timeline too long").

Failure cases

• Rules are too rigid and you disqualify your best customers. Example: you exclude all companies <$5M ARR, but your highest-LTV customers are $3M ARR startups. Fix: review the bottom 20% weekly and adjust weights.
• Lead data is incomplete or wrong. A prospect fills out the form with a fake company size or you can't verify their ARR. The score becomes noise. Fix: add a data-quality gate—if company size is unverified, flag for manual review before routing.
• Your nurture sequence for low-fit leads is nonexistent or generic. They get added to a list and forgotten. Fix: build a 6-email nurture track that either warms them up (case studies, product updates) or disqualifies them cleanly ("This doesn't sound like a fit—here's why").
• You never review the rules. Six months later, your ICP has shifted but your scoring logic hasn't. You're still disqualifying mid-market deals because you wrote the rules for enterprise. Fix: monthly rule audit tied to your sales metrics (e.g., "What % of closed deals had ICP scores <70?").
• The SDR queue gets flooded because your threshold is too low. You're back to wasting time on marginal leads. Fix: start at 75/100, run for two weeks, measure SDR time-to-disqualify, then adjust down if needed.