Sales Qualification 101

How to Think About Sales Qualification

Efficiency is defined as the state of production that produces as little waste as possible. All companies strive to be efficient. But few ever really achieve it. In business, waste is everywhere. From errant investments to employee turnover, waste plagues all companies and hampers them from reaching their greatest heights.

But waste doesn’t have to be a given. The key to fighting waste is focus. When organizations focus on the right actions, and employees stay focused on their key initiatives, efficiency can be achieved, leading to greater revenue, more opportunities for growth, and higher team satisfaction.

When it comes to Marketing, Sales, Business Development, Capture, and Proposals, the key to focus is qualification. Opportunity qualification, the ongoing process of deciding whether or not to spend time on an opportunity, is the single greatest tool for focusing employees’ time and attention on the most important activities and promoting overall efficiency.

In this blog post, we’ll detail the importance of opportunity qualification and how to implement strong qualification frameworks at every level of your company from marketing to sales to the bid and proposals team.

What is Sales Opportunity Qualification?

At Patri, we define opportunity qualification as the continual process by which companies determine whether or not they should pursue an opportunity and the next best steps to move that opportunity forward.

One mistake we see in common definitions of marketing or sales qualification is viewing qualification as a single point-in-time decision. At Patri, we see qualification as an ongoing process that not only aids in determining pursuit decisions but can also in deciding the next best steps to improve win probability on an opportunity, like an executive-to-executive introduction, extending a free trial offer, or hiring a consultant or lobbyist to help navigate the purchasing process.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that qualification takes on different forms depending on where an opportunity is in its lifecycle. From marketing to sales to proposals, there will be different elements of qualification that need to be emphasized or de-emphasized to make qualification useful for those functions.

In the sections that follow, we’ll detail common frameworks employed by Marketing, Sales, and Proposals to qualify leads and determine the next best steps to take.

First, though, let’s start with the basics.

From Contact to Customer: How a Lead Moves Through an Organization

Marketing Lead Generation, Nurturing, and Qualification

A lead is the basic unit of marketing and sales outreach. A lead is defined as any individual for whom your company has contact information and believes might be interested in your product.

Once a lead is generated, it enters the Purchasing Funnel. The Purchasing Funnel can be defined in many ways, but at Patri, we define it as having four stages: Awareness, Education, Solution, and Selection.

At the top of the funnel, leads are simply becoming aware of their problem and educating themselves on possible solutions. Marketing’s role is to nurture the lead through this top-of-funnel process. Nurturing is the process of building a relationship with a lead through targeted content and email marketing. Marketing is responsible for the lead generation process, including tracking the activities of the lead, nurturing their interest, and determining when it is ready to pass on to sales. Generally speaking, Marketing will tend to pass off leads to Sales when a lead is moving out of the Awareness and Education stages and into the Solution and Selection stages, where they are more seriously considering a purchase.

This process of determining when a lead is ready to be passed on to sales is called Lead Qualification. Organizations should develop clear criteria or metrics to define when a lead has moved out of one stage and into the next and at which stage an opportunity will be passed onto sales. When a lead demonstrates enough interest to be passed on to sales, it is designated as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). 

Handoff Between Marketing and Sales – Moving from a Marketing Qualified Lead to a Sales Accepted Lead

During lead handoff between Marketing and Sales, many companies, though not all, utilize a framework called Sales Acceptance, which determines whether leads will be accepted by Sales or sent back to Marketing for additional nurturing. A Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) is an MQL that meets Sales’ criteria for acceptance. Essentially, an MQL becomes a Sales Accepted Lead when Sales agrees to accept the MQL into their funnel and take certain agreed-upon actions to move that lead through the funnel.

Sales Acceptance & Opportunity Qualification

A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) that has been further qualified and designated as ready to enter the sales process under the supervision of a salesperson. To convert a Sales Accepted Lead into an SQL the sales team will usually vet the lead via a phone call or an email to determine if the lead is truly in the latter stages of the purchasing funnel and if it’s a strong enough prospect to warrant the salesperson’s time and attention.

Once a lead has been designated as a Sales Qualified Lead, it officially enters the Sales Process. At this stage, opportunity qualification begins in earnest. Remember, opportunity qualification is the continual process by which companies determine whether or not they should pursue an opportunity and the next best steps to move that opportunity forward. Just because an opportunity has been designated as an SQL, doesn’t mean that unlimited resources should be poured into its pursuit. Salespeople need to intelligently decide where they will spend their time and effort, when a deal should be aborted, and when it needs additional action to move it closer to closing. To this end, salespeople will utilize a Sales Qualification Framework, like BANT, MEDDIC, CHAMP, etc., to determine the relative strength of their opportunity and identify the most impactful steps to improve the deal.

In the next section, we discuss several common Sales Qualification Frameworks and the pros and cons of each framework.

What is a Sales Qualification Framework and How Should I Effectively Use One at My Company?

A Sales Qualification Framework is a defined set of criteria by which qualification occurs in a given organization. Often, certain thresholds in the Sales Qualification Framework must be exceeded for a salesperson to get the green light to invest significant company resources, like time, attention, proposals, etc., into an opportunity.

Sales Qualification Frameworks form the basis of a company’s sales methodology. Because a salesperson must qualify their opportunities before they work on them, the criteria of the Sales Qualification Framework will fundamentally shape the way that salespeople approach opportunities, the information they look for, and the conversations they have with prospects.

Sales Qualification Frameworks not only shape the way that salespeople interact with prospects but also form a common language between salespeople and their managers, enabling them to work together on deals, identify weaknesses, and strategize about how to fill gaps in ongoing deals. As a result, a Sales Qualification Framework becomes the foundation for sales’ forecasting, as managers will often refer to the strength of a given opportunity based on its strength according to their Sales Qualification Framework.

Because of how critical the Sales Qualification Framework is to a successful sales organization, it’s crucial to pick the right framework for your company. Below, we detail common Sales Qualification Frameworks and their relative pros and cons.

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1. How to quantify ICP Fit for your company.
2. A deep-dive of the 3 main components of a good opportunity.
3. How to better prioritize your team’s time by uncovering good fits in your pipeline.
4. Tools out there to help quantify fit and clean your pipeline.

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BANT Sales Qualification

Developed by IBM in the 1950s, BANT is one of the earliest known sales lead qualification frameworks. The acronym stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. The goal of BANT is to determine whether a lead is valid by determining whether there’s money for a purchase, whether you’re talking to the right decision-maker, whether the business really needs what you’re offering, and if the deal will happen in a reasonable timeframe. According to IBM, if the answers to three of these four questions were satisfactory, they considered the lead to be validated. If not, the lead was designated as needing additional nurturing.

We break down the framework’s core questions below:

• Budget:

  • What is the prospect’s budget to solve the problem?

• Authority:

  • Does the prospect have authority to make decisions, are they an influencer, or do they not have much influence?

• Need:

  • What is the prospect’s business need (i.e. in business terms, what is the problem they are trying to solve?)

• Timeframe:

  • In what time frame will the prospect be making a decision?

MEDDIC Sales Qualification

Developed by an executive at PTC in the 1990s, MEDDIC aims to introduce a new sales qualification methodology that expands BANT to focus on the goals and priorities of the wider team of stakeholders.

MEDDIC is laser-focused on identifying the steps to close a deal. As a result, it focuses on gathering information about decision makers, decision criteria, and the key metrics and pain points that will be influential to navigating the purchasing process.

MEDDIC asks the following core sales qualification questions:

• Metrics:

  • What kind of quantifiable ROI can you deliver that will address the prospect’s pain and be influential to decision-makers?

• Economic Buyer:

  • Who is the person who will actually make the purchasing decision?

• Decision Criteria:

  • What are the criteria by which the prospect will evaluate your solution?

• Decision Process:

  • How will the prospect come to a decision? Who will be involved? What gates need to be cleared?

• Identify Pain:

  • What is the pain, in business or personal terms, for which your solution will solve?

• Champion:

• • Who is the person who will fight for your solution and help it navigate the internal decision process?

Over the years, MEDDIC has been updated to include additional criteria. In its most expanded form, the methodology is structured as MEDDPICC. Below, we detail the additional criteria that have been added to the methodology:

• Paper Process:

  • What paperwork needs to be completed for a purchase? What is the process for completing the paperwork?

• Competition:

  • What other companies or options are competing against you?

CHAMP Sales Qualification

In response to frameworks like BANT and MEDDIC that focused on data-points for the sellers to validate leads, InsightSquared developed a qualification framework that would double as a complete sales system. Their methodology, called CHAMP, aimed to focus primarily on the customer-side of the selling process, creating criteria that would incentivize sellers to ask questions to help the customers realize the value of the proposed solution. Below, we detail the core questions CHAMP asks and the pros and cons of the methodology:

• Challenges:

  • What are the business problems and pains that need to be solved?

• Authority

  • Who are the decision-makers and influencers in the process?

• Money

  • What is the cost of the solution and what is the expected ROI?

• Priority/Process/Plan

• • How does your solution address a priority of the customer
  • What is the decision-making process?
  • What is the prospect’s plan for purchasing a solution?

GPCTBA/C&I Sales Qualification

GPCTBA/C&I is a qualification framework developed by HubSpot to address weaknesses they identified in other frameworks. Namely, HubSpot felt other Sales Qualification Processes were over focused on fitting the seller’s solution into the customer’s problem instead of trying to understand the customer’s problem more comprehensively, so the salesperson could become a broker of ideas more than a specific solution.

As such, GPCTBA/C&I focuses on cultivating conversations that develop a deep understanding of the customer. Below, we summarize the key sales qualifying questions below:

• Goals

  • What are the top measurable goals of the prospect?
• Plans

  • What has the prospect done to achieve those goals so far? What do they plan to do to accomplish them?
• Challenges

  • What are the biggest challenges to achieving those goals?
• Timeline

  • On what timeline is the prospect looking to address their challenges and, if applicable, purchase a solution?
• Budget

  • What is the prospect’s budget for a solution?
• Authority

  • How can you leverage the authority of your contact/champion to influence decision-makers?
• Negative Consequences

  • What are the negative consequences of not achieving their goals?
• Positive Implications

  • What are the positive implications of achieving their goals?

The PATRI Method – A Holistic Approach to Qualification

Most qualification frameworks are focused on whether a deal is winnable. But rarely do qualification frameworks consider whether prospects would make strong and successful customers who are likely to renew and unlikely to churn.

The PATRI method, developed by Patri, is a comprehensive approach to qualification that aims to determine whether a prospect is not only likely to sign a deal but likely to be a successful customer.

Below, we summarize the key questions that the PATRI method asks:

• Product-Market Fit

  • Does your solution resolve significant pain for prospects within your ideal customer profile?

• Analogous Opportunities

  • How does this opportunity compare to past wins and losses? What insights can you leverage from past opportunities to successfully navigate this opportunity?

• Triggering Pain

  • Utilizing insights about the prospect, how can you best dig for significant operational, economic, or personal pain? 

• Responsive Communication

  • Based on the prospect’s communication and engagement, when is the right time to introduce next steps including additional meetings or demos, introductions to executives, and a collaborative buying plan? 

• Ideal Customer Profile

• • Does the contact with your prospect fit within your ideal customer profile? If so, how can you leverage similarities with past successful deals to move the opportunity forward? If not, how can you navigate the internal purchasing process to include the right roles and personas in your deal?

How to Think About Choosing a Sales Qualification Framework

The most important element of a qualification framework is that you have one. Qualification frameworks are the foundation of a predictable, repeatable, and improvable qualification process. They create a common language with management and other reps. And they establish the company’s priorities for high-quality leads, helping marketing and sales to get on the same page with regard to lead generation and qualification. So more important than picking the perfect framework is picking one and adapting it to the particular needs of your company.

Of the five frameworks we’ve discussed, BANT, MEDDIC, CHAMP, and GPCTBA/C&I, PATRI method, we like to think of them as follows:

BANT is by far the simplest framework to implement. In addition, by focusing on the fundamentals of a deal, it encourages salespeople to see every lead that meets the basic criteria as a potential opportunity. This can be a positive if you have talented salespeople who can generate demand. And can be a drawback if your company is wasting too much time on opportunities that don’t convert.

MEDDIC expands on BANT and is easier to implement than CHAMP and GPCTBA/C&I. Generally speaking, it’s one of the more popular qualification frameworks because of how well it assists Sales Managers in analyzing and assisting on their reps’ deals. MEDDIC encourages salespeople to dig for all the information that will help create a clear plan to close a deal. Its drawback is that it can encourage salespeople to focus on seller-side information over buyer-side conversations.

CHAMP is similar to MEDDIC in terms of the qualification criteria, but CHAMP is generally implemented along with the CHAMP selling methodology. If you’re looking to implement an entire selling methodology and are willing to invest in significant training or consulting, this can be a really powerful option as it creates a framework that extends beyond qualification. If not, it can fall a little flat.

GPCTBA/C&I requires more training than BANT and MEDDIC but offers a methodology informed by the weaknesses of those two frameworks that have been documented over the years. By focusing on buyer-side conversations, GPCTBA/C&I often generates more compelling relationships between salespeople and buyers. But to convert those relationships into deals, it might require more skilled salespeople than MEDDIC would because it doesn’t create as clear of a closing plan. GPCTBA/C&I also relies more on the skill of the individual salesperson over the wisdom of sales management, which is best assisted by something like MEDDIC. But with plenty of resources available online, GPCTBA/C&I is more approachable than CHAMP and doesn’t require the same type of organizational overhaul.

The PATRI method distinguishes itself from the above frameworks by focusing not only on winning a deal but also on whether a deal is worth winning. By leveraging technology to quickly compare opportunities with past wins and losses, the PATRI method brings actionable insights right to salespeople’s fingertips, enabling higher close rates and importantly, higher renewal rates. By analyzing opportunities to ensure product-market fit and that the prospect is within a company’s ideal customer profile, the PATRI method prevents wasted pursuit efforts on bad-fit deals that are likely to falter or quickly churn. And by highlighting significant pain and tracking communication, the PATRI method provides powerful suggestions for how to move deals forward. For more information about how to utilize the PATRI method at your company, click the button below.

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But remember, whichever framework you choose, make sure you adapt it to your particular organization and its needs. In the next section, we discuss how to make the most of your qualification framework of choice.

How to Use a Qualification Framework: Qualification Shouldn’t Be a Point in Time

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is treating qualification as a single-point in time. The impulse is understandable. One of qualification’s key functions is to determine whether a lead is worthy of a company’s resources. This is an essential component of qualification but shouldn’t be conflagrated with its entire purpose. When done well, qualification can not only help companies make pursuit decisions but can also help them determine where they stand in an opportunity and generate ideas for the next best steps to take to move the deal forward.

Instead of static qualification, Patri recommends what we call Dynamic Qualification. Dynamic Qualification is the continual, disciplined process of applying the Sales Qualification Framework to an opportunity to understand the quality of progress, identify gaps and weaknesses with the prospect, and strategize for how to move the deal forward.

Dynamic Qualification not only helps sales management determine which opportunities to give the green light to but it helps salespeople stay updated on their opportunities, identify evolving gaps, and decide on the next best steps to take.

Customers are dynamic. Whether from staff turnover, new involvement from a competitor, or evolving internal politics, the fundamentals of a deal change constantly. The best salespeople revisit their opportunities continually to check-in on the opportunity fundamentals: acquisition status, competitors’ offerings, staffing and potential turnover, preferred procurement methods, and desired requirements to name a few. Dynamic Qualification is the process that enables salespeople to stay abreast of changes in the opportunity fundamentals and design interventions that will improve their chances at winning the deal.

The Benefits of Data-Backed Opportunity Qualification

Below, we highlight four ways that data-backed dynamic qualification helps bring qualification methodologies to life:

Quantify Your Progress 

The best Dynamic Qualification processes don’t rely on narrative assessments of progress but instead transform sales methodologies into quantifiable frameworks that enable salespeople to quickly and accurately understand their progress on an opportunity.

The resulting output, an Opportunity Score, gives a quantitative measure of progress on a deal and allows companies to track progress on an opportunity over time.

Identify Gaps

Having opportunity scores for each of your opportunities allows you to track progress, understand the steps you need to take to boost your scores and have a common language to talk about your opportunities with management.

Whether this entails asking management for additional resources or for them to assist on a certain component of the deal, dynamic qualification helps you track the activities that are most important to your success and design interventions to improve your p-win.

Improve Communication Between Management and Sales

Management is concerned with being able to forecast upcoming deals accurately and finding ways to help their direct reports take effective steps to improve their p-win on deals.

By utilizing dynamic qualifications to review deals, quantify progress, and identify gaps, managers can have more productive conversations with their reps about next steps to take, where additional investments might be needed, and how likely an opportunity is to close. And salespeople can retain more clarity on how their managers define success and the gate criteria that their managers will use to make go/no-go decisions.

Prioritize Activities and Opportunities

Dynamic qualification identifies gaps in ongoing deals and assigns a quantitative value to each task’s importance in improving the p-win for that deal. By utilizing dynamic qualification across all ongoing deals, salespeople and their managers can understand where their deals stand and the most important actions they can take to improve their standing. By constantly reviewing progress on opportunities, salespeople can steadily close gaps and move toward closing deals.

The Value of Opportunity Qualification Software

Now that we’ve discussed how to think about qualification frameworks and how to make the most of them by practicing dynamic qualification, it’s time to discuss the technology that makes implementing successful qualification frameworks possible.

In marketing, it is fairly standard for lead scoring technology to be integral to their operations. But with sales, teams tend to rely more often on qualitative frameworks. But with recent advances in technology, sales teams can and should utilize software to qualify their opportunities.

Salespeople tend to dislike rote tasks that take them away from deals unless those tasks offer a serious ROI. That’s why it’s essential to find software that will minimize the amount of time sales will spend on data entry and add value to sales by recommending the most impactful actions that sales can take on a deal.

We also recommend software that quantifies progress on opportunities, enabling salespeople and their managers to quickly understand their progress and to analyze the activities that will be most impactful on p-win.

By quickly highlighting which opportunities to pursue and which to qualify-out, sales qualification software enables sales management to intuitively understand progress on deals and more accurately manage their forecast, and empowers salespeople to identify the actions they can take to improve their deals.

Patri Score, is one such tool. Patri Score is a data-backed qualification tool that helps you understand the quality of your bid and proposal opportunities, decide on opportunity pursuit, and communicate it to your team. Formalize your qualification and go/no-go decision process by creating a single source-of-truth for all qualification evaluations and decisions. Visualize the strength of opportunities in your pipeline and identify the next best steps to move deals toward closing. If you would like to learn more about Patri Score, schedule a demo below.

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Are you on board with the value of enhanced qualification software but its difficult to convince management to invest in a new tool? Read our guide for How to Sell Enhanced Proposal Software to Your Executives to learn the following:

• Why You Need Data-Backed Proposal Qualification
• Understanding the Executive’s Role
• How Qualification & Proposal Software Contribute to the Executive’s Role
• Value Propositions for Enhanced Qualification Software
• How to Make the Case for Enhanced Qualification Software to Your Executives

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Qualification Shouldn’t Stop With Sales: How to Qualify Proposal Opportunities

For companies doing business in complex industries, many deals require responding to an RFP or other competitive solicitations. A common mistake most companies make with proposals is assuming that because a lead was sales qualified that it should automatically be green-lit for a proposal response.
Proposals can be extremely costly and distracting. The average proposal takes over 24 hours of labor and involves over nine respondents. Before approving the deployment of resources to respond to a proposal, every opportunity should be qualified again to determine if the proposal opportunity is a good fit.

Similar to Sales Qualification, Proposal Qualification should aim to assess an Opportunity Fit Score that will indicate the relative strength of the opportunity. Best practice is for organizations to set up thresholds that designate proposals into certain categories: automatic go, more discussion needed, and automatic no-go.

By moving the go/no-go decision from a qualitative to a quantitative approach, companies can make more accurate pursuit decisions, improve the speed of their decisions, and utilize the time they save to improve their proposals, winning more revenue and increasing their efficiency.

Want to learn more about how to qualify, respond to, and win proposal opportunities? Read our eBook Proposals 101: How to Start with Proposals When You Don’t Know Where to Start to learn the following:

• The proposal terms you need to know
• How proposals should fit in your company’s growth strategy
• How to find and qualify proposal opportunities
• Essential proposal management tools to satisfy compliance
• The top proposal pitfalls to avoid

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Putting It All Together

Opportunity Qualification is the dynamic, continual process by which companies determine whether or not they should pursue an opportunity and the next best steps to take to move that opportunity forward.

At its core, qualification is about focus and efficiency. Intelligent qualification enables staff to focus on the most impactful activities and reduce wasted time on wild goose chases.

The best performing organizations understand the importance of opportunity qualification and weave it into their entire acquisition process from marketing to sales to proposals.

In marketing, qualification is essential to distinguish high-quality leads that are ready to pass on to sales from leads that need more nurturing from leads that have no business being in the pipeline whatsoever. The more precise marketing’s qualification process, the higher the sales conversion rate will be and the more effective sales reps will become.

On the sales side, opportunity qualification is perhaps the most important factor in sales efficiency. Intelligent Sales Qualification Frameworks form the foundation of the entire sales process, enabling a predictable, repeatable, and improvable sales process. In this article, we discussed four common Sales Qualification Frameworks and the pros and cons of each. More important than the specific framework, however, is that your company has a framework that is well-understood and adopted throughout the organization.

And even though sales might have qualified an opportunity, that doesn’t mean that it should be an automatic go when it comes time to produce a proposal. Qualification should occur at every meaningful gate in an opportunity to ensure the opportunity is still worth the investment.

It can sound intimidating to perform qualification so frequently. But it shouldn’t be. With modern qualification technology, performing qualification becomes nearly effortless, simply consisting of a few minutes answering easily understandable questions. Best-of-breed qualification technology quantifies progress on an opportunity into an Opportunity Fit Score, which enables quick and precise go/no-go decisions, whether on the sales or proposals side, and clearly outlines the next best steps to improve p-win.

With the introduction of a new generation of qualification technology, the best-performing companies are practicing what is known as Dynamic Qualification, the continual, disciplined process of applying the Sales Qualification Framework to an opportunity to understand the quality of progress, identify gaps and weaknesses with the prospect, and strategize for how to move the deal forward.

About Patri

Patri provides instant AI-powered revenue intelligence for every team and every deal by revolutionizing sales qualification around the core principle of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Find, refine, and apply your ICP across the go-to-market motion with Patri’s AI-Generate ICP Engine. Win smarter with Patri by understanding your ICP(s), discovering the true health of your pipeline, qualifying effectively, and refining your forecast.

Top companies have increased win rates and saved millions in selling costs by leveraging Patri to prioritize and manage active opportunities, better understand why they win or lose, act upon automated deal insights, seamlessly share progress, and more reliably hit quota.

Schedule a demo to learn more about how Patri empowers companies to win smarter in complex industries through data-powered solutions and expert services.

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