Lead qualification

A lead is a possibility. Qualification tells you whether that possibility is serious. It happens at several moments: before first contact (does the profile fit?), during the conversation (does the need exist?) and during the discovery call (can the decision be made?).

It protects your time. Every hour spent with a prospect who will never buy is an hour taken from one who would have.

It protects the prospect too. Offering a meeting to someone without the need wastes their time and damages your reputation with them.

Qualification is not a one-time gate either. A prospect who did not qualify six months ago may qualify today: a new role, a new budget, a new project. Record why a lead was set aside, so you can recognize the moment when that reason no longer holds.

Four families of criteria show up almost every time. Fit: industry, size, role, region. Need: a real problem your offer can address. Decision power: the person decides, influences, or can introduce you to whoever decides. Timing: an ongoing project or a deadline, rather than an idea for two years from now.

Frameworks formalize these criteria. BANT, historically associated with IBM, checks budget, authority, need and timeline. Other frameworks, such as MEDDIC, add criteria for complex sales: the customer's success metrics, the decision process, the internal champion who carries the project.

Adapt the framework to your sale. For a service worth a few thousand euros, three questions are enough. For a multi-year contract, you need more.

One question at a time, in response to what they just said. A list of questions fired in a row feels like an interrogation, and the prospect stops answering.

Start with the need, not the budget. A prospect who has described their problem talks about resources more willingly afterwards. Asking about budget in the second message ends many conversations.

Listen to what is said spontaneously. Prospects often answer your qualification questions before you ask them: 'we lost two reps this summer' tells you both the need and the timing. Do not ask again what they already answered.

Look at what happens to qualified leads. If many meetings end with 'this is not for us', your qualification is too light. If you barely get meetings anymore, it may be too strict.

Have whoever runs the call note whether the prospect really met the criteria. That feedback, meeting by meeting, is the best way to tune the framework.

Finally, track rejection reasons. Three reasons that keep coming back show you where qualification needs to improve.

Qualifying on appearances. A profile that looks like your ideal customer does not necessarily have the need. In MimikFlow's 2026 LinkedIn Prospecting Observatory (published in French), the fit score given before contact barely predicted replies: between a score of 6 and a score of 9, the reply rate moved by about two points.

Qualifying on what you hope. If you cannot quote the sentence where the prospect describes their need, you did not qualify, you guessed.

Disqualifying too fast. A 'not now' is not a 'no'. It moves qualification to a later date, which you should write down.

On LinkedIn, qualification happens in two stages. Before contact, the profile lets you check fit: role, company, industry, background. During the conversation, the prospect's answers reveal the need and the timing.

MimikFlow covers both. Every profile found is checked against your target before the invitation, and those that do not fit are set aside. In the conversation, the AI that answers prospects follows up to eight qualification points you define, some of which can be blocking. It reads the whole thread, asks at most one missing point per message, never asks again what was already said, and only treats a point as settled if the prospect actually wrote it. As long as a blocking point is missing, it does not offer a meeting.