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How to build a simple lead qualification workflow
Not every enquiry deserves the same response, and you should not have to read each one to find out. A qualification workflow rates them against your ideal client and routes them, so your best prospects never wait.
The problem it solves
If every enquiry gets the same reply, your best prospects wait behind your worst, and nobody can say which is which until a person has read each one. Qualification is the step that decides, quickly and consistently, who gets a person today and who gets an automatic reply. It does not need to be clever. It needs to be written down.
Start with your ideal client, in writing
The rating is only as good as the profile it is measured against. Ours is a short document in our company files describing the businesses we help most. A rating system with no written profile is a guess dressed up as a process. Before you build anything, write three lines on who you want more of, and three on who you do not.
Collect the answers where they will be used
Our free check-up asks six short questions: what type of business, where they would start, which problems sound familiar, roughly how many hours a week it costs, how it is handled today, and how big the team is. In our CRM each company then carries an ICP fit rating of Strong Fit, Maybe or Poor Fit. A single front door makes that possible, as we describe in how we set up client intake. Whatever you ask, keep the answers as fields on the record, not buried in an email, so a rule can read them and a person can see them.
Route by rating
- High: a notification to a person, with the answers in the message, so the first reply is specific. Speed matters most here, for the reasons in the speed-to-lead stack.
- Medium: an immediate acknowledgement and a booking link. No one is made to wait for a human to decide whether they are worth replying to.
- Low: a courteous reply that says honestly what you do not do, and where they might look instead. Logged, so you can see how many of these you get and whether your marketing is attracting the wrong people.
Where AI helps, and where it should not decide
AI is good at reading a free-text description of a problem and tagging it to a category. It is a poor judge of whether someone is worth your time. Our advice is to let AI draft the tag and the reply, and keep the rating rules plain and inspectable, so when a good prospect is rated low you can see why and fix the rule. If a rule cannot be explained in a sentence, it is too clever.
Whatever you set up, send a sample through it once a month and check where the ratings are wrong. The first version always is.
Qualification is part of how we build the intake systems described on lead qualification as part of our Mallorca AI work.