Disqualifying Leads in Salesforce

When you’re building out your sales process, one of the most important considerations is how you’ll track information on disqualified leads, so you can go back and understand why leads aren’t converting to opportunities, and look for potential opportunities to match disqualified leads with other products. If you have a lead disqualified due to budget you can see if you have other offerings that are potentially in their budget or go back and promote new products that might match their criteria. So, what’s the best way to do it? In this article, we’ll walk through disqualifying leads in Salesforce, some of the most popular disqualification reasons, and when you might use them.

Disqualifying Leads in Salesforce

The default lead statuses in Salesforce are as follows:

• Open – Net new lead for sales to follow up on.
• Contacted – Sales made their first attempt to reach out to the new lead.
• Qualified – This status is used on conversion – once you qualified the lead and then convert the lead to a contact, this will be the status.
• Unqualified – When you decide the lead is not a good fit, mark them as unqualified.

Additional Status Considerations:

• Nurture – If you are using nurtures and you want to be able to quickly understand which leads are in an active nurture, consider adding this status. If you’re using the marketing automation platform Pardot, this status can be automated through engagement studio so you don’t need to manually change it.

When a user updates the lead status field to Unqualified, you’ll want to make a dependent field in Salesforce that asks for the disqualified reason. Then be sure to use values in this field so you’ll be able to easily report on why your leads were disqualified. Before you can create this list, you’ll likely need to have a conversation with your sales team to understand some of the common reasons why they disqualify leads. To get you started, we’ve outlined a list below of commonly used disqualification reasons in Salesforce. Feel free to take this list to your sales team to allow them to choose the ones that are most relevant to them.

Salesforce Disqualification Reasons

When you unqualify a lead you will be required and prompted to enter a reason why.

Reasons and Definitions:

• Size –
  • When an organization is too small you can select this reason. Sometimes they’ll grow into a larger organization and will become a qualified lead.
• Budget –
  • If the lead indicates they do not have the budget for a new system/work, use this reason.
  • Pricing objections should be handled in the opportunity object (because if they have pricing, they should have an associated opportunity).
• Timeline –
  • If the lead indicates they will not be making a purchase decision in the next 12 months or so, they can be disqualified for this reason.
  • Be sure to indicate the buying timeframe in the notes and create a task for yourself to follow up with the lead closer to that timeline.
• Selected a Competitor –
  • If the lead indicates they have already selected a competitor’s product and are no longer looking, you can use this option. Be sure to enter the competitor’s information in the notes.
• Not Responsive –
  • If the person does not respond to any of your attempts to contact them over the course of 30 days.
  • Be sure to send a final message that makes it clear you will not be contacting them again unless you hear back.
• Bad Data –
  • If the contact information is incorrect (fake email, company name, etc.), you can DQ and mark it as bad data.
  • If this is not the decision-maker, do not disqualify the lead. Work the lead to determine the decision-maker.
• Partner/Competitor –
  • If you determine this company is not a lead but an existing partner or competitor use this reason.
• Student/Prospective Employee
  • If you determine the lead came from a student conducting research or a prospective employee doing research, use this reason. If you are looking to include your candidate database in Salesforce and want to track this information, then you may want to break this out into two different categories so you can make the distinction between the two.

Learn More

You can also check out one of our tutorials, about disqualifying leads in salesforce. It’s part as part of our Salesforce in a Minute series, where we teach quick Salesforce lessons in just a minute or so. Feel free to browse those videos. 

If you need help setting up your sales process or your sales cloud, feel free to reach out to us.

About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.