Before you even start nurturing leads, it's important to "qualify" them. 

Qualifying—or "scrubbing"—leads means determining which prospects are worth your sales team's time. For example, perhaps your product or service is expensive, so you've discovered your most important leads are companies with an annual revenue of $10+ million. These would be your "qualified" leads.

It's a critical part of the lead research process and makes sales outreach more efficient. But it can be a daunting task, particularly if you're manually processing hundreds of leads in a short amount of time. To avoid bottlenecks (like hot leads going lukewarm before sales have a chance to reach out), you should think about automating that process. 

By creating automated workflows—what we call Zaps—you can automate the tasks involving lead research and deliver qualified prospects to your sales team faster. From automatically tracking engagement to enhancing lead data, here are the top ways to automate the lead research process. 

Skip ahead

• Enrich your lead data

• Score leads based on engagement

• Notify your sales team about qualified leads

• Improve your sales feedback loops

Enrich your lead data

Obviously, the more data you have about a company or an individual, the more able you are to qualify them effectively. But if you have limited resources, you can't expect your team to spend all day searching online for detailed information. Instead, you can use a contact management tool like Clearbit to locate that info for you. 

With these Zaps, anytime a new lead is sourced through your CRM, database, or ads tool, Zapier will find the prospect and add any missing gaps to your other tools (think phone numbers or email addresses). 

Score leads based on engagement

The more information you have about a lead's movements, the more you can tell if they're qualified. Did they open a marketing email you sent them? Or click a link in an ad campaign? Maybe they even attended a webinar and spent an hour getting to grips with your product. 

Understanding how a lead engages with your company before they've converted should give you a general idea about where they're at in the sales funnel. Once you've determined that level—or "score"—you'd update the prospect in your CRM so your sales team can actively reach out to them. 

Doing this manually is a lot. Instead, use these Zaps to actively track lead engagement in tools like Mailchimp or Go To Webinar. When a lead opens an email or attends a webinar, Zapier will track that engagement then automatically log it in your CRM, ready for your sales team to tackle. 

Notify your sales team about qualified leads

You've finished the research side of things. You've got a list of qualified leads to hand over to sales, and you want to strike while the iron's hot. The problem is your sales team might not spend every waking minute in your CRM (or wherever else you're storing those leads). 

They're probably in Slack or communicate via email. With these Zaps, whenever your list of leads is ready, you can automatically ping the right people in the right channel to let them know.

Improve your sales feedback loops

Obviously, lead qualification isn't a science. What might sound like a perfect match on paper doesn't automatically guarantee success. 

But feedback—especially from the sales folks on the front lines—can make a difference for future research. For example, they might be able to shed light on why a specific prospect went cold so you can fine-tune your criteria accordingly.  

If you use a tool like Typeform or Google Sheets to routinely gather feedback from your team, you can use these Zaps to streamline the process. Once someone fills out a form, Zapier can either send that response straight to a spreadsheet, or ChatGPT can first provide a summary and categorize responses to save you time. 

Qualification made easy with automation

There are so many moving parts to lead research. 

But with a few automatic workflows, you can easily streamline that process from start to finish. Whether you need to automatically enrich lead data or streamline the feedback process, Zapier can help you make the whole sales process a breeze. 

This article was originally published in March 2017, written by Jamie Irish. It was substantially updated in February 2024 by Elena Alston.