Lead qualification
Lead qualification is asking a new inquirer a set of questions to establish whether, and how urgently, the business can help them. Sales effort then goes to the inquiries most likely to become customers.
Also called: call qualification, lead screening, qualifying questions
A qualification script collects the facts that decide what happens next: what the caller needs, where they are, when they need it, whether they are the decision-maker, and sometimes budget. Frameworks such as BANT (budget, authority, need, timing) formalize this for larger sales; a trades business might need only the job type, location and preferred date.
Qualification can happen on the first call, on a web form, or in a follow-up. Doing it at the first point of contact means the inquiry arrives at the sales team already sorted, booked, routed to the right person, or politely declined, and the business does not spend a call-back on a job it would never take.
The output is usually a status (qualified, unqualified, needs follow-up) and the answers themselves, written to a CRM or sent as a message so the person who picks up the lead has the context without asking the caller to repeat it.