A bad-fit lead costs as much as a good one: you paid for it with ad spend and with the time of a sales rep who called, found out the budget was a third of your minimum, and hung up. When a third of your leads look like that, the sales team stops trusting website leads and starts calling back "when there's time." Lead qualification solves this before the call: the criteria are built into the quiz questions, people who aren't a fit see a rejection page, and people who are a fit land in your CRM with their answers. Here's how to set it up.
What counts as a qualified lead
A qualified lead is a request that meets the criteria under which you can actually make a sale. There's no universal list, but four criteria work in almost any niche.
- Budget. There's a minimum amount below which a job isn't worth it for you. For a kitchen manufacturer, it's the price of the simplest kitchen set; for a home builder, the entry price of a project.
- Timeline. "Planning to do it next year" and "need it this month" are different leads. The first one doesn't need a call today; they need an email a few months from now.
- Need. Does what the person wants match what you do? A company that builds timber-frame homes gets requests for modular homes, and a dental implant clinic gets requests for teeth whitening.
- Location. Do you serve the area where the customer is? For services with on-site visits, installation, or delivery, this is the first filter.
Write down which values for each criterion pass for you and which mean a rejection. Your job is to move them into the quiz so the questions get asked before the conversation.
How to build qualification criteria into quiz questions
Each criterion becomes one question with answer options, some of which pass and some of which mean a rejection. Wording matters more than it seems: the question shouldn't feel like a test.
- Budget: answer options with ranges, or a slider. Don't ask "What's your budget?" It sounds like an interrogation. Ask "What price range are you considering?" instead, with options where the lower bound of the first passing range matches your minimum. Keep the ranges below your minimum: they are the filter.
- Timeline: "When do you plan to start?": within a month, within three months, this year, just researching. The last option isn't a rejection; it's a signal to handle that lead differently.
- Need: the first question of the quiz, "What are you interested in?", with images. The options are only what you actually do, plus "Other" with a text field if you want to see demand you don't cover.
- Location: a dropdown list with the cities you serve and an "Other city" option. If you ship nationwide, you don't need this question; for installation and on-site work, it's a must.
The order: need first (it's the easiest), location second, timeline and budget toward the end, when the person has already invested a minute in the quiz. The quiz should stay at 4–6 questions in total, so if four of them are qualifying questions, only one or two are left to give the customer something useful. That's fine for expensive services and too much for cheap ones: there, need and budget are enough.
A separate topic is how to use those same answers to make different offers to different groups, not just to screen out bad-fit leads. It's covered in the article on how to segment leads with a quiz.
Branching: different paths for good-fit and bad-fit leads
Branching lets you show a question only when certain answers were given to previous ones. For qualification, it works both ways.
Follow-up questions only for good-fit leads. If someone chose "Other city," there's no point asking about square footage and timing: a rejection is waiting for them further on. In the question editor, on the "Conditional logic" tab, you turn on conditional logic and set the condition: show the question "When do you plan to start?" only if one of your cities was chosen in the location question. You can add several conditions and join them with "AND" or "OR." The details are in the question branching guide.
A short path for bad-fit leads. Anyone who fails the first criterion reaches the end in two questions and wastes neither their time nor yours.
The contact form can branch too. The "Add form" button creates a second form, and on its "Conditional logic" tab you turn on "Show the form only if a condition is met," based on the answers to the questions or on the quiz result. That way, good-fit leads see a form with a phone field, while people who are "just researching" see a form with only an email field for your newsletter. The form without conditions stays as the default form. How to do it is in the guide to the contact form based on answers.
Rejection page: how to politely decline a lead
There's no need to show the contact form to a bad-fit visitor at all: a phone number your sales rep won't call only clutters your database. That's why the quiz has a separate type of ending, the "Rejection page." Setting it up takes four steps.
- On the "Contact form" step, click "Add form": the rejection page is tied to its own form.
- On the new form, open the "Conditional logic" tab, turn on "Show the form only if a condition is met," and set the rejection condition: the question and answer that mean you don't want the lead. For example, "Location" = "Other city" or "Budget" = the range below your minimum.
- Go to the "Thank-you page" step. There are now two pages: the first goes with the main form, the second with the form that has the condition.
- Open the second page and, in the "Final page type" block, choose "Rejection page." Add a headline, a subheadline, and an image if you like.
People who meet the condition will see the rejection page instead of the form and the usual thank-you page, and won't be asked for any details. The text shouldn't say "you're not a fit for us." Try "We serve the Austin metro area; if your project is there, send us a message" or "Our projects start at a set minimum; for smaller budgets, check out these ready-made options," with a link. A rejection with an explanation and an alternative doesn't hurt your reputation, unlike a request nobody ever called back. The full walkthrough is in how to set up a rejection page.
Make rejection conditions strict only for the criteria where you definitely won't make a sale. A "next year" timeline isn't a reason to reject someone; it's a reason for a second form with an email field and a message a few months later.
Lead qualification in sales: sending answers to your CRM
Screening is half the job. The other half is making sure your sales rep sees a qualified lead's answers before calling and doesn't ask the same questions again. LeadForms integrations send the answers along with the contact.
- Kommo. A deal is created automatically; in the integration settings you choose the pipeline, the responsible user, the deal title, and tags. Tags are handy for qualification: a separate tag for the quiz with a filter makes those deals easy to spot in the list. Setup is in the Kommo guide.
- Bitrix24. A lead is created through your portal's inbound webhook, the responsible person is set by employee ID, and you can define the lead title. The steps are in the Bitrix24 guide.
- Webhooks. For your own CRM or a spreadsheet: a JSON payload is sent to your URL, where the answers array holds every question with its answer, contacts holds the contact details, and extra holds the UTM tags and the page URL. You can use the answers to set priority automatically or route leads to different reps. The format is described in the webhooks guide.
Agree on a playbook with your sales team: a lead with a budget above the threshold and a "this month" timeline gets a call within an hour; a "this year" lead gets an email and a call a week later; "just researching" gets the newsletter only. Without a playbook, qualification in the quiz changes nothing: reps still call everyone in the order leads come in.
How to check that the filter works
After launch, watch two metrics. The first is the "Where people drop off" report in the built-in analytics: if a disproportionate number of people leave at the budget question, it's worded like a test or placed too early. The second is the share of leads your sales team considers qualified, before and after qualification. You count it manually in your CRM over two or three weeks.
If qualified leads went up and total leads went down, that's expected: you stopped paying for calls that ended in a no. If total leads dropped more than the number of bad-fit leads did, the filter is too strict: loosen the rejection conditions and keep only the deal-breaking criterion.
Frequently asked questions
Won't a budget question scare off people who are ready to pay?
It's not the question that scares people off, but the wording and placement. Ask for a range rather than an exact amount, put the question near the end, and explain why you're asking: "so we can suggest options within your budget." A good-fit customer answers without hesitation: they want options they can afford, too.
Which is better: a rejection page or collecting the contact and not calling?
A rejection page. A contact you collected and ignored is a person who waited for a call that never came. A rejection with an explanation and an alternative leaves a good impression and doesn't clutter your CRM.
How many qualifying questions can a quiz have?
Two to four out of 4–6 in total. Keep only the criteria you actually reject on or adjust your offer for. Not everyone needs location; almost everyone needs budget; timeline doesn't decide rejection, it decides the order in which leads get handled.
Can I send only qualified leads to my CRM?
Yes, indirectly: bad-fit visitors see the rejection page and don't leave their contact details, so they never reach your CRM. If you need finer routing, for example to different pipelines depending on the answers, you can do it with a webhook and logic on your side.
What should I do with "just researching" leads?
Don't reject them and don't call them. Show them a second form with only an email field, send the contact to Mailchimp or Brevo via Zapier, and schedule an email there a few weeks out. Some of these people come back when the time is right, and they already trust you.
