Sales Lead Qualification: How To Quickly Identify Fortune 500 Accounts

So many businesses struggle to generate leads. But since you’re reading this post, it’s likely you’ve probably cracked the formula!

If you’re generating thousands of leads every week, kudos to you. But now, there’s a tougher mountain to climb, i.e., separating the high-quality leads from the low-quality ones. This is know as the sales lead qualification process, and it varies by company.

Let’s say your “The State of Industry X” report helped you generate over a million leads. It’s important to note that not every person who has submitted your lead generation form is likely to do business with you. In fact, some might just be content creators who wanted to gather some stats from your report.

What if you want to separate the Fortune 500 leads from the rest? What’s the best way to do that? Allow me to show you how to quickly perform this part of your sales lead qualification process.

Throughout this blog post, I’ll explain how I used a combination of Gigasheet’s features to separate the Fortune 500 leads from the rest. Gigasheet is a free, online spreadsheet with tools that can be used by sales and marketing professionals.

Let’s dive in!

Sales Lead Qualification with Quick Filters

For demonstration, Gigasheet’s Product Marketing team provided me with a sales leads dataset comprising one million dummy leads – which can be accessed ,here. This dataset gives me the following information on the leads:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email

These are the three fields in most lead generation forms, and so many companies have no way to determine whether a lead is from a Fortune 500 company or not.

But there’s a way!

You can use your leads’ email addresses to determine whether they’re part of a Fortune 500 company or not, and perform sales lead qualification.

Use Gigasheet’s Free Email Verification Enrichment to Strip Out Domains

To make things easier, I stripped out domains from the email addresses using Gigasheet’s email verification enrichment feature. To tap into this feature, click on “Functions -> Enrichments” – which will launch this pop-up in front of you:

Now, click the first option as “Email” – since we’re playing with emails.

Choose the Enrichment Column inside your spreadsheet. Mine is “Email.” Under “Service Options,” select “Email Format Check.”

After applying the data enrichment settings, Gigasheet generated the following information using the emails in my list:

1. Email Format
2. Email – Domain
3. Email – Alexa Rank
4. Email – Disposition

Want to get rid of leads that used their personal emails or used a disposable email service? Just apply this filter:

This way, you can get your hands on Organization leads.

But let’s not forget – my goal is to get my hands on Fortune 500 leads. Now, I could have easily applied a filter with domain names of Fortune 500 companies like this –

But there are two problems with this approach –

1. Creating a filter with domain names of Fortune 500 companies is time-consuming.
2. Secondly, Fortune 500 companies own multiple domains. For example, Amazon owns amazon.com, but at the same time, it also owns amazon.in, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, and many more. The same applies to companies like Apple, Disney, and many more.

This is a challenge.

To solve this problem, the marketing team at Gigasheet created a spreadsheet comprising Fortune 500 companies and the different domains they own. This list doesn’t comprise every single domain owned by Fortune 500 companies; but we’ve tried our best and flood it with as many domains as we could.

You can access the Fortune 500 Email Domains list here.

Now, what I’ll do is use Gigasheet’s Cross File VLookup function to flood our sales leads sheet with Fortune 500 company names. Once I do that, I’ll apply the “Company is not empty” filter to get my hands on Fortune 500 Leads.

Let me show you how.

Use Gigasheet’s Cross File VLOOKUP to Compare Sales Leads against Fortune 500 List

I have my sales leads spreadsheet comprising the names and email addresses of leads. After applying the email verification enrichment feature, I managed to strip out domain names from email addresses.

Alongside, I have Fortune 500 Email Domains spreadsheet comprising company names along with different domains they own – and more information.

Gigasheet’s Cross File VLookup functionality allows you to retrieve and transfer data from one spreadsheet to another. So, I’ll use this functionality to retrieve and transfer the names of Fortune 500 companies from my Fortune 500 Email Domains file to my sales lead spreadsheet.

Next step – I hopped onto my sales leads spreadsheet and clicked on “Functions -> Cross File VLookup.” Under Cross File VLookup, I selected the column name “Email – Domain.”

The reason why I chose “Email – Domain” as the column is that we have a comprehensive list of domain names of Fortune 500 companies in the Fortune 500 Email Domains spreadsheet.

Next, I selected the VLookup file as “Fortune 500 Emails Domains.” Under “Select Lookup Column,” I chose “Primary Domain” - which represents the domain names of Fortune 500 companies in the “Fortune 500 Emails Domains” spreadsheet.

I wanted to add the company names to our sales leads spreadsheet. So, I applied the following settings:

As soon as I applied, Gigasheet retrieved and transferred the company names from Fortune 500 Emails spreadsheet to the sales leads spreadsheet.

My sales leads spreadsheet is flooded with only Fortune 500 company names. For companies that are not Fortune 500, the field “Company Name” is empty. So, I got rid of the rest by applying this filter:

The Output of the Sales Lead Qualification Process With Only Fortune 500 Accounts

That’s how I filtered Fortune 500 leads from the rest.

Now, I can either export this list or if required - further narrow down my data using Gigasheet’s advanced filtering and grouping functionalities.

I grouped my data based on the company name for better analysis.

Having sorted the leads based on the company they are associated with, I can now easily run a targeted email campaign for leads from a specific company. For instance, if I want to target leads from Alphabet, I can simply select Alphabet, and all of the company's leads will be displayed.

If your marketing or sales teams are spending countless hours filtering Fortune 500 leads, all you need to do is sign up for Gigasheet to help them save their precious time.

Gigasheet is free to use! Sign up today.

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