Crack the Code of Lead Intelligence: How to Make Lead Intelligence Work, So You Don’t Have To

Lead qualification is one of the hardest tasks a marketer or a sales rep has to do.

Separating the bad from the good ones and creating a system. Although it’s a necessary part of the whole sales process, it still requires time, data, and experience.

You can study already existing frameworks, but none will fit your business 100%. You will need to adapt them to your own needs.

Lead intelligence can make this job easier for you. What it does, in a nutshell, is that it uses automation tools and AI to score and qualify leads, based on your criteria. A feature that can change the game for agencies, pay-per-call marketers, and every kind of business that works with phone leads.

In Nimbata we have paired lead intelligence with call tracking and our clients have witnessed a huge increase in their conversion rates and ROI. By the end of this article, you will see how you can do that too! We will talk about lead intelligence, how it can help your business, why you should invest in it, and take a look at some cases you might find useful for your business.

Here we go!

Why Do You Need Lead Intelligence?

Like any tool you buy or investment you make, there must be a good reason behind it. You spend money, hoping to gain more in value than you paid for. Lead intelligence is also an investment in your business and knowing its full potential is important to understand why you should take the step.

Save Time & Effort

Going through each lead individually and trying to qualify it can be a massive time drain. Instead of prospecting, you find yourself or your team arguing over single leads, whether they should receive a score of 80 or 75. Lead intelligence will automate that process, reduce the grind, scale up the process of lead qualification, and save you tons of hours. You can then spend that time optimizing your marketing and bringing in even more leads.

Your Clients Will Love It

A common challenge our users face is getting clients to actively qualify and assess the value of their leads. Without client participation, it becomes harder for users to identify which leads are converting into high-value customers. With lead intelligence, this process is automated, so your clients no longer need to invest extra time in qualifying and valuing leads—it’s all handled for them.

Full Picture of the Quality of Your Leads

Understanding the quality of a lead depends on multiple factors. Lead intelligence unifies your data and gives you the full picture of your lead quality. By leveraging lead intelligence, you can assess not just the basic demographic data but also behavioral insights, engagement levels, and intent signals. This comprehensive understanding allows you to prioritize high-quality leads, tailor your outreach strategies, and ultimately increase conversion rates.

Data-Based Google Ads Optimization

An exciting feature of lead intelligence is the ability to set up rules that automatically send only selected leads to be tracked as conversions in your Google Ad campaigns. This allows you to fine-tune Google Ads’ Automated Bidding to focus specifically on high-value leads, helping you maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Close the Gap Between Marketing & Sales With Lead Intelligence: 50+ Data Points in a Single Caller Profile

They say that AI is the future. But AI is just a means to an end. A tool in our shed we can use in a million different ways to enhance functions and processes, we already do by hand.

AI speeds up the lead classification process. Using your criteria, data from calls, and well-designed automations, you can filter leads at a staggering speed. Instead of going through call transcripts and trying to decipher sentiment and intention, AI will do that for you, in a matter of seconds.

Here’s how this happens:

Put Your Lead Classification on Autopilot with AI-Powered Call Filters and Automations!

The whole point of lead intelligence is to speed up a time-consuming task and lighten your sales team’s workload. So, now instead of running every lead through your lead qualification gauntlet, you can create an automation to do that for you.

It’s a simple “if X” then “do X” process.

IF your lead talks on the phone for over 5 minutes, THEN tag the lead as “interested”.

IF your lead mentions “appointment”, “book”, “interested” AND UTM_Campaign = “Brooklyn apartments” THEN create new contact in HubSpot and set Quotable as “Maybe”

These are very simplified examples, but it’s only a fraction of what our automations can do. We will see more use cases later.

Creating an automation is very easy thanks to the automation builder. You’re just clicking around, selecting your criteria and actions.

One of our most powerful AI features is word & phrase spotting.

Classifying a lead is a multi-step job, but it’s never complete without taking a look at what has been said during the phone conversation. Words and phrases exchanged can provide invaluable insights into a lead’s intent, needs, and urgency. By analyzing specific language patterns, sales reps can determine how far along the lead is in the buying process.

For example, words like “budget,” “timeline,” and “decision” might indicate that a lead is ready to make a purchasing decision soon, whereas phrases like “just exploring” or “gathering information” suggest they are still in the early stages of their journey. Sales reps can also use word spotting to identify pain points and key motivators that can guide future follow-ups or pitch adjustments.

Call Activity 🤝 Lead Timelines: the duo that empowers Lead Intelligence

You can’t evaluate the quality of a lead without data. Call analytics with valuable data and insights are an important aspect of lead intelligence. The number one requirement for a successful lead qualification system is understanding your customer and creating an ideal customer profile. You need data from every source you can get.

Phone calls are an often overlooked data source. With call analytics from Nimbata, you can plug that hole in your marketing reporting and have a full picture of your ideal customer.

Modern CRM systems integrate with call tracking tools to automatically pick up on key phrases. These tools analyze the conversation, flagging important terms that indicate a hot lead or a high-value opportunity. By combining word spotting with other data, like lead demographics or engagement history, reps can make more informed decisions about which leads to prioritize and how to tailor their follow-up strategies.

You can also go back to a call and listen to the recording, or read the transcription. But, this can be a time-consuming process. Imagine reading page after page from a long call, trying to spot that tiny little detail that will determine whether the lead is actionable. Call summaries reduce the time it takes to do that by 95%. How? Simply, by producing a summary of the transcript which includes all the key details from the call in a few sentences. Instead of reading whole pages, you will just read a few words and have all the information you need.

All these data points (and more) are stored under Call Activity.

Call Activity is like having your own personal CRM just for phone leads. It’s a fully customizable dashboard where all your caller data is stored. Here, you can do things like listen to call recordings, tag calls, and more.

The Call Activity Dashboard is made up of Views, Rows & Columns, Call Details, and the Lead Timeline report.

Views: Think of Views as groups of callers that meet specific criteria. Nimbata includes default Views like “All Calls” and “Only Answered” to help you get started. You can also create custom Views based on your own filters, making it easy to segment call data in ways that are most meaningful to your business.

Rows: Each row represents a caller and expands to show details like call recordings, call tags, and more.

Columns: In Nimbata, columns show specific metrics related to your call activity. You can customize the columns to display the metrics that matter most to you, such as call outcomes, duration, caller location, and campaign performance.

Lead Timeline Report: The Lead Timeline gives you a complete view of each lead’s journey, showing their entire interaction history before and after the call. You’ll see details like the pages they viewed on your website, form submissions, and other touchpoints. This report helps you track key interactions throughout the customer journey, offering a visual breakdown of when and how leads engage with your content, calls, and other channels. Data like page views, calls, and submissions reveal patterns, measure engagement, and show where prospects are in the buying cycle.

In The Field: See How Lead Intelligence Can Transform Marketing For You

Okay, let’s see now how lead intelligence works.

You’re a marketing manager for a real estate agency that’s qualifying 100+ weekly buyer inquiries by reviewing the following data from a lead management system:

• Where leads are coming from (social media ads, property listing websites, referrals, Google ads)
• What properties are they showing interest in (single-family homes, condos, luxury homes, etc.)
• Budget range they’ve communicated to your team (“I’m looking for something around $500,000.”)
• Urgency to move (“I need to relocate in the next 30 days.”)
• What neighborhoods are they most interested in?
• Do they prefer urban, suburban, or rural locations?
• What are their top priorities when it comes to the location of their new home (e.g., safety, amenities, commute time)?

Using this data, you qualify leads and assign value based on the type of property they’re interested in (e.g., $15,000 commission for a luxury home sale).

This month, you’re specifically targeting high-urgency leads who are looking to purchase luxury homes—a high-value segment of the market.

Instead of spending hours every day trying to sort through the leads and qualify them, you can reduce time spent by more than 90% with Lead Intelligence. Minutes, instead of hours.

Step 1. Create your customer profile. People who are interested in luxury homes. So, upper middle class, over the age of 40, with college education, etc. Use data from past sales and research to make your customer profile as accurate as possible.

Step 2. Choose your criteria. These could be interactions with your luxury homes ads, calling you from your landing pages, or using keywords and phrases like “luxury home” or “beach house” in their phone conversations with you.

These are some indications of a high-quality lead. But don’t limit yourself. There is a great range of criteria to choose from, so get creative and combine your experience as well. For example, a phone conversation that lasted more than 5 minutes might be another indication.

Of course, these are just indications, not guarantees that the lead will convert. Remember, it’s all about weeding out the less qualified ones and focusing on those who have a higher chance. There are no absolutes in the sales game.

Step 3. Now that you have your criteria, it’s time to create your automation.

Set the conditions:

If:

• Caller said the words “appointment” or “luxury home”

And

• Came from the luxury homes Google ads
• Or
• Luxury homes landing page

And

• Call lasts more than 5 minutes

Then take these actions:

• Tag lead as “Luxury Homes Interested”
• Score lead as 70
• Send lead to Google Ads
• Send lead to Hubspot CRM

With this automation active, every time a call fulfills these criteria will be tagged as a high-quality lead and shared with your integrated Google Ads account for training purposes and with your CRM for data sharing.

And all that will be done in a couple of minutes. Sounds good, right?

Just picture how much time you will save and how much easier your life will be. Not to mention the increased conversion rates and ROI.

You can create more than one automation or combine them with intelligent call flows. Use your experience and imagination to create scenarios, specific or wide-catching, that will serve your purpose right.

For example, you can create an automation where if the caller presses “1” for example, it means they are interested in renting a property. A different automation, where if they press “2” it means they want to buy, etc. Then these calls can be tagged directly as “Rent Lead” or “Buy Lead” and sent to your CRM. Combine these automations with intelligent call flow actions for maximum results.

Takeaway

Lead qualification is a challenging yet vital part of the sales process, requiring time, data, and experience to effectively identify high-quality leads. While existing frameworks provide a starting point, each business must adapt them to fit its specific needs.

The introduction of lead intelligence, especially when paired with call tracking and automation tools, can significantly streamline this process. By automating lead scoring and classification, businesses can save time, improve client satisfaction, and optimize marketing efforts—particularly for high-value leads.

This automation enables faster decision-making and increases conversion rates, making lead intelligence a game-changer for businesses working with phone leads.