Automated Lead Qualification: One Key to a Seamless Marketing-to-Sales Handoff

One of the biggest frustrations in the marketing-to-sales handoff is lead quality. But in many cases, the problem isn’t that marketing is generating bad leads—it’s that sales doesn’t have the right insights about those leads.

Too often, sales teams spend hours on the phone chasing down prospects to find that missing insight, only to discover incorrect details, false inquiries, or families who have already moved on. By the time someone is fully “qualified,” the opportunity has often slipped away.

In a recent webinar, Sonia Vachon, VP of Client Engagement at Further, highlighted lead qualification as a critical improvement area that could significantly streamline the marketing-to-sales handoff.

Want more strategies to streamline your marketing-to-sales handoff? Watch the full webinar.

Where Manual Lead Qualification Falls Short

Lead qualification is essential in senior living, but manual approaches can drag down the process. Families looking for communities are usually under stress and short on time, with needs that go far beyond what a checkbox form can reveal. To truly qualify a lead, communities must understand both practical needs and family dynamics like:

• Financial and care fit (budget, clinical needs, lifestyle preferences, location)
• Family decision-making (adult child researching vs. senior making the final choice)‍
• Readiness to move (identifying who is prepared now vs. who needs more time)

Unfortunately, traditional lead capture methods—like webforms, phone calls, and manual data entry—fall short. They collect vague or incomplete details, leaving sales teams stuck spending hours asking basic qualification questions instead of building meaningful relationships with prospects.

This approach isn’t sustainable—especially when Further’s data shows that only 18% of leads drive 75% of move-ins, while the bottom 52% account for just 3.5%. Without automation, most of those calls are wasted effort.

How Automated Lead Qualification Changes the Game

Automation transforms the qualification process. Instead of relying on phone calls and static forms, automated lead qualification instantly evaluates intent and fit by analyzing online behavior, inquiry details, and past conversion patterns.

Further’s Move-in Prediction Algorithm—built on the industry’s largest dataset of senior living interactions—takes this a step further. By combining marketing, behavioral, and conversational data, all tied to real move-in outcomes, our machine learning model predicts conversion with over 80% accuracy. This gives sales teams powerful insights into each lead before they ever pick up the phone.

With our automated lead qualification, you can track digital behaviors alongside first-party insights, such as:

• Entry point: How each prospect discovered your website
• Browsing behavior: The pages they explored, including drop-offs on key areas like pricing
• Financial signals: Signs of budget sensitivity or constraints
• Engagement actions: Whether they viewed floor plans or scheduled a tour
• Lead quality filters: Automatically screening out job seekers, vendors, or invalid inquiries

By learning from past move-ins, the system identifies which behaviors signal true intent and assigns every lead a score from 0 to 100. Higher scores strongly correlate with conversion—for example, leads in the 90+ range convert at rates 10X higher than the 40–50 range, and more than 60X higher than the 11–20 range.

Learn even more about how our Move-in Prediction Algorithm works.

Why It Matters?

This isn’t just insight—it’s action. Automated lead qualification empowers your team to:

• Prioritize high-intent leads
• Filter out unqualified prospects
• Personalize outreach based on behaviors
• Spend more time building trust and relationships

The result? A more productive, intentional team that fills vacancies faster.

“ We need to prioritize high-potential leads and filter out the noise using intelligent lead scoring and signals. The intent is there. Let’s capture that and leverage that.”

Sonia Vachon, Vice President of Client Engagement at Further

👉 Ready to see how Further’s automated lead qualification can transform your marketing-to-sales handoff?

• Not a customer yet? Request a demo to see it in action by clicking the button at the top of this page.
• Already a customer? Reach out to your CSM to learn how to get started.