AI-Powered Lead Intake & Qualification
Turn a messy inbound form into a scored, prioritized lead in minutes, not days
The intake bottleneck
Most agencies lose good leads not because they say the wrong thing, but because they respond too slowly or inconsistently. A founder triages leads sharply on Monday morning and sloppily on a busy Thursday. Claude doesn’t get tired by Thursday — but it needs your actual qualification criteria to be useful, not generic “is this a good fit” guessing.
Step 1: Write down what “qualified” actually means
Before Claude can score a lead, you need explicit criteria — the kind that usually live only in a senior partner’s head. Get them out in the open first:
Help me turn my qualification instincts into explicit written
criteria. Here's how I currently decide if a lead is a good fit,
roughly:
- Budget: we don't do well under $5k/month retainer
- Industry: we're strongest in B2B SaaS and professional services;
we've struggled with ecommerce and restaurants
- Timeline: leads who need to "launch in 2 weeks" are usually a
bad culture fit for our process
- Decision maker: if the form is filled out by someone who isn't
the final approver, deals slow down or die
Turn this into a numbered scoring rubric (1-5 per category) I can
hand to anyone on my team to apply consistently.Step 2: Score inbound leads against the rubric
Once you have a rubric, apply it to raw form submissions or discovery-call notes. This is the highest-leverage use of Claude in intake — turning unstructured text into a consistent score.
Score this inbound lead against our qualification rubric (pasted
below). Give a score per category, a total, and a one-line
recommendation: fast-track, standard follow-up, or politely decline.
RUBRIC:
[paste rubric from Step 1]
LEAD SUBMISSION:
Company: Kepler Robotics (B2B hardware/software, Series A)
Budget field: "$8-10k/month"
Message: "We need a new website and ongoing content marketing.
Our current agency isn't hitting deadlines. Ideally start ASAP,
we have a product launch in 6 weeks."
Submitted by: Head of MarketingTip: Feed Claude your last 10-15 closed-won and closed-lost deals with outcomes labeled. Ask it to look for patterns your rubric might be missing — this often surfaces a real disqualifier nobody had written down, like “leads referred by past clients close at 3x the rate of cold form fills.”
Step 3: Draft the response, not just the score
Extend the same prompt to draft the actual reply — a fast-track leads gets a same-day call-booking link with a specific, personalized opener; a decline gets a warm, referral-friendly no. Both should go out faster than a human triaging manually ever could.
| Score outcome | What Claude should draft |
|---|---|
| Fast-track (high score, urgent) | Personalized reply referencing their specific need, with a booking link |
| Standard follow-up | Warm reply, a qualifying question or two, added to nurture sequence |
| Decline | Polite, specific, ideally with a referral or resource — protects the relationship for later |
Watch out: Never let a scored lead auto-send without a human glance, especially declines. A rubric can’t catch “this is actually the CEO’s old college roommate” — a 15-second human check before sending prevents the rare, expensive miss.
Build it: Write your own qualification rubric using the Step 1 prompt with your agency’s real criteria, then score your three most recent inbound leads against it and compare the output to how you actually handled them.