Lead Qualification: A Simple Guide

We’ve all been in that meeting. You know the one, where everyone is debating, ‘Is that lead marketing or sales qualified?’ These meetings can often be tense affairs, with the sales and marketing departments each vying for its share of the leads.

In sales and marketing lead generation is a big deal. It’s inherently baked into everything we do as a business - from strategy, where we obsess over how to generate leads, to finance, where predicted lead volume is incorporated into our revenue projections. But as a whole we do a very poor job defining what a lead is, often confusing and blurring the lines between the various stages of lead qualification.

In this guide we explain the various stages of lead qualification, ending with a case study to help illustrate how clear and consistent lead qualification strategies can help businesses drive better customer engagement and ultimately increased revenue.

What is Lead Qualification?

Lead qualification is the process by which we move prospects down the funnel. We can qualify leads at various stages of the funnel. The qualification process often centers around a lead scoring system, with a score given to each new prospect entering the funnel based on their persona and actions taken by that lead set against an ideal persona weighting.

1. A Lead 
   The life of a lead starts with a qualification event, which could entail anything from downloading a case study to opening an email. Leads are often the prospects entering a company’s marketing funnel for the first time. Furthermore, a lead can be qualified from an offline event like a conference or a personal calling card, not exclusively from actions taken online. However, the process of uploading the lead information and applying a weighted score is very much still the same. 
    
2. Marketing Qualified Lead 
   A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect that the marketing team has deemed worthy of their investment. The lead is engaged with the company The lead is engaged with the company thanks to its marketing efforts. For example, perhaps they fill in a form to download a report, or submit a contact us request. MQL is often the first step in the sales process and can stem from a qualification event, online or offline. 
    
3. Sales Accepted Lead 
   When marketing hands off the responsibility of the lead to sales we call this a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). Sales operations often takes the reins and hands off to a sales strategists to conduct exploratory efforts into each lead personally, either through an introductory phone call or through an email. These exploratory efforts are often facilitated by a qualification framework, often used to determine the fit between the two parties. 
    
4. Sales Qualified Lead 
   The next step before converting a sale is the process of qualifying SALS. Once a sales accepted lead goes through the exploratory process and is deemed a suitable fit we now move the lead down the funnel converting to a sales qualified lead (SQL). The SQL is now a lead that has a high likelihood of making a purchase and is worth the investment of sales resources.  

Where your lead gets qualified is critical to the whole process.

Acquiring a lead and qualifying them is a time and resource consuming activity. Google and Linkedin make the Lead Qualification process but the intrinsic challenge for companies has been reaching out to the right audience online. Platforms such as  Harvest  are very potent platforms for lead qualification because of a very important reason - The community is large, curated and are on the platform for delving deep into investment management.  This helps our community in two significant ways - (i) the readers (who are all sophisticated investors/ professionals)  get access to the correct and most updated information they need and (ii) Our clients make a larger impact on their target audience. In essence, while Google and Linkedin help you start at step 1,  Harvest  enables you to start at step 3, thereby reducing the time and overall investment into your sales process.

Over the past five years, a larger number of companies have consistently invested their time and resources on  Harvest  . We expect to see this trend growing in the next few years as more companies see the value in reducing lead qualification cycles.