I’m often asked what makes a perfect sales lead, or when does a MQL convert to an SQL. To be honest, every company will have a different take on this.
In my view, there are a number of pieces of information that marketing needs to get sight and understanding of before prepping a lead for the sale team to go and play with.
This checklist is a good start point.
Relevance: The lead matches your target customer profile and has a genuine need for your product or service.
Need
Qualification: The lead meets specific criteria set by your sales team. This could be industry, company size, or geographic location etc. Making them more likely to convert.
Desire
Engagement: The lead has shown active interest in your offer. This is demonstrated by requesting more information, signing up for a demo, engaging with your content etc.
Communication: The lead is responsive and open to communication, making it easier for your sales team to nurture the relationship.
Authority
Budget: The lead has the financial means to purchase your product or service within your pricing range.
Authority: The lead has decision-making power within their organization or has influence over the purchasing decision.
Timing
Timing: The lead is in the buying stage or has an imminent need for your product or service.
Referral: The lead comes from a trusted referral source, such as a satisfied customer or a strategic partner, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Lead Scoring
In the past, I have run campaigns where each of these 8 criteria can be scored. A scale of 1-5 works well. A red hot, absolute certainty would score 40 points – but that never happens.
The key here is to decide how many points a leads needs to score before it’s handed over to the sales team.
For example, anything over 20 could be passed to sales as a qualified lead. Then the lead is be tracked through the sales process. Each of these criteria being improved by the sales person.
For example. You might have a poor score of say 1 for Timing, because you don’t know when they want to / have to place an order. But by talking to the prospect, you discover they need delivery by XX date, this score would go from 1 – 4 perhaps
With a sophisticated CRM system in place, that can be used for tracking website and outbound marketing activity, you can also add further lead scoring such as:
- Clicked on an email link
- Watched a webinar
- Downloaded a pdf
- Etc
If you want to get to really sophisticated with your sales lead process, then you should align your sales stages with this scoring system. That means that in order for a lead to pass to the next level of forecasting, the scoring needs to meet a certain level. This is time consuming to set up, train and implement, but it will mean that your factored sales forecast becomes more accurate over time.
I hope that helps with some ideas on how you could be setting Sales Qualified Lead objectives.
How do you define a great sales lead?