Qualified leads mean different things to different organizations. If you do a lot of live events is someone qualified if they register, if they attend, or if they raise their hand for more information after the event? Or something else?
What about people who attend a webcast? Do you qualify them simply by their attendance or a combination of attendance, request for more information, company size, geography, title, and industry?
What about inbound phone calls? Do you account for the type of request or just immediately qualify everyone and pass them along?
Let’s make one thing clear, you do not want to deliver unqualified leads your sales team because you want to make sure they are following up on all of your hard lead generation work. If you deliver undesirables to them, they’re going to lose trust in the lead flow and then, when a good lead comes in, it will be ignored.
I recently found a great article on this topic, “What is a Marketing-Qualified Lead?” It’s worth bookmarking to review from time to time to make sure your lead gen is organized properly.
Some of the highlights:
- Define the profile of the lead you want (name, title, organization, etc.)
- Organize your channels (inbound, events, etc.)
- Identify the actions the person needs to take to be qualified
- Make sure your sales team agrees with the definition of a Sales Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Opportunity
- Keep the lead qualification process simple