Definitions for marketing leads for use in lead generation

I just finished reading Brian Carroll’s erudite blog post on Five steps to help create your universal lead definition. In 10 years of working with firms on marketing automation and lead management there have been far too few that had this important definition agreed to by Marketing and Sales.

Marketing’s primary deliverable to Sales is the marketing qualified lead.  Not having a firm definition of this deliverable is unforgivable. How can marketing be held accountable if there is no definition for a good lead? Notwithstanding Brian’s advice on how to organize around arriving at a lead definition, here are a few items to consider in the lead definitions.

Marketing Lead Definitions

Most folks use the lead status field as a means to differentiate between leads of various qualities. Do not use this field as a call disposition field (‘left message’, ‘contact successful’ etc). Limit the number of Lead Status values to 10 or 12 at the most. Remember at some point you will be reporting on how many leads are in which state, and how long did they remain there. Consider this the marketing funnel report and you want to be able to demonstrate a steady flow through the various lead states!

• Raw – person identified as worth engaging, no relationship yet, probably a list import
• Open or Inquiry or New or Suspect– person has at least one incoming response, or otherwise expressed interest somehow
• Lead Qualification – person sent to lead qualification (telemarketing) for qualification
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – person that marketing feels is ready for Sales' attention
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) - a person that may represent a new opportunity. Once a lead is known to be associated with an existing account or a revenue opportunity, it becomes a sales qualified lead and is converted into a contact.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Use this as the final resting state of a lead that is converted into a contact by the Sales person in your Customer Relationship Management system!
• Disqualified – Someone who will never rise to the level of qualified and is not worth any future attention from marketing and sales.
• Junk – Bad data, "asdf@abc.com" and the like. It is useful to flag this separately from Disqualified because (a) you can later on determine which lead source is producing the most junk, and (b) at some point you may opt to delete all junk from your database but you will want to retain the Disqualified folks. "Disqualified "is still good information, and you never want to go through the process of qualifying them again!
• Re-Market – person sent back to marketing by sales because it was not ready to become a Sales Qualified Lead.

So in the meetings between Marketing and Sales you need to arrive at definitions for each of these lead status values. The most contentious one is the Marketing Qualified Lead. What information does Marketing have to know about a lead before handing it off to Sales.  I won’t repeat my blog post on BANT versus the SCOTSMAN but it is worth a read if you are interested in this topic.

Very few leads should remain in the Sales Accepted Lead state. When a lead is handed off to Sales they will have a limited period of time to either accept it (change it to a Sales Accepted Lead), Disqualify it, or return it to Marketing for further lead nurturing (change it to Re-Market).

There are some further twists on these definitions based on dealing with ISRs,  channel partners, and methods to fast track certain leads through the process. We will save that discussion for a future time. As always, comments welcome!

-Kevin

Comments

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Hi,

This is quite interesting concept for any bussiness to be successful. Iam a technology student hope to start my own business in almost 5 years from now.
I think these little tips will be really help full for me to organize my business.

Thanks
Hussain

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Very interesting post. Each person with a business should know this. It'll help to improve and increase each ones business site.

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I use a similar system within my marketing system to sift and filter out leads for my Online Networking Business (MLM). It is a great way to eliminate the time and effort of qualifying every lead into a prospect when the System does it for me. It also provides a sales funnel and affiliate commisions to help curb the cost of the primary business itself.
What this article goes into is what I do everyday, or rather the marketing system/ Sales Funnel does for me. Great stuff.

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