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