Marketing qualified lead criteria in vendor negotiations

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as you look at a funnel the question is you know how do we get leads at the top of the funnel it leads at the top of the funnel mean that they're you know usually not very aware of your organization they may have never heard of your organization before in the past and you want them to gain some awareness so that you can interest them in what you're doing so that and you're just moving them down the funnel so that they can consider you when they're going to make a purchase decision and that they then go and buy your product or service usually what happens is up at the top of the funnel we're trying to get new leads into into our funnel meaning that there's a bunch of people out there who don't know about us these These are what I call prospects they are they probably fit our target market but we may not have enough information about them to make a clear-cut decision on whether or not they fill out the top fill into the target market and we're saying okay we're gonna go to these prospects we're going to try to Market to them in a way that they then respond to us now what does that mean it means that they express interest in something that we are providing to them so the more complex the sale the more things that they could express interest in they could just sign up to see a video they could sign up to get a free ebook they could do one of these kind of activities and then that would classify them as a marketing qualified lead what that technically means is that we've taken somebody who's a prospect they'd be they've become a lead by responding to something that we put out in the marketplace is it I'm interested in XYZ it's related to our product or service in some way shape or form and then we say okay so that's now a lead now we have to qualify that lead does that lead do we want to work with that lead or is that kind of a junk lead if you do want to work with that lead if it's a qualified lead then it would be a marketing qualified lead that's the next step down a marketing qualified lead just means that you want the marketing team to spend their time energy and resources attempting to move that lead down the funnel until it becomes a sales qualified lead sales qualified lead is pretty easy to determine that means that the sales team has agreed that a sales qualified lead is one that they want to talk to right so there's a number of different criteria every organization has a different criteria for what a sales qualified lead should be marketing qualified lead tends to be a little bit more agreed upon um the reason for the difference in sales qualified leads being a little bit less common across different organizations is that essentially sales teams operate very differently some sales teams are very um what where do I want to use outbound oriented and so they say okay you know give us even things that are lukewarm leads and we'll have somebody go and call on these things um calling these leads but other organizations say no no it's not a sales qualified lead until that person is ready and wanting to sit down and talk to a salesperson that's a lot harder to get to obviously it takes a lot more nurturing from the marketing team to get to that place so marketing qualified lead almost always means that they fit in our target market and they have responded to our communication in such a way that we would say great we want to Market to them and they clearly want us to Market to them because they've they've expressed interest in what we're doing sales qualified lead means your sales team and your marketing team have agreed that we are going to pass these along to sales these are going to become sales leads and we're going to assign a salesperson to them when they meet a specific criteria generally speaking I mean if it's a booked meeting then it's obvious right okay so the marketing a lot of the marketing campaign says book a meeting and then you just nurture that nurture that lead until they say Okay I want to book a meeting and it's obviously a sales a very hot sales lead because they want to talk to a salesperson but in a lot of organizations for example it can get into there are some gray areas for example if you ask me and we're using a webinar as part of our strategy I would tell you that someone from sales or someone from marketing or someone from product or some subject matter expert or whatever somebody should follow up with every single one of the leads that attended the webinar that fit in our target market somebody should call them um within a day within 24 hours ideally um perhaps even the same day that the webinar has run somebody should go out and and connect with those folks uh does that make those leads sales qualified leads well you got to talk to your sales team and and come to an agreed upon approach to at what point in time does something become a sales qualified lead