A clue is a clue, right? It depends, are you in marketing or sales?

SAL – Sales Accepted Leads is the bridge between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).

No, I am not splitting hairs nor am I giving myself over to semantics. Clearly defining and understanding the implications of MQL, SAL, and SQL is critical to successful B2B lead generation.

Assigning a numerical score to business sales leads based on a predefined set of rules takes the subjectivity out of qualitative ranking, such as hot, warm, and cold leads. Quantitative definitions of leads reduce the friction between sales and marketing.

B2B marketers are being much more accountable (as they should be) for their contributions to a company’s revenue. This is more important to industry marketers because generating a steady stream of high-quality sales leads plays a much bigger role than other B2B marketing goals, such as branding, thought leadership, and/or lead building. communities.

These days respect for B2B and industrial marketing is expressed as S METRIC

And that goes beyond producing reports of marketing activities for senior management. They want to know how much revenue was generated from all that marketing activity. Being able to prove the value of marketing with empirical data is the best defense against C-Suite’s accusation of “show me the money.”

Definition of qualified prospects

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)– A lead that has achieved a certain score based on a predetermined set of criteria and is ready to be handed over to sales
• Accepted Sales Leads (SAL):Leads accepted by sales for follow-up actions
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): Leads that turn into opportunities, whether profit or loss

SAL aligns sales and marketing

At first glance, it may seem like it’s just a matter of assigning numerical scores to leads and that the transfer to sales should happen automatically through the use of marketing automation software. Dig a little deeper and it will become obvious that there is much more involved than “set it and forget it”.

SAL is what brings sales and marketing together to achieve the Holy Grail of B2B lead generation: a unified definition of a qualified lead. Sales and marketing will continue to argue without this agreement. And a large part of the leads generated will be lost. Oh what a waste! (See my previous post, B2B Lead Generation Without Lead Nurturing Is Doomed)

Lead qualification and management best practices require at least the following:

• Sales and marketing must work together to define what constitutes a qualified prospect for your particular business.
• Lead scoring should be based on both the profile of the best prospects (company size, industry classification, job function, etc.) that Sales knows best, and visitor engagement (site activities) for sales. which Marketing has access to analytics and reports.
• Sales must agree to perform all follow-up actions before rejecting an MQL (if a salesperson is too busy, the system must route the lead to someone else)
• Marketing must be willing to adjust scoring rules based on sales feedback to refine lead scoring for optimal results (closed-loop system)

I don’t want to create the false impression that every manufacturer, distributor, or industrial company needs a sophisticated marketing automation package to get the best results from their lead generation efforts.

Let’s say you are a manufacturer or distributor selling to a niche market. So you are likely dealing with only a handful of leads and not hundreds of them at any given time. It is quite possible that your needs will be met with a simpler manual system made up of a visitor identification program (internet caller ID) and outbound telemarketing to fully qualify your prospects. Results can be tabulated using Excel spreadsheets for tracking and refinements.

Of course, it would be unmanageable to scale a manual lead tracking and scoring system as the volume of leads increases.

A good lead scoring and management system should be flexible enough to accommodate exceptions. For example, a site visitor with a very high level of activity (multiple pages viewed, including pricing information, white papers downloaded, and online demos viewed) would score high for engagement. However, this may be an integration consultant rather than an end user. It may take a phone call or progressive landing pages to uncover this additional information.

Your system must be able to fit this low-key score. This may not be a lead you want to send to sales right away, but rather put them on a nurturing path that doesn’t require much of your time and resources.

Although we B2B marketers like to think of marketing as more science and less art, lead generation is not an exact science. Human intervention and interactions are the oils that grease the wheels of B2B lead generation.

The key takeaway here is that you may be making a very costly mistake if you treat all of your leads the same way, put them in one common bucket, and dump it into sales to qualify and close. You are going to need some type of SAL if you want to maximize your ROI from lead generation.