Qualified Lead

A qualified lead is an enquiry from someone who could actually buy from you, and that last part is the whole difference. Not everyone who fills in a form can spend money, because a student doing a school project sends the same message as a factory owner with a budget. So a qualified lead is the one you checked before a salesperson spent an hour on the phone.

Most businesses learn this the hard way, a month after a new advert goes out. The enquiries jump, everyone is pleased, and then nothing sells, so the advert gets the blame. It rarely deserves it, because the count was never the problem. Half of those people were comparing prices for next year, and a quarter were suppliers trying to sell something to you.

Sales teams split these enquiries in two, and the split is the useful part. A marketing-ready lead has only shown interest, so they downloaded the price list, came back three times and opened four emails, which earns a follow-up rather than a meeting. A sales-ready lead has said something that proves a purchase is possible: a budget, a date, or a problem costing money right now. That is the person to call today.

The sorting comes down to two questions on the form, and most companies ask the wrong two. Company size and industry tell you almost nothing, while when they need it working and who else approves the spending tell you almost everything. Someone who answers next month and just me is a different buyer from one who answers sometime and I would have to ask. Two extra fields, and the list sorts itself.

The answers then have to land somewhere a person owns, because a form that emails a shared inbox loses leads. Nobody owns an inbox, so nobody feels responsible when a message sits in it for three days. That is why, when Linkysoft builds a web application for a sales team, the sorting rule lives inside the system. A hot enquiry is flagged the minute it arrives, and the salesperson sees why, not only that it was.

One honest warning: strict sorting makes the lead count fall, and a smaller number looks like bad news on a digital marketing report. It is not, because ten enquiries you can serve are worth more than sixty you cannot. Linkysoft therefore asks new clients to count the enquiries that turned into paid work rather than the ones that arrived. The two numbers rarely tell the same story.