I am interested in gathering the community's feedback on how they handle the routing of leads to their sales teams.
We have a marketing qualified revenue stage that listens for leads who reach a lead score threshold and then based on certain parameters are routed to the appropriate sales team member.
My question is more around the leads that are sent to sales without going through the 'system process'. For example: leads are acquired at a marketing supported tradeshow that stop by the booth, upon conclusion of the tradeshow, our team will share those leads with sales before they are tagged as marketing qualified in our system.
Would these leads be considered marketing qualified as well? To me they were acquired by marketing but not influenced enough to reach the lead score threshold to have their lead status flip to marketing qualified.
I have been asked to define this process and would appreciate any input.
Thank you!
Christine
Christine Selvaggio
I would define "Marketing Qualified" as a person that marketing believes is ready for a sales engagement, regardless of the technical method used to make that determination.
So if you feel that leads that stop by a booth are sufficiently engaged to talk to sales, in my book that makes them MQL.
To preserve the integrity of your scoring model, you could ensure your lead scoring program adds enough points for reaching a "Visited Booth" status in your tradeshow program to ensure they hit the MQL lead scoring threshold, and then your existing threshold process will kick in.
If after considering this approach you don't feel that visiting the booth is enough to make them MQL, that might raise the question of whether those leads are actually ready to talk to sales, which could be a useful discussion to have with your sales team.