Your take on manual lead qualification before passing fully to sales team

[Anonymous]

This is a question I have been thinking about in my head and it has recently come up in a client discussion. I am hoping to tap into some of my Marketo peers for your varying perspectives.

My question is this:

Even with scoring models built on activity/engagement and demographic data, is it STILL a good idea for there to be a layer of "manual" lead qualification between marketing and sales? That is, should Marketo direct "good" leads to a person or team who can then work to further qualify the lead? 

My thoughts are that many (larger?) orgs do  use some form of gatekeeper/sales assistant to help understand a lead's specific objectives before setting up a meeting with an actual sales person. I assume the reason for this is to help if there are tremendous volumes of leads coming in where meeting setting and these kinds of initial interviews via phone or email can help keep the busy salesperson focused on closing deals. 

I would argue that this need is less for an organization that may have 10-50 new leads a day versus one which gets 1,000 leads a day, and likewise I'm sure the quantity of sales people also work into that equation.

Any thoughts/POVs or articles on this topic appreciated! 

[Josh_Hill13]

I had an MQL Queue where each region's marketing manager would spot check MQLs and then assign to territories. This was helpful early on because of scoring checks as well as territories that changed a lot.

I'd recommend for at least a little while, but once everyone is happy with the flow and quality, there's no need for a human. The exception would be if it is hard to automate lead routing for some reason.

[Anonymous]

In my opinion, absolutely! We have an inside sales team that will call up our leads to further qualify them before passing them along as appointments to our sales team.

I've found, over and over again, that when our inside sales team calls up the lead, it turns out that while they're researching one particular topic to learn more, they've often got a more immediate need that we can meet. If I'd sent them along straight to the sales team in one division based on the materials the lead has downloaded, we'd have missed an opportunity for another department to meet a more immediate/related need.

[Anonymous]

Thanks both for your responses