For an individual or company to be termed as a sales qualified lead, it has to be made sure that they are ready for the next stage in sales process i.e. they are accepted by your organization as fit for direct sales follow-up. For that, a potential customer is properly researched and vetted by the marketing department of the organization and also by the sales team. Once they are deemed ready for sales by marketing and sales department, they can be called sales qualified leads (SQL).

SQLs are the contacts that have shown extra interest in your content by requesting sales info, other offers like a request for a demo or a free trial. Once, you are sure that these contacts are engaged with your content; you can call them SQLs and move to next step in the sales process.

Now, what are the parameters to know if certain contact is an SQL? Here are a few tips to help you.

  1. Find out their current needs. For this, a research will be needed into finding out how the products and services offered by you are going to fit in their current landscape and how will they make it better.
  2. Next, it is important to know who, what, and why are they counting on now to fulfill their needs. Also, why are they looking for a replacement and how do you fit in the scenario?
  3. Further, find out that if the individual who has been interacting with you is the decision maker, a person who will pay you, or just a researcher who is digging out the right information. This will help you approach the prospect better.
  4. Lastly, check whether the company has the capacity to switch solutions and have the budget that allows you to push them further in the sales process.

What to take care of?

Poorly timed sales pitch are a great turn off for a prospect. Never start bombarding their inbox with emails and information just after you have their contact information only. If the person has only yet subscribed to your email and not shown an active interest, there are chances that they are not yet ready.

So, it is very important to categorize your contacts by a lifecycle stage. This means that you need to divide your contacts into different categories depending on the level of the interest they have exhibited towards your products or services. Further, you can segment your emails and content by these categories. This will help you approach your contact in the right manner by preventing you from bombarding contacts who are relatively new or those who are already into sales stage. Categorizing contacts allows better sales and marketing alignment. Also, this allows all the employees to have a better understanding of when and what type of content has to be sent to a contact.

Once you have the list of SQLs, you can focus your resources and efforts on these contacts. This will allow time prioritization and help you avoid wasting your valuable time in following up unqualified leads unnecessarily. By focusing on the SQLs, the sales team can pitch their offers and ideas to only the contacts those have shown an active interest towards sales.

Why do you need to have a separate list of SQLs?

SQLs are separated based on the lifecycles stages. This is important because:

  1. Clearly segmented SQLs allow the organization to make an effective strategy to sell and market to their contacts. You might have thousands of emails and contact in your database but SQLs are the prospects with most potential to convert into customers.
  2. Having separate SQLs, further, enhance strategic alignment between the sales and marketing department resulting in the increase in the number of successful deals. Also, it helps you segregate your content better.
  3. Separating SQLs can help you nurture a better relationship with them by personalizing the messaging and content that is targeted at them. This makes them feel more involved and valued.