What Is A Lead?

" Leads  ", " prospects ", " sales leads ", " SQL " and  "  MQL ": the vocabulary of the lead is very broad, and with your service providers and your teams, you sometimes find it hard to agree building your marketing strategy . Do not panic, we help you to see more clearly. 

What is a lead ?

At the simplest, we can consider that once you have information about a person, it can be considered a lead . Specifically, he is a contact who has completed the form of a website or blog. The lead is already a good track , but is not yet considered a prospect. He will have to follow a path before becoming a potential customer.

We talk about leads especially in a BtoB context , and the BtoB lead is not the same as a BtoC lead ! In a general way, we consider that the first seeks an information, an acquaintance, when the second seeks more an emotion, a desire, to see a price.

Having leads is good, but it is still necessary that their interest in your service or product guide them to what is called "the conversion tunnel ": the qualified lead will make all the difference! What is a qualified lead ?

A simple contact is not really enough to sign a sale. It's time to qualify this lead , and that's exactly what marketing is all about. He will have to get more and more information about the contact, in stages. Functions, challenges and projects: the behavior of visitors to a website can say a lot.

As downloads progress, more and more information is requested, such as to obtain the premium content of ComExplorer, for example. For us, you will become an MQL , a " Marketing Qualified Lead ", a lead qualified marketing : You receive our newsletters, you are kept informed of our webinars and download some content.

So you are in a MOFU - Middle of the Funnel workflow . You are in the middle of the conversion tunnel. If the lead is here qualified from a marketing point of view, it is not yet for the sales team. Once the sales team has enough information about the lead , and can identify it as qualified, it can then engage in a more precise prospecting strategy , and send him invitations to meetings, presentations, or other formats of a more direct relationship than the strictly digital relationship.

The MQL becomes here a SQL , " Sales Qualified Lead ", a commercially qualified lead .