Marketing: What is lead generation and What is PQL, SQL and MQL?
Lead generation is one of the most important job of a marketing team. If there are no leads then what would the sales team do? They just can not go about cold calling random people. Cold calling is infective especially for a company which focuses on a niche market. To generate leads a marketing team usually runs interesting campaigns or attend events and sets up booths there. How do we classify leads, we can not treat each lead in the same way, we need a way to distinguish between the leads who are really interested and leads who do not know anything about our product. That’s why we separate them as MLQ, PQL and SQL. Established companies segregate their leads by giving each lead a score or assigning tags to a particular lead.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) :
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a website visitor who’s engagement levels indicate that he is likely to become a customer. To become an MQL the visitor would have showed some interest in the website’s content. For example, the visitor would have filled in a web-form, downloaded content from your website or would have signed up for a newsletter. Each type of these interactions is assigned a lead score, a metric that is intended to help sales and marketing personnel to determine where the visitor is in the buying cycle.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL) :
A product Qualified Lead (PQL) is an individual or business who has experienced value from using through a free trial or freemium model. A PQL is not the same as an MQL. The conditions for PQLs are based on the real use of a product, not content metrics like eBook downloads or webinar registrations.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
The decision stage is reached by offering trials, demos, and consultations to the MQLs. If the lead reaches this stage, then the company now has a hot lead also referred to as a Sales Qualified Lead. This label is applied to a prospect that has gone past the engagement stage and is ready to be pursued for conversion into a full-fledged customer.
Interesting reads related to this topic :
Lead Generation: A Beginner’s Guide to Generating Business Leads the Inbound Way
