Lead generation is the process of attracting and identifying potential customers, called leads, who may benefit from your offering. Leads can be generated through inbound channels, where prospects come to you via content marketing, search engine optimisation, and social media, or through outbound channels, where you proactively reach out through cold calls, emails, and events. Once leads are captured, they are typically classified based on their readiness for sales engagement.
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that has shown interest through marketing activities, such as downloading a whitepaper or attending a webinar, but has not yet been vetted by sales. Once the sales team reviews the lead and confirms it meets specific criteria, it becomes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), ready for direct sales engagement. To prioritise outreach, sales teams use lead scoring, a methodology that ranks leads based on attributes like company size and role, as well as behaviours like website visits and email opens.
Two widely used qualification frameworks help sales reps assess whether a prospect is worth pursuing. BANT checks for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline, asking whether the prospect can afford the solution, whether you are speaking with the decision-maker, whether they have a problem you solve, and when they intend to buy. MEDDIC offers a more rigorous framework covering Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion, with MEDDICC adding Competition as a seventh element. Together, these frameworks help reps build an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), describing the type of company that benefits most from the product, and buyer personas, semi-fictional representations of individual decision-makers within that ICP. Because the average B2B buying group involves six to ten decision-makers, each with their own priorities, modern sellers also practise multi-threading, building relationships with multiple stakeholders to reduce deal risk.