A Sales Qualified Lead is a lead that sales has accepted as a scheduled appointment. It meets the service level agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales – a lead that meets:
The ICP Persona requirements, and
Has shown some level of interest in learning more about your company and offerings, and
Has answered some basic qualifying questions, and
Scheduled an appointment with one of your sales executives
SQLs are ideal for augmenting your sales executive's activity, scaling new sales executives or initiatives, and maintaining sales activity at a level necessary to maintain and grow pipeline.
After more than a decade of providing SQLs to clients, Green Leads has studied tens of thousands of SQLs and discovered that the conversion rate from appointments to be the following:
37% convert to an Active status - they are the right fit, show a propensity to purchase, and have immediate ongoing sales activity (second meeting, quote, introduction to wider team, etc.)
34% convert to Nurturing status - they are the right fit, show a long term/possible propensity to purchase, but have no immediate sales activity.
29% convert to Closed status - although they were the right fit, they or the sales executive determined there is no opportunity to pursue.
The study also showed:
50% of the Nurturing status leads converted to Active within 12 months time.
30% of the Active status leads became closed/won. This means that if there were 100 SQL appointments, 37 would move to Active immediately, and 17 (half of the Nurturing leads) would move to Active within 12 months. Of these 54 leads, 17 (30%) will close over time.
