Sales-Qualified Leads Are People, Not Points

Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are not treated with reverence and revenue suffers. The hand-off can improve but only if you treat the buyer like a person.

Isn’t it so easy to treat marketing like a game? Score the leads and hand off to the sales teams– each behavior has a point, and these points add up to a sales-qualified lead.

And yet in these gamification and qualification processes, marketing teams are losing sight of one crucial facet: the lead is a person or group of people. Gamifying them can help you gauge behavior, but not establish a relationship.

B2B buying isn’t the Instagram Marketplace where the dopamine-inducing reels push a buyer to an impulse purchase. Yes, there is logic involved, but so are economic and political (external and internal) factors that affect buyers’ emotions and bombard them with it.

Then why are SQLs treated like a batch of data with no context around it?

“Hey, this batch shows relevant (arbitrary?) interest in our brand. Give them a call, they know us.”

And what happens when your SDRs call, and there is a disconnect between what you say and what they perceive?

75% of buyers feel all calls are transactional. They get it. You want to sell. But shouldn’t selling be treated like a business relationship– one where people build mutual understanding for a shared goal?

That isn’t a transaction. And that’s what your SQLs need to signify.

Buying is deeply personal for them, just like selling is for you. It’s not a game to them, and neither should it be for you.

Scoring stays, the context changes. This is how SQLs can change for the better.

Key Takeaways

1. Marketing is not a game. SQLs are people, not points on a chart. Treat them that way.
2. Relationships matter more than arbitrary behavior tracking. Build context before scoring.
3. Modern SQLs are earned. Marketing must nurture, observe, and understand before handing off to sales.
4. Multi-threading and consultant-like selling turn pre-SQLs into long-term customers. Trust compounds and referrals follow.
5. Be aware of external factors and cost limits. Optimize every touchpoint without losing the human connection.
6. Asking the right questions is the foundation of any strategy. Without curiosity, scoring systems and campaigns are meaningless.

How can we define SQL for modern businesses?

If gamification and arbitrary data points aren’t enough, we need to rethink what makes a lead truly ‘sales-qualified’?

What is SQL in the modern context?

The Sales-Qualified Lead, as defined by Salesforce, is this: –

“A Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL) is a potential customer thoroughly assessed by both the marketing and sales teams. Having demonstrated an intention to purchase and meet specific lead qualification criteria, this prospect is considered suitable for advancing to the next phase in the sales process. Once a prospect surpasses the engagement stage, they receive the SQL label, signifying readiness for targeted efforts to convert them into a valued customer.”

Intention to purchase and specific lead qualification criteria = Arbitrary data points

Surpassing the engagement stage = Downloading the whitepaper/sitting for a demo

Targeted efforts = Sales calls and en masse nurturing.

Salesforce’s definition is facing extinction. Their State of Sales report clearly outlines: –

And while we can blame marketing and sales misalignment for this. It’s better to reinvent the definition.

What is the new definition?

An SQL is a batch of people that a marketing and sales team has built a clear relationship with. This relationship can be measured by a personalized scoring system, but the system does not base the score on behavior alone; rather, the type of conversations the segmented people are having about your brand.

An SQL should answer this question: Will the person being contacted know who you are, what you do, and are they willing to give their time to hear your SDRs out?

Why are Sales Qualified Leads important?

From their report, Salesforce identifies another crucial metric- 42% of sales leaders cite recurring sales, cross-sells, and upsells as top revenue sources.

The jury is clear on this: relationship and value-based interactions give organizations the revenue they need. And SQLs can become a direct bridge to it, helping marketing teams prove ROI. However, the reality is not as clean as it looks; there are trade-offs involved that data points cannot solve.

But it’s because of these unknown factors that SQLs should be used and as drivers of relationships.

Only when there is a bond that moves beyond transactions will your buyers tell you what you need to know to make that sale.

Let’s codify into a working method, shall we?

Methods to Convert MQLs into SQLs

A side note: MQLs or Marketing Qualified Leads are people in the top-funnel. The whole takeaway here to convert them into SQLs is nurturing them, which most marketing teams are not doing. If you think these methods sound like lead nurturing. You won’t be wrong.

But the difference here is that the methods answer the question: Why should your prospects care?

Relationship-Mapping Becomes the New Lead Scoring

Let’s run a thought experiment.

Imagine you’re running an organization that provides manufactured goods, and you’re using a current solution for managing inventory, but your inventory still has its hiccups and delays- missing products.

This is big for any manufacturing organization because inventory helps you manage your product and request more raw materials if the inventory is about to become empty. You would like to switch, but there’s too much uncertainty in changing your systems, which are linked to your Supply Chain vendors and your buyers and everyone else in between.

But a sales rep calls you and says he has your perfect solution. And asks you to sit on call. You may agree because you need it. But mid-call, you realize, “Ah, good solution, but integration is going to be a pain.” And instead of following up with you, the sales rep keeps calling you to buy.

And you think, “Guys, you have the solution. But I need to think.” And they don’t respect that; instead, they still call you incessantly with personalized marketing to boot.

Is that something you’d enjoy or prefer, or would you, knowing the seller’s behavior and tactics, wait for a better option?

But what if their marketing teams had built a relationship instead of jumping directly to sales and personalization?

Marketing has a lot of behavioral data. The team knows what makes their buyers tick and tock. But they limit themselves to messaging and forget to nurture and then observe behaviors.

Before assigning the label of SQL to a lead, marketing teams must answer these questions: –

1. Will the person(s) know who we are on the first call?
2. What is our relationship with them that is apparent from the scoring and behavioral analysis?
3. What are the possible gaps in contacting them?
4. Are the people passive consumers or active participants in conversations? If they are not, what in the marketing messages is stopping them from contacting us?
5. Can we identify people in the same account and nurture them together for effective selling- using a relational approach to personalization?
6. What will the sales team note after receiving this batch?

Answering these questions will enable your teams to nurture effectively.

But why is that? It’s because many marketing teams believe they are in the content or data game, but forget that strategies begin with asking questions.

For example, could you do an AMA for your prospects? It doesn’t matter if many show up. The right question is how many showed up and what they asked?

This approach is just one of many to build relationships and show your potential buyers you care about solving their pain points. If you’ve heard that line in a lot of online content and wondered what that actually means- this is it.

Multi-threading as a way to build relationships

Now, let’s shift the focus from marketing to sales without qualifying the leads just yet. What the marketing teams should hand off are pre-SQLs. But with the method above, there is a good chance they are really qualified.

Here’s another truth: Buyers expect consultant-like behavior from the SDRs. No matter how well the marketing team has qualified the people, if sales cannot move away from transactional, they will falter in the long run.

Making thousands of calls a week and then hoping only 2 stick is not effective sales. Hopefully, the Pre-SQLs you received were of the quality range.

Now that you have a batch of these relationally-mapped people, you must use multi-threading to build an unshakeable relationship with the organization.

1. Identify multiple stakeholders and decision-makers.
2. Build a relationship with your champion and branch out
3. Act as consultants, guiding the buyers to a better solution
4. Understand what their industry needs and use it as leverage to sell why you’re the solution they’d need.
5. For the quality of the conversations, are they divulging internal matters or processes that they’d like to change?

This step is vital because there are 8-11 decision makers, and the buying cycles for all B2B industries are crossing 12-18 months.

All of this is to position yourself as an expert at what you do and know, and build relationships in the market. This serves two vital purposes: –

1. Trust is compounding, and word-of-mouth referrals are still king.
2. If you build relationships that transcend transactions, the buyers are more likely to stay as customers and upgrade.

Why?

Because they are actively looking for markers of trust. And buyers don’t change vendors on a whim; it’s deliberation.

Would you change your vendor, who provides a good solution and has a good relationship with you?

Unlikely.

There’s a reason many teams wait for a leader to switch because they know the leader may not have a similar relationship with the vendor.

The challenges of this method

This method does have its challenges, and they are mainly two: –

1. External factors (buyers’ side) affecting the purchase
2. CAC and LTV.

External factors (buyers’ side) affecting the purchase

The economy, for lack of a better term, is uncertain. The hype surrounding AI has been challenged at the time of this writing; ROI from tools is uncertain, and so is the geopolitics.

Your buyers are facing many factors that affect their decision. It’s why we outlined the method to understand these factors and leverage them. But it assumes they will divulge even after the relationship-building, or they might buy on your terms.

This should be brought to light.

This gives rise to the second and vital challenge: cost.

CAC and LTV

Each touchpoint has a cost. And SQLs do have the potential to prove marketing’s role in revenue. But if the price of acquiring a customer surpasses their lifetime value, all will be for naught. There must be optimization and clear boundaries with these methods. Or, like ad spend, it could balloon and cross its limits.

We believe these methods can be done with what you have, following the marketing adage of “Do more with less”.

But there is a reason why many marketing teams don’t have the space to think outside of the box- strategies cost and budgets are tight. It is a reality everyone in the organization must face.

Without understanding the constraints, a strategy cannot be executed properly.

Sales Qualified Leads are relational, not transactional.

The reduction of marketing and sales as data-led functions has deteriorated their original function.

To build markers of trust. That is what a brand is. People know this instinctively and yet fall into the data-led trap.

SQLs aren’t data, but people whose behavioral data your systems collect. By this simple shift, teams can leverage conversations and problems to influence the buying committee and create business relationships that continue paying in dividends.

This is what the successful brands are doing: product/service-led relationship building.

They know the problem they solve and care about their buyers. That’s not the future of marketing and sales but a timeless principle lost in the rubble.