Most disputes about lead quality are actually disputes about definitions. Here are ours, in advance.
A contact inside your profile who engaged with your content in a way that required a person to act deliberately. A distinct human click. A form filled in. Something a scanner cannot do on somebody's behalf.
What it is not: an open, a raw click count, or a contact who happens to match your profile and has done nothing.
One of our reps had a real conversation with the person and they came out of it qualified against criteria you set with us in advance. Budget, authority, timing, whatever you actually screen on.
What it is not: somebody who answered the phone, or a meeting that was booked and never happened.
A contact is a verified person in your profile. An MQL is that person after deliberate engagement. An SQL is that person after a qualifying conversation. A meeting is counted when it is held. A recovered deal is counted when it moves stage in your CRM. Each step has to actually happen. Nothing is promoted up the ladder by time, volume or optimism.
An MQL costs us campaign work and infrastructure. An SQL costs us all of that plus a rep's time and conversations that do not qualify. They are different products, and pretending otherwise is how vendors end up quietly reclassifying one as the other near the end of a quarter.
Before anything runs we agree what qualifies, and that definition does not move afterwards. If we think your criteria will produce very few SQLs, we say so before you sign rather than after you have paid for a quarter of them. If you inherit our defaults instead, they are the ones on this page.
Edge cases go against us, not for us. A click we cannot attribute to a person does not qualify. A conversation that almost met the criteria does not qualify. When a judgement call is required, the judgement is: counted, never estimated.
Send us what you are running now: the data you buy, how your outreach is sent, and what your CRM reports. We review all of it. You get the findings in writing and you keep them whether or not you work with us. There is a quote at the end and no obligation to take it.