Do your sales reps complain about wasting their time with people who are not ready to buy?
Do they often ignore or cherry-pick the leads from marketing? Or end up generating their own?
If so, it delays kicking off sales cadence, and it hits your business in the pocket.
One way to remedy this is to properly define (or redefine) what your sales-qualified lead (SQL) is.
We’ve asked Cognism sales experts Rachel Goldstone, Hugh Campbell, Ole Pugh, and Jonathon Ilett to guide you on how to do so.
What is a sales-qualified lead?
A sales-qualified lead (or an SQL) is a prospective customer created and nurtured by your marketing team and vetted by the sales. SQLs are considered ready to speak to the sales reps because they’ve shown an intent to buy.
For example, by interacting with marketing content.
The sales role is to continue the interaction and explore the sales-qualified lead’s capability to purchase.
Every organisation can have different criteria for defining sales-qualified leads depending on the length of its sales cycle, the depth of its sales team, or even the sales reps’ previous experiences.
Generally speaking, the two qualities that make a lead sales qualified are:
- A high level of interest in your product or service.
- A strong likelihood of completing the sales process.
Identifying them is all about asking the right sales qualification questions to evaluate their suitability for your product or service.
And it’s a big deal!
Without proper qualification, your sales team wastes time with people who aren’t ready to speak to the sales, let alone make a purchase.
Choosing the right B2B company and contact database is crucial for generating accurate lead lists. Consider a global B2B data provider like Cognism. It gives you access to leads’ emails, manually verified cell phone numbers, and intent data. Book a demo to learn more 👇
How to determine a sales-qualified lead?
Now for the good stuff!
We’ve asked Cognism sales experts Rachel Goldstone, Hugh Campbell, Ole Pugh, and Jonathon Ilett to give you the lowdown on identifying SQLs.
To make sure our SQLs are always on point, we use the BANT methodology at Cognism. It’s an acronym for budget, authority, need and timeline.
Use the following criteria to determine if a lead is a good fit. 👇
1. Has the budget to buy
To a certain extent, successfully determining who your SQLs are is a money question.
After all, a prospect could be your company’s biggest fan. But they could have the world’s smallest budget.
To avoid any awkwardness, Jonathon Ilett advises you to get this part of the conversation out of the way quickly.
“Always ask your prospect if they’re comfortable with your price point. Then you can start thinking about building an implementation plan and setting timescales.”
💡 If you want shorter sales cycles and higher conversions, you need a solid grasp of your prospects’ finances.
2. Has the authority to buy
Great, you’ve got a high-intent prospect.
Not so great, if it’s someone who’s currently being onboarded at the company. In the most junior position, they have.
To properly define an SQL, you either need to speak to a decision-maker or an internal buying champion who could influence a decision-maker.
In Rachel Goldstone’s experience:
“Deciding SQLs isn’t single-threaded. You need to find a way to engage the multiple stakeholders who are involved in the decision-making process and understand the business impact of a purchase.”
💡 Your ideal customer profile (ICP) should guide you when qualifying SQLs. A solid one will mean you target people with the right seniority most of the time.
3. Has the need for your product or service
No one wants bad-fit customers. Literally, not a soul.
That’s because your life and theirs will be made far more difficult than it needs to be. All because you didn’t properly qualify a sales lead list.
To make sure that doesn’t happen, you’ve got to find out whether your prospects need what you can deliver.
Hugh Campbell adds:
“SQLs need to state clearly that your product or service is a top priority for them and their business.”
💡 The more good-fit customers you have, the more you’ll retain. That’ll allow you to scale your sales quickly.
4. Their time frame to buy suits yours
Super-long deal cycles suck. HARD.
That’s why when qualifying sales leads it’s best practice to:
- Find out the purchasing timescale prospects are running on.
- Try to close the deal within a six-month period.
Ole Pugh speaks from experience when he says:
“You should focus your attention on prospects looking to buy within the next quarter. If there’s no urgency, it’s likely there’s no immediate need for your product or service.”
💡 Clogging up your pipeline will frustrate your team. But by using the BANT criteria, you can determine if your leads are sales-ready.
Qualifying questions to ask in 2025
Asking these questions enables the sales reps to figure out if the SQL’s a good fit for your product or service.
1. What is your current role and responsibility within your organisation?
This question helps the sales representative determine if the lead has decision-making authority or if they need to engage with other stakeholders.
It also provides insight into the lead’s level of influence and involvement in the purchasing process.
Keep in mind there might be more than one decision-maker involved in the process.
2. What pain points are you trying to solve?
Understanding the lead’s challenges and business model will help you tailor your sales approach. You will be able to align your product or service with the lead’s specific problems and empower them to solve them.
You might also discover a pain point they didn’t realise they had.
3. What led you to consider our product/service?
This question helps the sales representative to gauge how well the lead knows your brand, product and services.
It may sound like a formality, but a seasoned rep will be able to understand the lead’s motivation, tailor their pitch and avoid objections even before they arise.
4. What is your budget and how is it typically allocated?
Understanding the budget constraints or allocation process helps in assessing if the lead’s budget aligns with the pricing of your product or service.
If your pricing is out of their reach, or they’ve allocated funds elsewhere, you might have to disqualify them.
5. Have you evaluated other vendors? What did you like or dislike about them?
This question provides insights into the SQLs’ competitive landscape and their expectations.
It allows the sales rep to address other vendors’ weak points and differentiate their offering based on the lead's previous experiences.
6. What is your timeline for implementing a solution like ours?
Knowing the potential customer’s timeline helps manage expectations and plan the sales process accordingly. If there no specific deadlines or events driving this timeline, they may not feel the urgency to make the buying decision now and need more nurturing.
The answers to this question allow the sales rep to prioritise SQLs who are ready to buy.
7. How do you prefer to communicate during the sales process?
This question ensures effective communication and hits at their level of interest.
Adapting your communication style to the lead’s preference can enhance the customer experience and increase the likelihood of a successful sale.
What to do after qualifying a sales lead?
Researching your leads thoroughly, focusing on their pain points and outlining how your product solves them is the bread and butter of B2B sales.
But where do you go from there? And how can you build a predictable engine for lead qualification?
Well, at Cognism, we’ve developed a lead-scoring system.
By giving each lead a grade, we can prioritise sales-qualified leads and move them through our sales cycle. Disqualified leads are placed into a nurturing sequence, where they'll warm up to the product and ideally make a purchase later.
To decide if previously disqualified leads are ready to be qualified again, consider lead scoring factors like:
- Responding to your cold email with questions about your product.
- Contacting you directly via email or your website’s contact form.
- Registering for a bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) webinar or upcoming event.
- Revisiting certain pages of your website multiple times, such as your product page or pricing page.
- Arriving at your site from a referral that has shown to produce SQLs in the past.
Taken collectively, these actions make it clear your prospect will be receptive to a call from your sales team.
What are MQLs and SALs in relation to SQLs?
Qualifying sales leads is a process that involves moving interested customers through the sales funnel from marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) through sales-accepted leads (SAL), to the sales team who works on converting them into customers.
Let’s consider the following example:
You’ve got someone who’s come through your lead generation page or Facebook ad. Your marketing team, including content marketers, campaign marketers, and performance marketers, engages with them to see if they are likely to become customers.
To decide if a prospect is an MQL, they review things like:
- The web pages they visit.
- The forms they fill out.
- The white papers they download.
Once satisfied, the marketing team passes the lead over to sales. And depending on the strength of your sales qualification process, they could later become SQLs.
The hand-off process is critical here.
You want to avoid marketing hitting 200% of their pipeline quotas and the sales being 50% away from the target.
To ensure alignment between sales and marketing, some companies implement a lead acceptance process before accepting leads as sales-ready to avoid poor closing rates.
It means that SALs are market-qualified leads that pass on sales checks, such as:
- Job function.
- Company size.
- Industry.
When everyone is happy, the SALs show concrete intent to buy your product or service, like magic, they become SQLs.
You can disqualify leads if they don’t fit the established qualification criteria.
To qualify SQLs, reps contact leads directly to establish some important details and prioritise hot leads.
For example, at Cognism, we employ sales development representatives to qualify new leads.
Not all companies follow the same model, though. Other companies may decide on a model with ‘full-stack’ sales reps who manage the full sales process from start to closure. That’s ok, too.
💡 Learn more about making discovery calls and the best cold-calling tips.
How to find and convert sales-qualified leads?
You could easily drop your quality and have a higher number of leads coming in.
But that’s not going to impress the boss or increase your leads-to-sale conversion rate.
Do you know what will? Shortening the sales cycle and producing quality leads that convert!
Just follow these tried and tested techniques.
1. Make a qualified sales lead list
But make sure it’s high-quality. You don’t want:
❌ Data that’s not useful.
❌ To violate compliance rules.
❌ To waste money.
Your B2B sales list should contain contacts you actually want to speak to and who are likely to convert to customers.
You can use Cognism to quickly build your ideal audience. It has built-in filters to segment and populate all the major data points, including job titles, seniority, email addresses, leads’ cell phone numbers, and direct dials.
Use AI search to speed up prospecting and discover a universe of new sales-qualified leads drawn from our unique, globally compliant database!
💡 Nail your email marketing campaigns with targeted email lists:
- CMO email lists
- CFO email lists
- C-level executives’ email lists
- IT decision-makers’ email lists
- Marketing directors’ email lists
- CIO email list
- HR email list
- CTO email lists
- Chief Accounting Officers’ email list
- CSO email list
2. Build relationships
If someone asks about a feature of your product and you send them a link to your product webpage, you’re doing it wrong.
Jump on a video call and walk them through it.
3. List your company online
Listing your company on online sales directories helps drive sales-qualified leads to your website.
Popular directories in the B2B sector include G2, SaaS Genius, and Capterra, among many more.
Make sure your brand is as visible online as possible, and you’ll soon see that targeted leads simply come to you.
4. Warm up your cold calls
Cold calling is still the number one driver of lead gen in B2B. It’s an age-old tactic, but it's easy to use.
Focus on your SQLs pain points, work hard to build rapport, and always, always let them do most of the talking!
5. Personalise your outbound emails
Second only to cold calling is the outbound sales email. Personalise your emails as much as possible. That’s a great way for boosting engagement with sales-qualified leads.
Some personalisation tips are:
- Create merge fields for the receiver’s name and their company’s name.
- Show empathy towards their daily frustrations.
- Hit their pain points.
6. Get chatty
Not over the phone, on your website!
Live chats are a great way to engage with SQLs immediately and to collect all the relevant information to pass n to the sales team.
Look for a tool that integrates with your CRM to automate sales.
7. Use email signature marketing
On every email, there’s a ton of empty space that’s just waiting to be filled. Why not transform your company email signatures into a channel generating sales-qualified leads?
Just think of all the thousands of emails your employees send, every day.
And for this, Mailtastic’s your new best friend.
8. Get social
B2B sales leads and LinkedIn are a match made in heaven. Join relevant groups, post your own content, and respond to questions on existing posts.
Check out our LinkedIn prospecting guide for more info or follow us on LinkedIn.
9. Get even more social
Two words, two syllables:
Paid ads.
Make them simple so it’s not a game of charades for your prospective SQLs. Use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for this.
Don’t make leads guess what to do. Send them to specific landing pages on your website, direct them to newsletter signups, or simply get them to follow you.
Discover more about this on our LinkedIn advertising blog.
10. Automate your marketing
Want higher conversions? Segment your customers into groups and target them with specific messaging.
You should also use email automation for your outbound marketing. It’s to send personalised emails at scale and nurture those SQLs until they’re ready to become customers.
11. Get more online reviews
If a B2B decision-maker can’t find reviews of your company anywhere online, they’re probably not going to purchase your product.
Incentivise your clients to post product reviews on reputable industry sites. If they have a high NPS score, they’ll likely give you a great review.
12. More paid ads?
Yes!
Use Google Ads but choose your keywords carefully. Think outside the box, and make sure you’re staying within budget.
Target new potential SQLs and remarket to people who’ve already visited your site.
13. Use SEO to increase website traffic
You can use search engine optimisation to get your website to the top of Google’s search results page and engage more sales-qualified leads.
Choose long-tail keywords that usually suggest higher intent to buy and don’t forget to set up lead capturing on your pages.
14. Leverage the power of content
Generate more qualified sales leads with newsletters, blogs, e-books, white papers, and webinars. Content marketing can help you add value for your leads.
Make sure that what you say is informative, solves a problem, and makes your brand accessible.
15. Find unsatisfied customers from competitors
Search for what people are saying about your competitors. Social media is a great place to look.
If you see a client of a competitor and they’ve shared some negative feedback, you might have just found your new sales-qualified lead. Offer them a free demo or trial with your company.
Final thoughts
Defining your process and criteria for sales lead qualification helps sales improve close rates, prioritise valuable contacts, and deliver a personalised experience for customers.
MQLs vs. SALs vs. SQLs in sales and marketing are all sales terms that describe leads with specific characteristics. They are meant to improve your workflows and sift through low-quality leads.
The BANT framework is often used to qualify SQLs.
