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What are the different types of B2B Leads?

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Mark Ciminillo
What are the different types of B2B Leads?

What does B2B Lead Mean?

A lead is nothing but a potential client. A B2B lead means a potential business lead. Here, your potential client would be a company, not an individual. B2B leads are generated using different lead generation strategies like email generation, content syndication, appointment setting, content marketing, etc.

What is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generation process accommodates one of the initial steps in any typical marketing or sales funnel. Gathering all the required data about the potential customers - Name, email, job profile, etc. which could be used in future by the sales team. However, it does not happen so quickly and smoothly. Before qualifying for B2B Sales Leads or sales-ready leads, the gathered information goes through multiple filters. The data is sorted based on its status and eligibility into different types of leads. 

Two core types of leads are:

Marketing Qualified Lead

Sales Qualified Lead

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL):

A lead can be qualified as an MQL if a prospect is showing interest in the company's offerings/message. Lead generation team finds out quality MQLs after analyzing the database depending upon specific behavior pattern, level of engagement of the prospect in the business offerings. In the lead generation funnel, marketing team comes across the potential B2B sales leads database, which is mixed with other no-so-sales-ready leads. Marketing team takes on these as MQL and try to convert them into the SQL. MQL is a lead which is more likely to become the client.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL):

What SQL means vary from company to company, depending upon the company's nature, client's expectations from the leads, etc. Marketing and sales team sometimes have to sit together and decide the difference between MQL and SQL as per their lead scaling measures.

Sales Qualified Lead is the next stage of MQL. Which means the sales team is the last part of lead generation funnel and has a responsibility of converting SQLs into the potential customers.

As a matter of fact, once the MQLs are worked on by the marketing team and SQLs are provided to the sales team, the received leads enter the buying cycle. As this is the final stage of conversion, more than half of the work is already done, and the sales team just has to identify the expectations and offer deals accordingly.

The sales cycle is the most significant process as the successful ROI depends on this cycle. A crucial factor to consider while qualifying any SQL is demographics. Factors like prospect's pain points and budget should also be considered by the sales department to shorten the sales cycle. A reliable and experienced B2B lead generation company would assist in acquiring quality SQLs. Here is an ideal process of finding the quality SQL:

Understand the target segment

Build lists based on clients' specifications

Start the lead generation process and appointment setting.

These were the two core types and core step of  B2B lead generation. KIABiz is a reliable market player when it comes to B2B lead generation and marketing. Contact [email protected] for more details.

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