Introduction to the Fundamentals of Lead Generation

What is a Lead?

A lead is any user that demonstrates interest in products or services of a company in any possible way.

How it normally goes is that the lead hears back from the business/company only after having submitted their personal information for a free trial, offer, or signup. 

The submitted personal information is collected from the company and used towards a more tailored communication to the lead addressing actual problems and offering relevant solutions. This process gives the opportunity to the prospects to respond if they feel like it reducing calling contacts to people that are not really interested in the service. 

Leads are an essential part of the consumer lifecycle and the transition from a visitor to a customer. 

What is the Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of converting visitors and prospects into a lead which is someone who has expressed interest in your product and service. The interest in products and services is expressed by providing personal details by filling out landing page forms. Leads can be generated through blog posts, online content, job applications, vouchers, and so on.

Marketing Qualified Lead

Marketing Qualified leads are contacts who have responded to your marketing actions but not quite eligible to receive your sales call yet. Normally, marketing qualified lead is the one who has just filled out a landing page offer form. 

Sales Qualified Lead

Sales qualified lead are in turn the contacts who have clearly expressed interest in paying to buy your product or service. SQLs usually fill out a form with inquiries about products and services.

Product Qualified Lead

Product qualified leads are contacts who have actually used your product in the past and now take actions that demonstrate an interest in converting to a paying customer. This type of leads has typically used your products from free trials, or any other limited version free use. A typical example of a PQL is when the contact has used the free serviced and no inquires on features that are included in the paid version of your offer. 

Service Qualified Lead

Service qualified leads are contacts or who have expressed their interest to become paying customers. SQLs usually refer to the customer service team asking to upgrade to a product subscription. Then the customer service representative will forward the customer to the sales team escalating the request.

This was just an example of how the service qualified lead generation is working.

Lead generation is a way to effectively make people to be lured to your business without aggressive marketing actions or any cold calling. You provide them all relevant information and sometimes give them some free samples of your product in order to be more confident if they want to proceed to complete the purchase of your product or services. When this happens, your prospect comes with a genuine interest in your product or services and maybe turns to a loyal customer.