Glossary
Lead qualification
Deciding whether a prospect is worth a salesperson’s time before anyone spends it. In outbound this usually means checking fit against an ICP; in inbound it more often means checking intent and budget.
Qualification in outbound is a different activity from qualification in inbound, and conflating them causes a lot of wasted effort. An inbound lead has already signalled interest, so the question is whether they can buy. An outbound prospect has signalled nothing, so the question is whether they should be approached at all.
Frameworks like BANT and MEDDIC are built for conversations already underway. They are poor tools for triaging a list of 1,500 strangers, because almost every field they ask for is unknowable before contact.
A threshold - the score below which a prospect is parked rather than contacted - is a separate lever from the scoring weights. Confusing the two is the most common diagnostic mistake in scoring projects.
More terms
- Outbound prospectingContacting potential customers who have not approached you first, usually through email, LinkedIn or the phone, after deciding from research that they are likely to be a fit..
- Buying signalAn observable event suggesting a company may be in the market now: a funding round, a job posting, a leadership hire, a new office, a public project announcement, or a technology change..
- Lead enrichmentAdding missing detail to a prospect record - role, seniority, company size, industry, location, technology, contact details - so it can be scored and acted on rather than just stored..
Start here
Definitions are the easy part
Applying them to 1,500 rows at once is the part that takes a team all week. Bring one export and see what a scored, ranked queue looks like on your own list.
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