Most companies believe they have a way to systematically track and manage their leads as they flow into their sales pipeline. What I call the lead process, or for those who remember the early Sirius Decisions days, the “demand gen waterfall.” But after working inside dozens of marketing and sales orgs, I’ve learned something surprising. If you ask five people to explain how a lead turns into revenue, you rarely hear the same answer twice. If there ever were formalized definitions, they’ve drifted as teams have grown or morphed, as tech stacks evolved and as priorities changed.
I have seen companies with world-class products “operating” on lead management flows that were never actually defined. I have seen CRMs with more than one hundred thousand records where only a small percentage were marketable. I have seen teams rely on platform vocabulary rather than their own shared business definitions. This typically leads to debates about whether a record is a lead or a contact, simply because Salesforce and HubSpot categorize objects differently. None of this is unusual. It is the natural outcome of “tech before process” and scale without structure.
The upside is that once you build the structure, everything stabilizes. Teams trust the numbers. Routing becomes predictable. Qualification becomes meaningful. Speed to lead improves. Data-driven analysis and optimization can occur. And leaders finally gain visibility into what is happening between suspect, lead, opportunity, and revenue.
Revenue does not begin at the point of inquiry. It begins much earlier, with suspects. A suspect is anyone who fits your total addressable market (TAM). TAM is simply the universe of people or companies in your ICP (ideal customer profile). Those who could reasonably need or want your product or service. A contact in your TAM is a possible lead, and some segments of the TAM might be higher priority than others. Suspects often come from past imports, event attendee lists, enrichment tools, research pulls, or retargeting pools. They matter because they define your market opportunity size, but they are not leads. Treating them as anything more creates the first layer of noise in the system.
It is important to remember that having a TAM does not equal sales readiness. Fit alone is not a qualification signal. Many organizations mistakenly collapse TAM into their sales process (eg. the first step in their sales management / pipeline management process) and therefore send reps after suspects instead of actual opportunities. TAM tells you who could buy, not who is ready to buy. Sales should only work the portion of TAM that has “raised their hand” and moved into an inquiry path (eg. filled out a form on the website) or demonstrated validated need (BANT). Everything else is marketing’s responsibility.
Except for the gray area of SDR/BDR activity. Sales Development Reps (SDRs) sometimes live in the sales org and sometimes in the marketing org, and they are often tasked with outbounding to the high priority parts of the TAM that may have yet to become hand-raisers (inbounds). That’s the equivalent of making a cold call.
A suspect becomes meaningful when they enter an inquiry path. This is any point where a human takes an identifiable action. They submit a form. They attend a webinar. They stop by your booth. They reply to outbound. They download something gated. These actions mark the transition from unknown to known.
This moment creates the first real stage in the system: the Marketing Captured Lead. An MCL is not a qualified lead. It is simply a person who has crossed the threshold into your world with a signal that can be tracked. In many organizations, this is the most misunderstood stage, and teams treat all captured signals as qualification. Generally a “hand raiser” is NOT a qualified lead worthy of sales follow up. If MCLs are treated as marketing qualified leads (MQLs), it leads to inflated reporting, misaligned expectations, unhappy sales people and wasted sales cycles.
Qualification begins by defining what fit looks like. Someone fits your TAM because they are the type of customer your product can serve. Fit becomes sharper when you layer in job roles, industries, company size, revenue ranges, geographic regions, or tech stack criteria. These details turn a broad universe into a focused ideal customer profile. This is one side of qualification: the explicit side based on the demographic/firmographic profile of the hand raiser.
The next piece is BANT. Does the hand raiser have the Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe to purchase your solution. These questions are difficult to glean digitally, unless you explicitly ask them on a lead form, and are typically best sussed out by an SDR/BDR. If they meet the pre-determined number of BANT criteria, then complete fit is established and true intent is validated, and the MCL becomes an MQL.
This is the step most teams get wrong. A form fill is not a buying signal. A webinar registration is not qualification. Even a demo request does not always guarantee real need. True qualification usually requires evidence. That evidence can be gathered manually through SDR outreach or inferred through meaningful engagement patterns. Without evidence, the lead is not qualified, and treating it as such creates friction between marketing and sales.
Once marketing identifies an MQL, the next step is sales acceptance. The sales accepted lead (SAL) is the handshake between teams. It is the point where sales reviews the lead and confirms that it is real, relevant, and worth pursuing. SAL relies on discipline. It relies on SLAs, usually within twenty-four to forty-eight hours to evaluate the MQL, because speed-to-lead is a massive variable in lead progression. In B2C, contacting a lead within five minutes dramatically increases the chance of conversion. In B2B, the timing must match the buyer’s internal priorities, but rapid response still signals professionalism and intent.
Without consistent SAL discipline, the entire funnel becomes unreliable. Marketing cannot measure performance accurately. Sales cannot prioritize effectively. Leaders cannot forecast with confidence.
After SAL, the lead becomes sales qualified (SQL) and enters the sales process / pipeline process. SQLs are the deals that are forecasted by sellers and managed through the sales stages to closed won or closed lost Discovery happens first, where the team confirms the problem, uncovers motivations, and further qualifies the opportunity. Pricing and proposal follow. Then negotiation, procurement, contracting, and signature. Finally, ideally, the opportunity becomes revenue and transitions into customer success.
This sequence seems straightforward, but every organization will have its own nuances. Some have longer procurement cycles. Some require technical validations. Some deals involve multi-threading and legal reviews. Pressure tests, risk reviews, and budget approvals all shape the path in real life. That is why the sales process must be built with sales leadership, not pushed onto them. A process only works when it reflects how deals actually move in your environment.
It’s also worth noting that there is a solid argument to be made for renaming “Sales Process” as “Buying Process.” Whatever you call it, you should be laser focused on the motivations, buying signals and explicit exit criteria built into each stage. For example, most companies say “sent proposal” is the gate to move from one stage to the next. That is seller-centric, not buyer-centric. A buying cycle would say “proposal requested” or “proposal reviewed and approved by prospect.” This is a subtle, but meaningful nuance.
Many companies have ten or more years of data collected before any of these definitions were in place. They may have outdated segmentation, inconsistent fields, or contacts from previous systems. They may never have used data hygiene tools like NeverBounce or ZeroBounce. This is common. It is not a reason to avoid rebuilding. It is the best reason to start.
Modern CRMs and MAPs can enrich, validate, score, route, and report with precision. Once definitions are clear and data is cleaned, the systems finally perform to the level you expected when you purchased them. A decade of history is not a liability. It is institutional knowledge waiting to be organized.
When definitions are aligned and ownership is clear, the entire go-to-market engine changes. Data quality improves. Teams stop fighting over terminology. Sales spends time on truly qualified leads and SDRs and BDRs spend time on the most likely suspects. Marketing reports become accurate. Sales forecasts become dependable. Leaders regain confidence in the funnel. Everyone begins speaking the same language.
This is the difference between a funnel that looks good in a diagram and a system that consistently and predictably produces revenue.
A suspect represents possibility. An inquiry path represents interest. An MCL represents a signal. An MQL represents verified fit and intent. An SAL represents alignment. The SQL and the sales process represent commitment. Customer success represents retention.
None of these stages work unless the structure around them is shared, documented, and enforced. None of it works without buy-in from sales and marketing leadership. And once alignment is real, the question inside the business changes from “What counts as a lead” to “How many late-stage, qualified opportunities are moving toward revenue.”
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