Sales Qualified Meetings (SQM) is the fifth stage of six lifecycle stages in the buyer’s journey. It also happens to be both one of the most important and hardest stages for a company to define because it’s where the marketing-to-sales handoff occurs. So to provide some clarity, we think it’s reasonable to review the other five lifecycle stages before discussing how the SQM stage fits in. 

So, Let’s understand the lifecycle stages!

The customer lifecycle stages include:

1- Visitor

Visits, or sessions, is a metric used to measure the total number of times a user navigates to a website. Visits are an important digital marketing metric that is used in tandem with the conversion rate to measure the performance of an online store.

Unique visits, on the other hand, measure the number of distinct individuals who go to the website. This metric is sometimes seen as more valuable than the aggregate number of visits because the data cannot be skewed by power users.

2- Leads

Let’s put it simply, lead is a person who has shown an interest in a product your brand is selling. The user might share his email id, phone number, or any other contact information so that you can get in touch with them on the following date. 

Here’s the twist, for some companies, a lead may mean an individual that has already been determined as a prospective customer. Whereas for some companies, a lead is just a contact they have received from one of their many sources. However, irrespective of how the companies see the leads, they have the potential to become future clients. The main goal of the company should be to convert a lead into a sale.

3- Marketing Qualified Leads ( MQLs)

When a company confirms a lead is a good fit and demonstrates return interest by marketing to them, that lead becomes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Once a lead becomes an MQL, the company continues to explore the contact and nurture them down the funnel.

Identifying a qualified marketing lead is critical to your start-up success. Some of these high-quality leads will turn out to be your long-term business partners, while others may just be window-shopping your products. Thus, it becomes important to not just estimate the right marketing qualified lead, but also have a predetermined estimate of the business they may bring.

4- Sales Qualified Leads ( SQLs)

An MQL is defined as an SQL when sales agree with marketing that the contact has enough interest and is a good enough fit for a discovery call to initiate a sales conversation.

Demographics are an essential factor in the design of SQL as companies aim to use techniques such as customer profiling to determine whether a lead is ready for the sales department. Information such as a lead’s industry, company size, and job role is crucial to learning how interested and serious they are in purchasing a company’s products. As the prospect moves closer to being labeled an SQL, information such as pain points or budget becomes relevant to the salesperson before he directly contacts the prospect.

5- Sales Qualified Meetings

Sales Qualified Meetings becomes an opportunity when the customer confirms that the company could provide a viable solution to their problem and decide to continue the sales process by exploring our products and services in greater detail.

At FunnL, the meetings are of the highest quality because we adhere to the quality parameters ‘you define’. That is our customers decide on the lead qualification criterion be it in terms of services marketed, regions targeted, decision-makers, target companies / Industries, and revenue parameters. 

6- Customer

Sales Qualified Meetings become customers when they sign a deal.

Let’s investigate further into what defines Sales Qualified Meetings!

Typically, an actual meeting is being conducted for the clients in the Sales Qualified Meetings stage. That meeting can be a demo or an assessment, where a conversation between the prospect and a sales representative takes place. The meeting only becomes an opportunity if during this conversation they confirm interest in continuing the sales process and potentially making a purchase. Of course, this procedure can look different from the company to the company.

Why do Sales Qualified Meetings( SQM) matter?

Understanding the customer lifecycle and the SQM in the buyer’s journey is vital for your success. Without clearly defining your lifecycle stages, you will not be able to monitor leads and define the actions. 

If you don’t leverage SQM, you might face huge challenges in tracking your customer lifecycle in the sales funnel. Here, at FunnL, Sales Qualified Meetings becomes important because we understand that each of our customers is unique and has unique requirements. Our engagement models are designed to be flexible, efficient, and cost-saving. We offer two broad models of engagement to all our customers, which can be adopted individually or in combination, as per the client’s specific requirements.

Contact FunnL to have a conversation about how we can help you qualify prospects for a meeting or discuss outsourcing your prospecting to ProSales Connection. All you have to do is a request for an online meeting.

FunnL is one of the best and fastest growing B2B sales qualified meeting generation firms. The team involved is highly skilled and experienced. The team has an experience of generating more than 10,000 sales-qualified meetings from healthcare, education, finance, business services, telecom, and technology.