Notes for owners · CRM, automation and RevOps
How to qualify marketing leads before sending them to sales
Agree in writing what a sales-ready enquiry is, capture the four or five facts that prove it, and send only those to sales.
The GullySales team · Updated 15 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
Rules for this trade differ by state and professional body, and they change. Check the current position with your own council or adviser before you act on anything here.
On this page
Write down what a sales-ready enquiry looks like in your business, capture the four or five facts that prove it, and send only those to the sales team. Everything else stays in marketing for nurturing rather than consuming a salesperson's afternoon. The definition has to be agreed by both sides in writing. Unqualified handover is the single most common reason sales says the leads are useless and marketing says sales does not follow up.
Separate fit from intent
Two different judgements get muddled into the word "qualified".
Fit is whether this person is the kind of customer you can serve profitably. Industry, size, geography, product need, budget range. Marketing can judge fit from the form, the source and a quick check of the company.
Intent is whether they are going to buy, and roughly when. Marketing cannot judge this from a form, because a person downloading a catalogue may be buying next week or writing a college project. Intent is established in a conversation.
So the handover rule is: marketing passes anything with confirmed fit and a sign of intent, and sales establishes real intent on the call. Marketing does not get to guess intent, and sales does not get to reject on fit criteria that were never written down.
Decide the facts you need
Five facts cover most businesses. Keep the list short, because every extra form field costs you enquiries.
What they want, specifically enough to route the enquiry. Where they are, so you know whether you can serve or deliver. Roughly when, because a buyer with a date behaves differently from one who is exploring. Who they are, meaning their role, which tells you whether you are talking to the decision maker. How big the requirement is, as a quantity, configuration or budget band rather than an exact figure.
Not all five need to come from the form. Two from the form and three from the first call works better than a nine-field form that halves your enquiries.
A qualification table you can agree in one meeting
| Level | What is true | Who owns it | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiry | Contact details and a stated interest | Marketing | Acknowledged within five minutes, called within the hour |
| Marketing qualified | Fit confirmed: right industry, area, product and rough size | Marketing | Passed to a named salesperson with the source and the notes |
| Sales accepted | Salesperson has spoken to them and agrees it is worth working | Sales | Enters the pipeline with a next action and a date |
| Sales qualified | Need, timeline, decision maker and budget range established | Sales | Scoping, site visit or proposal begins |
| Nurture | Real person, wrong time or unconfirmed fit | Marketing | Email or WhatsApp sequence, revisited in 60 or 90 days |
| Disqualified | Wrong geography, student, job seeker, competitor, no requirement | Marketing | Recorded with the reason, removed from the working list |
The row most businesses lack is "sales accepted". Without it, nobody can tell whether the problem is lead quality or follow-up, because there is no record of a salesperson looking at an enquiry and agreeing to work it.
The service level agreement, in four lines
Put this on one page and have both sides sign it. Marketing will pass enquiries with the five facts recorded, and no more than a stated number per week that fail the fit test. Sales will make first contact within the stated response time and record an accept or reject with a reason within one working day. Rejections come back to marketing weekly with reasons attached. Both sides meet for thirty minutes a month to look at the rejection reasons and change one thing.
That last line is what makes the agreement useful rather than decorative.
A worked example
For example, imagine a coaching institute in Bengaluru running NEET and JEE programmes with centres in Basaveshwaranagar and Jayanagar. The details and figures below are illustrative. Enquiries arrive from Meta ads, search and walk-ins, in large volume, and the counselling team complains that most are time wasters.
Qualification here is four facts: which examination, the student's current class, which centre is reachable from home, and whether the parent or the student is enquiring. An enquiry from a class 9 student is real but eighteen months early, and belongs in nurture with a school-year sequence rather than in a counsellor's calling list. An enquiry from a parent of a class 12 student living four kilometres from the centre, two months before admissions close, goes to a counsellor within five minutes.
Illustrative arithmetic: 600 enquiries a month, of which perhaps 180 are class 11 or 12 parents within reach of a centre. The counselling team of four can handle 180 properly and cannot handle 600 at all. Splitting the list is the difference between 40 admission conversations and 120. The figures illustrate the trade-off rather than any actual result.
What to measure
Five numbers monthly: enquiries received, marketing qualified, sales accepted, sales qualified, and orders, with the rejection reasons listed underneath. Read them as a funnel. The argument settles itself. If accept rates are low, the definition or the sources need work. If accept rates are high and sales-qualified numbers are low, the calling is the problem.
Report enquiries by source alongside this, because usually one source produces most of the disqualifications and a large share of the spend.
What to do next
Get the marketing and sales sides into one room for forty minutes and write the definition of a sales-ready enquiry on a single sheet, along with the five facts. Then apply it to last month's enquiries and see what proportion would have passed. If the two sides cannot agree, that disagreement is usually the real finding.
