I’ve been having a lot of conversations about sales and marketing alignment of late, and the question has arisen, “How do we know when we’re on our way to reaching sales and marketing alignment?”

This reminded me of comments Mac McIntosh made in our recent webinar on best practices for handling webinar leads. I provided an overview of the webinar in a recent blog, and I wanted to share additional comments Mac made around sales lead generation and the marketing-to-sales handoff process.

Mac used the following terms that have been nicely illustrated and well defined in SiriusDecisions’ Demand Metrics Waterfall chart:

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Leads deemed ready for handoff from marketing.

Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
Leads where lead qualification tenets have been met and where sales agrees to work them.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
Leads where opportunities have been identified and sales-ready buyers have been added to the pipeline with a high probability of buying.

Mac recommends measuring the percentage of MQLs that become SALs as well as measuring the percentage of MQLs that become SQLs.

Perfection, of course, is that 100% of MQLs become SALs and SQLs.

But sales and marketing demonstrate great progress toward full alignment the closer that percentage gets to 100%.

What other metrics do you suggest for confirming sales and marketing alignment?

By Dan McDade