What is a qualified meeting?

Why does the definition matter?

Two teams can look at the same campaign and report different results. One counts every reply as a lead. The other counts only buyers with a live project. One counts a meeting when the invite is accepted. The other counts it when the call has taken place. Neither is wrong, but the numbers cannot be compared.

In an outsourced campaign this matters more, because the meeting count is what both sides judge the work by. A loose definition rewards a full calendar. A clear one rewards conversations your sales team can act on. So the definition is written down first.

Five stages, five different numbers

These are the stage definitions we start from. Each stage is a smaller group than the one before it.

• Lead: a contact at a target account who matches the buyer profile.
• MQL (marketing qualified lead): a lead who showed interest. They replied positively, clicked, downloaded something or visited key pages.
• SQL (sales qualified lead): a lead who confirmed a real need and agreed to talk to sales.
• BANT-ready: budget, authority, need and timeline are all confirmed.
• Qualified meeting: a held meeting with an SQL or BANT-ready contact.

The word lead causes the most confusion. Some reports use it for anyone on a list. Others use it for an interested reply. Our own benchmark report uses lead for an interested reply from a buyer who fits the campaign profile, which sits closer to the MQL stage above. Whenever you compare two numbers, check which stage each one counts.

The last step matters as much as the first. Booked and held are not the same thing. People reschedule, and some do not turn up. A meeting counts as qualified once it has taken place with the right person.

Why are thresholds agreed in week 1?

The stage names stay the same for every client. The thresholds do not. For a fit-out contractor, budget means project value. For a software company, it is a license or project budget. Authority might be an owner or a projects director in one industry and a CIO or head of function in another. Timeline can be a project start date, a budget cycle or a renewal date.

So in week 1 we set the exact thresholds with each client. Which roles count as authority. What size of budget or project is worth a meeting. What a real need looks like. How soon the buyer has to be ready. These go into the campaign brief before the first email is sent.

Doing this early has a practical benefit. The people who answer buyers know what to ask. Your sales team knows what it will receive. And when the Friday report shows a number of qualified meetings, both sides read it the same way.

The BANT handover note

Every meeting we book comes with a BANT handover note. It records what the buyer told us against each of the four points.

• Budget: is money set aside, or is there a range for the scope?
• Authority: does this person decide, or do they bring the person who does?
• Need: what problem or project do they have, and does it fit what you sell?
• Timeline: when do they need to decide or start?

The note does two jobs. It lets your salesperson start the call where the conversation left off, without asking the buyer to repeat themselves. It also makes the qualification checkable. If the note says the buyer has a project starting this year and the buyer says otherwise on the call, everyone can see the gap.

When is a meeting not qualified?

Sometimes a meeting misses the mark. The person turns out to have no say in the decision, or the project in the note does not exist. When that happens, flag it immediately after the meeting takes place. Speed matters, because the details are fresh and the buyer's answers can be checked against the note.

A meeting flagged this way does not count toward the qualified-meeting target. That includes the target in the Meetings or We Keep Working Guarantee, which is a number of qualified meetings agreed before we start. Flagging an unqualified meeting right after it takes place is one of the conditions of that guarantee.

Then we look at why it happened. Was the role wrong for this account? Was a qualifying question skipped? Was a threshold too loose? The answer changes the list, the questions or the brief, so the same miss is less likely next time.

How do you write your own definition?

If you run outbound in-house or with another partner, the same approach works. Write down five things.

• The accounts that count as targets and the roles that count as buyers.
• What a lead has to say or do before sales will speak to them.
• Which of budget, authority, need and timeline must be confirmed before a meeting counts.
• Whether a meeting counts when it is booked or when it is held. We count held.
• Who can flag a meeting as not qualified, and by when.

Share the page with sales and with whoever books the meetings. Then report against it every week. A definition that lives in one person's head will drift. One that sits in the brief and the weekly report stays the same from the first meeting to the last.

Khalil Ahmed

Founder of Leadee, a Dubai-based growth agency running outbound and visibility campaigns for companies in the GCC and worldwide. About Leadee