Most disputes about lead quality are actually disputes about definitions. Here are ours, in advance.
A contact inside your ICP who engaged with your content in a way that required a person to act deliberately. A distinct human click. A form filled in. Something a scanner cannot do on somebody's behalf.
What it is not: an open, a raw click count, or a contact who happens to match your ICP and has done nothing.
One of our reps had a real conversation with the person and they came out of it qualified against criteria you set with us in advance. Budget, authority, timing, whatever you actually screen on.
What it is not: somebody who answered the phone, or a meeting that was booked and never happened.
An MQL costs us campaign work and infrastructure. An SQL costs us all of that plus a rep's time and a conversation that may not qualify. They are different products, and pretending otherwise is how vendors end up quietly reclassifying one as the other near the end of a quarter.
Before anything runs we agree what qualifies, and that definition does not move afterwards. If we think your criteria will produce very few SQLs we will say so before you sign rather than after you have paid for a quarter of them.
The data you are buying, the campaigns going out, what your reps are doing and what the CRM says happened to all of it. You get the findings in writing and you keep them whether or not you work with us. There is a quote at the end and no obligation to take it. We would rather tell you your current setup is fine than sell you something on top of it.