How We Define Lead Generation vs Lead Qualification

B2B marketing is hard - and we’re saying that as a B2B inbound marketing agency.

It’s suggested that marketing is a numbers game, with marketing ‘chucking’ leads over the fence to sales who devalue those same leads. So much so, statistics suggest that 45% of B2B companies report generating enough leads as their biggest challenge. Additionally, only 39% of firms consistently apply lead qualification criteria, leading to a substantial percentage of leads being neglected.

So why is this? Does marketing really not generate sales-ready leads? Or, perhaps more likely, are marketers confusing lead generation with lead qualification and overvaluing the leads that come through?

This is the core idea discussed in our article, explaining the difference between the two and how we, as an inbound marketing agency, qualify leads that are ready to go to sales for follow-up.

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What is the Difference Between Lead Generation and Lead Qualification?

Here’s the TL;DR overview:

• Lead Generation is the process of generating more contacts or leads through marketing (or sales)
• Lead Qualification is understanding which of those leads generated are ready to pass to sales and are likely to become customers.

We do admit that this is easier said than done. Done properly, however, it helps you properly forecast and plan for your marketing strategy, generate more ROI from your activities and, perhaps more pertinently, not annoy your sales team. After all, you should be aligned with commercial goals and what the overall business is trying to achieve.

Let’s dig in a little further…

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and capturing interest in your product or service. It typically sits at the top of the sales funnel and is focused on building awareness and initiating relationships.

With B2B lead generation, the goal is not to sell, it’s to engage. That engagement can take many forms, from both an inbound and outbound perspective: a prospect downloading an ebook or gated asset, subscribing to a newsletter, attending a webinar, or even being engaged on a cold call or email. Simply put, lead generation is a numbers game whose main KPI is ‘Contacts Generated’

The emphasis here is on visibility and value exchange. You’re offering something useful, whether that’s content, insight, or access to something, in return for contact information or attention. Lead generation tactics span across digital and offline channels, including SEO-optimised content, paid media, organic social, events, and webinars. It’s all about creating opportunities for people to raise their hands.

Crucially, not all leads generated are ready to buy. And that’s where qualification comes in.

What is Lead Qualification?

Conversely, lead qualification is what happens next.

As mentioned earlier, it’s the process of determining whether a lead is a good fit for your business and whether they’re ready to speak to sales. Therefore, if generation is about quantity, qualification is about quality.

Qualifying a lead means assessing both demographic and behavioural indicators, from job title and company size to engagement with key web pages or email content. This ensures that, before you pass the lead over to your sales teams to work, they’re a good fit for your services and will get the most value from what you’re offering.

Tools like lead scoring, buyer intent signals, and CRM data help prioritise which leads are worth pursuing further. HubSpot utilises this all within its tools, with the most advanced being predictive lead scoring, which uses AI to evaluate how likely a lead is to close from their interactions across your website.

Ultimately, this stage is about filtering. You’re identifying which leads show the most promise based on how closely they align with your target market and how much buying intent they’ve demonstrated.

How We Qualify Leads

All companies will do this differently; some successfully, some not so well. As with everything B2B marketing, lead qualification isn’t a one-size-fits-all, and you have to find the sweet spot with your company to drive growth.

Here’s the good news, though. As an inbound marketing agency, we have set rules we abide by when creating lead classifications for our clients and how to identify what those high-intent contacts look like.

Collaborate with Sales

The first, and most important step of lead qualification, is collaborating with your sales team.

Although marketing has the market landscape and buyer trends, they very rarely speak to customers. This means marketing may miss crucial, real-world insight into what actually drives customers to seek out a solution, why they choose your business over competitors, and how your offering meets their pain points. Sales, conversely, holds this first-hand knowledge.

Set up a meeting with your sales reps and discover things such as:

• What problems do they need to solve using your product
• What made them enter the market/What broke the ‘status quo’
• What their budget is
• Any more nuanced buying behaviours or objections

Off the back of this meeting, make sure to request sales calls for you to listen to as well. This will mean you can obtain first-hand information from the customer about how, in their words, they need to solve a problem and how your business is the answer. This is invaluable when evaluating new leads – helping you identify which ones are a strong fit, what level of intent they’re showing, and how likely they are to convert.

Identify Target Audience

After speaking to your sales team, but before you begin generating or qualifying leads, it’s critical to understand and define who you’re targeting.

This means understanding both the type of businesses that benefit the most from your offering (ideal company profile or ICP) and the individuals within those businesses who are the decision makers (buyer personas).

Ideal Comapny Profile (ICP)

An ICP outlines the characteristics of companies that get the most value from your solution. It focuses on those most likely to deliver high lifetime value, not just aspirational logos or businesses you would like to work with, but have no idea if they see the value in your solution.

To define your ICP:

• Analyse current customer data in your CRM
• Calculate the total contract or customer lifetime value
• Identify shared traits among high-revenue accounts (e.g. industry, company size, tech stack)
• Group these into 2–3 core profiles for targeted campaigns

This ensures your messaging is relevant and grounded in real-world data, not wishful thinking. It means you’re taking your literal first-party data on your most successful customers, and actively taking that information to create content that resonates with them.

Buyer Personas

While ICP focuses on the business, personas focus on the people within those organisations.

Despite B2B being intrinsically business-to-business marketing, you’re still selling to humans, so it’s vital to understand what motivates them and what breaks their ‘status quo’.

If you followed the first step, you should have a lot stronger idea of who your ideal customer is after speaking with your sales team. It’s important to document this information within persona documents, so that everyone in the business has clarity on who you’re targeting and why your marketing efforts are focused on that specific sub-segment of your audience.

If you're light on data, conduct interviews or surveys with decision makers in the market you want to work in. This can be completed using tools like respondent.io to reach decision makers and cultivate ideal personas.

Once you’ve ascertained what sort of prospects you want to be targeting, you can begin qualifying leads with more ease.

Lead Scoring (Optional)

We’ve marked this section as optional, as lead scoring doesn’t necessarily help you qualify leads if they don’t fit your ICP or persona documents. But what they do help with is identifying the prospects that are engaged with your content.

If you don’t know what lead scoring is, it’s the process of assigning numerical values to leads based on how likely they are to become paying customers. This method helps sales and marketing teams prioritise leads, personalise outreach, and allocate resources more effectively.

An example of this would be if someone requests an eBook, but doesn’t engage following that initial outreach, they will have a low lead score value. However, if another prospect downloads the eBook, engages with follow-up emails and requests a demo with your solution, then they will have a higher lead score, therefore prioritising them with your sales team.

If you’re a business with a lot of leads coming in daily, then lead scoring is proficient in prioritising leads based on how they engage with your organisation. This can be set up easily within most CRMs, and with the latest advancements in AI, you can set it up with automated lead scoring criteria based on existing customer journeys within HubSpot.

As mentioned, this isn’t completely necessary to set up to qualify leads, but it’s important if you have a lot of leads within your ICP and want to prioritise those that are likely to close quicker.

Lifecycle Stages

Finally, HubSpot’s default lifecycle stages track where a contact is in the buyer journey, helping teams align, qualify leads effectively, and personalise outreach.

Here’s a breakdown of each stage and its role in lead qualification. Please note that this isn’t necessarily how you have to qualify leads, as it should reflect the actual buyer's journey within your organisation.

• Subscriber - contacts who have opted into content like newsletters or blog updates. Useful for building awareness and nurturing early interest.
• Lead - contacts who have shown initial interest, such as downloading a guide or completing a form. Indicates that they may become potential customers, but are not yet ready for sales interaction.
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) - contacts who fit your ICP and have shown buying signals through their engagement. Prioritised for targeted marketing and further qualification.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) - contacts vetted and contacted by sales as ready for direct outreach. Sales-ready leads with verified need, budget, and intent.
• Opportunity - contacts involved in an open deal or pipeline activity. Actively being worked on by sales toward a purchase.
• Customer - contacts who have purchased or signed a contract.
• Evangelist - happy customers who actively advocate for your brand. Valuable for referrals, reviews, and influencing new leads.
• Other - contacts who don’t fit the standard stages (e.g. partners, suppliers).Helps maintain CRM hygiene and accurate segmentation.

As marketers, no contact that’s before MQL should be passed to sales. This leads to sales and marketing misalignment, with sales wondering when marketing is going to send across a lead which has the possibility of closing.

Just to dig a bit deeper, this means that if, for example, someone clicks a link to your website in an email, they’re not an MQL - simply someone who’s a lead looking for more information on the subject you’re talking about.

For us, an MQL constitutes someone who has filled in a high-intent enquiry on the website (such as a pricing guide download or a contact form) and that’s within our ICP and persona parameters. This will look different for you based on your individual buyer’s journey, but you need to communicate and agree with your sales team what an MQL and SQL look like for your business, for you to move forward with qualification correctly.

Qualify effectively With An Agency

Understanding the difference between lead generation and lead qualification is fundamental to building a high-performing B2B marketing strategy.

While lead generation is about driving awareness and building a pipeline, qualification ensures you’re focusing your time and effort on leads that are a genuine fit for your business and ready to buy, therefore aligning sales and marketing towards a joint commercial goal.

If you need support in aligning your lead generation and qualification strategy, download our Pricing Guide to see how we can support your business in generating qualified leads that actually convert.