Ask five people on a growth team what a "lead" is and you will get five answers. Marketing counts every new contact. Sales counts only the people who pick up the phone. Finance counts the ones who pay. The gap between those numbers is where budget disappears.
This guide gives your team one shared vocabulary: what a lead is, what makes it qualified, and where an AI Lead from social fits in.
A contact is not a lead
A contact is a record: a name, a profile, maybe an email address. A lead is a contact who has some reason to need what you sell. A Qualified Lead is a lead your team has checked against clear criteria and decided is worth time and money.
The difference matters because each step costs more than the last. A contact costs very little to store. A sales call, a demo or a tailored proposal costs hours. Qualification is how you decide who moves to the expensive steps.
MQL and SQL: the two classic stages
Most teams split qualification into two stages.
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). The person fits your target profile and has shown interest, for example by downloading a guide, attending a webinar or engaging with your content. Marketing believes they are worth nurturing.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). The person has shown a clear buying signal, such as asking for a demo or a quote, and sales has confirmed there is a real need, a budget and a decision-maker.
The model works, but it has a weakness: it waits for the lead to come to you. Until someone fills in a form, they are invisible to your funnel, even if they have been talking about the exact problem you solve for months.
Where an AI Lead fits
An AI Lead is a lead identified from public social behavior, then structured and scored before it reaches your team. Instead of waiting for a form, our engine starts from communities where intent is already visible: a Facebook Group about IELTS preparation, a fanpage for a small business CRM, a group of founders studying offers and pricing.
Membership in those communities is a signal in itself. In our IELTS Forecast Group review, 12,735 profiles came from a group whose members joined to prepare for an exam that leads to study or work abroad. That is a clearer need than many newsletter sign-ups.
An AI Lead does not replace MQL and SQL. It feeds them earlier, with context attached: which community the person belongs to, where they are, and what that community is about.
| MQL | SQL | AI Lead (Lead from Social) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where it starts | Your content or forms | A sales conversation | Public social communities |
| Main signal | Engagement with you | Confirmed need and budget | Community membership and behavior |
| When you see it | After they find you | Late in the journey | Before they search for a vendor |
| Best next step | Nurture | Proposal or demo | Targeted ads, then nurture |
A five-question qualification checklist
Whatever the source, a lead is qualified when your team can answer yes to most of these questions.
- Fit. Does the person match the market, role or life stage you serve?
- Need. Is there evidence of the problem your offer solves?
- Timing. Is the signal recent enough that the need is still active?
- Reach. Do you have a compliant way to contact them, such as ad targeting or a consented email?
- Value. Is the likely deal worth the cost of the follow-up?
Write your answers down as rules, not opinions. "Lives in Vietnam, member of a study abroad community, active in the last 90 days" is a criterion. "Seems interested" is not.
What to read next
Qualification starts with intent. Our next guide, Intent Signals: What Social Behavior Tells You Before a Form Fill, explains how to read the signals that come from communities. When you are ready to see real examples, explore audiences on QualifiedLead.
