# Lead qualification SOP

Version: 1.0

Owner: Revenue operations

Effective date: [YYYY-MM-DD]

Review cadence: [cadence and owner]

## Purpose and scope

Validate, qualify and route one inbound lead record using approved evidence and versioned criteria. Qualification allocates internal attention; it does not authorize external outreach, claims, pricing, opportunity creation or a buyer commitment.

## Trigger, inputs and prerequisites

- Trigger: approved inbound lead event with a unique event ID.
- Inputs: person/account identifiers, source and permission state, declared request, fit fields, engagement events with dates, existing ownership and criteria version.
- Prerequisites: approved eligibility/fit table, territory and assignment rules, default owned queue, correction path, data-retention policy and external-communication approval policy.

## Roles

- Revenue operations: owns criteria, routing rules, versions and exceptions.
- Marketing operations: owns source and permission evidence.
- Sales owner: owns the commercial response and record corrections.
- Data/privacy owner: approves fields, sources, retention and access where required.

## Procedure

1. Receive the event and deduplicate against person, account and open-record keys.
2. Validate source, permission state, freshness and required fields.
3. Separate eligibility, fit, stated need, engagement, unknowns and ownership fields.
4. If approved, extract a bounded field from free text with the exact source span; otherwise mark unknown.
5. Apply the versioned eligibility and fit decision table deterministically.
6. Apply territory, account ownership, queue and capacity rules separately from qualification.
7. Store reason codes, supporting evidence, unknowns, criteria version and destination.
8. Route conflicts and high-value ambiguity to the named review queue.
9. Let the assigned sales owner decide any contact or commercial next action.
10. Correct source fields or rules with actor/reason, then rerun without duplicating effects.

## Decisions, exceptions and approvals

- Duplicate identity: hold assignment and resolve the canonical record.
- Missing field: preserve `unknown`; never convert absence into negative fit.
- Conflicting sources: show both source and freshness values for review.
- No assignment match: use the owned default queue.
- Criteria update: keep the original result/version; migrate only under an approved policy.
- External communication, pricing, qualification override or opportunity creation: named sales approval.

## Output and completion

Output one owned record containing qualification result, evidence, unknowns, reason codes, criteria version, assignment rule/version, destination, review state and correction path. Completion means the route is owned—not that a sale is likely.

## Measures

Track duplicate rate, unknown-field rate, manual-review age, routing correction rate, unowned records, criteria-version distribution and false certainty found in review. Set targets from observed cases.

## Worked example (simulated)

A record has recent content engagement and an eligible region but gives no supported operational use case. The workflow records engagement and region, leaves need unknown, and routes the owned clarification queue. It neither creates an opportunity nor sends a message. A rep asks the approved question and owns the update.

## Revision log

| Version | Date | Change | Approver |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1.0 | [YYYY-MM-DD] | Adapted from public template | [name/role] |