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Conversion

Qualified lead

An enquiry that reached the stage you declared to be qualification — not a property of the person but a decision about your funnel, which is why the number is so easy to move without changing any marketing.

Formula
leads that reached the qualification stage
Unit
Count
Direction
Higher is better
Across periods
Adds up across periods
In KO
qualified

A qualified lead is an enquiry that reached the funnel stage declared to be qualification: somebody looked at it and decided this person is worth working on.

Note the phrasing. Qualification is not a property of the lead, it is an event in your CRM. The same person is simultaneously qualified at one company and unqualified at another, and both answers are correct, because the question was never about them.

The formula

Qualified leads = number of enquiries that reached the qualification stage

It is a counter, not a ratio: it adds across periods and across report rows. It is almost always read as part of a set — the leads before it and the money around it:

What it counts
Leadsevery enquiry
Qualified leadsenquiries that passed the filter
CR QLwhat share passed
CP QLwhat one that passed cost you

What it does not show

It does not say the lead is good. It says a salesperson moved a card. This measures the sales process every bit as much as it measures marketing, and weekends, holidays and end-of-quarter pushes are all visible in the numbers.

It does not survive a change of criteria. The qualification criterion is a paragraph in a playbook and the habits of particular people. Tighten it and the number falls; add a new salesperson with a different threshold and the number moves for that person alone. Neither is a change in demand, but both look exactly like one.

It does not separate “rejected” from “nobody got to it”. An enquiry nobody touched and an enquiry that was reviewed and turned down are equally absent from the qualified count. The first is a response-time problem, the second a traffic problem, and they are fixed in opposite directions.

It does not mean the same thing to you and to your agency. Agencies almost always report leads rather than qualified leads — not out of malice, but because they have no access to your CRM. Comparing the two reports without reconciling the definitions is the single most common source of the “we delivered, you failed to work them” argument.

How it breaks

Retroactively. Change the set of stages that count as qualification and the entire history moves with it, previous quarters included. A report taken before the edit and one taken after are not comparable, and nothing labels the difference.

Skipped stages. Some deals bypass qualification entirely — a referral that goes straight to contract. If the funnel only counts leads that passed the step explicitly, the best deals drop out of the numerator and conversion is understated precisely on the most valuable segment.

Delayed qualification. An enquiry arrives in March, a salesperson gets to it in April. It is absent from the March report and present in the April one, although the marketing that produced it ran in March. The longer the processing queue, the further the number lags the spend that caused it.

Duplicates. Three approaches from one person, merged into a single CRM record, produce one qualified lead and three original enquiries — and the qualification rate halves without a single change in traffic.

How KO calculates it

In KO, qualified counts the enquiries whose CRM stage belongs to the set declared as qualification. That set is a project setting, not a product constant: in a subscription business and in project sales, qualification sits at different points of the funnel, and hard- coding it would impose somebody else’s funnel on everyone.

The Stages section puts the step in context: how many enquiries reached it, what share moved on, how many are stuck, and how long a lead spends there on average.

The project funnel in the Stages section: stage cards with the number of enquiries, the share that moved on and the number stuck; the qualification stage is highlighted
The highlighted stage is qualification: each step shows how many reached it, how many moved on and how many are stuck

The metric is additive: it adds across periods and rows with no recomputation. The metrics derived from it — CR QL and CP QL — are computed from summed inputs at every level of the report, so a quarterly conversion rate is not the mean of three monthly ones and does not try to be.