The product qualified lead

If I'm interacting with your business in some way, and I hit a threshold that causes a salesperson to ring my phone number, I'm going to think really hard about whether I can drop your service completely.

My reactions are probably stronger than the average, but who out there feels that a phone call from a salesperson is a pleasant event?

I don't care how polite the person is; they're interrupting my life, asking that I stop whatever I was doing -- they can't know, of course -- and pay attention to them while they try to convince me I'm wrong about something (that is, not yet converting to a paying customer of their service).

Trigger an email from a real person, if you like, that I can read at my leisure (or simply delete, without feeling impolite like I would hanging up on someone).

But think carefully before you start triggering unsolicited sales calls to the people you want most to think favorably of you.

The first step is always identifying the actually qualification event. The problem is they are not always obvious. I see in a few years big data companies helping to find these patterns in data and identify a few high correlation metrics with ease.