Lead qualification and the sales-ready handoff

What it does

Qualification criteria watch one or more live scoring models and, when a lead crosses the thresholds you set, stamp the lead as marketing qualified and sales-ready. That stamp is the handover point — it's what Dynamics 365 Sales assignment rules, sales sequences and follow-up journeys key off.

Key facts

Lives at Lead management > Qualification > Qualification criteria, and appears only when the Lead Management feature switch is enabled under Settings > Overview > Feature switches.
Criteria are built from live scoring models. A draft model cannot be used, so the model has to be published first.
You can combine multiple models in one criterion — the common pattern being a demographic-fit model plus an engagement model, each with its own threshold, both of which must be met.
When the criteria are met the system sets the lead's Status Reason to Marketing Qualified and Sales-Ready to Yes.
Only leads in an open status are eligible. Leads already qualified, disqualified or otherwise closed are skipped.
Qualification is one-way. If a lead's score later falls below the threshold, it stays marketing qualified — there is no automatic downgrade.
A lead that has already been marketing qualified will not be re-stamped on a later crossing of the threshold.
To change a criterion you stop it, edit or remove the entries, and publish again. There's no in-place edit while running.
The published state is documented as generally available; it is not a preview feature.
Qualification runs off the scored data, so it inherits the scoring model's refresh cadence rather than firing the instant a form is submitted.

When to use / skip

Use this when the client has an actual definition of a marketing qualified lead and a sales team that will honour it. The feature is deliberately thin — it sets two fields — and its value is entirely in what happens downstream. If the client has Sales assignment rules, a queue, or a sequence ready to pick up sales-ready leads, this is the connective tissue and it's worth wiring in on day one.

Skip it if the handover is a human one. Plenty of mid-market clients have a marketer who eyeballs the score list every Monday and forwards names. That's not elegant, but it works, and automated qualification with nothing behind it just fills the lead list with Marketing Qualified records that nobody actions — which is worse than doing it manually, because it looks like a process.

Also think twice if the client's lead status reasons are already heavily customised. Marketing Qualified is an addition to a status model the Sales workstream usually owns, and that conversation is better had before you publish anything.

Configuration decisions

Single model or several. Decide whether one composite score is the gate, or fit and engagement are separate thresholds that both have to clear. The latter produces better leads and more arguments about tuning.
Threshold value. Set it from the observed score distribution, not from a round number. The top-decile figure on the model's Insights tab is the sensible anchor.
What happens after the stamp. Sales assignment rule, sales sequence, a real-time journey, or a queue? Pick one owner for the next step; two mechanisms firing on the same field is a familiar mess.
Recycling policy. Because there's no downgrade, decide how leads get back into nurture — usually a manual status change or a disqualify-and-recreate process.
Status reason alignment. Confirm Marketing Qualified sits sensibly in the client's existing lead status model and that Sales' views and BPFs account for it.
Volume expectations. Agree roughly how many leads a week should qualify. If the answer is "all of them", the threshold is wrong.

Gotchas

The no-downgrade behaviour surprises everyone. A lead qualifies on a burst of activity, goes quiet for six months, and is still flagged sales-ready. Build a recycling step or accept the drift.
Leads that are not in an open status are silently ignored. Clients who use a custom "Nurturing" status that maps to a closed state will find those leads never qualify, with no error anywhere.
Editing criteria requires stopping them, and while stopped nothing qualifies. Do tuning in a window, not on a Friday afternoon.
Qualification depends on published models. Republishing a model to change its conditions recalculates scores, which can push a batch of leads over the threshold at once — a Monday morning of several hundred new sales-ready leads is a real failure mode.
Sales-Ready and Marketing Qualified are just fields. Nothing stops a user or an integration overwriting them, and nothing recalculates them afterwards.
Business unit scoping on the underlying models carries through. Leads outside the model's BU never qualify.

Consultant notes

Get sales to sign off the threshold in a workshop with the actual distribution on screen. Agreeing a number in the abstract guarantees you'll be re-tuning within a month.
Demo the whole chain — score crosses threshold, lead flips to sales-ready, assignment rule routes it, sequence starts. Demoing the criteria screen alone sells nothing.
Push back hard on qualification going live before someone owns the downstream action. An unowned Marketing Qualified queue is the classic reason lead scoring gets written off as useless at the six-month review.
Before go-live, check the Sales workstream's views, business process flows and duplicate detection all behave with the new status reason, and that the first bulk qualification after go-live is expected rather than alarming.
Agree a recycling rule in writing, since the platform won't do it for you.

Worth another look if Microsoft ever adds automatic de-qualification or score decay — the recycling advice here exists only because they haven't.