Definition
A lead deemed ready for sales engagement based on marketing-driven signals: downloaded content, attended webinar, repeated site visits. Earlier in the funnel than an SQL. For a service business the equivalent signals are humbler: a price-page visit, a form fill, a second call to the office. The label means marketing thinks this person is worth a human's time.
What it looks like in practice
A free math-readiness checklist sits on a tutoring service's site, and plenty of parents download it over a school year: most just curious. The owner decides what counts as ready for a call: the parent downloaded the checklist, came back later and looked at the pricing page, and the child's grade level matches a subject the tutors actually teach. Only those get flagged for a phone call. A parent who downloaded and never returned goes onto the monthly email list instead. The threshold is written down, so nobody argues afterwards about whether a name should have been called.
Why it matters
The point of the label is to force a business to say out loud what 'interested enough to call' actually means, instead of treating every download and form fill as a hot prospect. That definition is really an agreement between whoever does the marketing and whoever does the selling, and writing it down prevents the argument where one side says the leads are junk and the other says nobody worked them. The line cuts both ways, though: set it too high and real buyers sit ignored in a nurture list, set it too low and the calling hours vanish into casual curiosity.