Through the vote of the team members and different teams, your company’s employees can work together to create enjoyable experiences that drive potential customers to convert and stay true to your brand.
An example of a process where this type of collaboration only improves your ability to convert prospects into loyal customers is lead qualification.
Think of it this way: if your marketing team can coordinate with sales about what makes a high quality lead in your company, then after a lead’s first interaction with your brand, marketing can identify those leads and pass them on to the sales force. As soon as the sales department has these contacts from marketing, they can also be qualified and appropriately maintained by the sales staff. TThis results in time well invested across the organization and ensures that sales reps don’t waste their time identifying leads that marketing has already engaged and reviewed.
These leads, which marketing engages, reviews and passes on to sales, are known as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
MQL
In this post we talk about what an MQL is, why it is worth identifying MQLs and MQL criteria that you can set in your team.
What is a Marketing Qualified Lead (mql)?
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that the marketing team has assessed as more likely than others to become a customer. This determination is based on criteria such as: websites were visited, content offers were downloaded, CTAs were clicked and social posts were interacted with.
How does the qualification process for an MMS work?
At the high level, a lead becomes an MQL, then an SQL, and works its way down the funnel until (hopefully) it becomes a customer.
As mentioned earlier, when a lead becomes an MQL, it has been reviewed by the marketing team. In other words, the marketing team determines whether sales have a good chance of successfully nurturing a particular lead and converting it into a customer.
When the sales team does Agreeing with the marketing team – and believing that they have a good chance of turning a MQL into a customer – then MQL becomes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
Why you want to mark a lead as MQL
Whether through a content offering, social post, virtual or in-person event, website, blog post, subscription, podcast, or ad, marketing has many potential touchpoints with leads, prospects, and audience members before anyone else in your company does .
The resulting engagement data (and possibly contact information) is of crucial importance for the success of your company. This allows your marketing team to efficiently search these prospects to identify the highest quality leads based on the criteria set by your company (which we will discuss in more detail below).
Once marketing has identified MQLs for your company, you can forward them to your sales team – this will guide sales through the first steps of their role (ex.
The sales department then carries out its own qualification process and pulls the top-tier prospects out of this list of MQLs.
Not only does this save sales reps time, but it also ensures that marketing and sales are focused on who your buyer personas are, what type of marketing content is bringing the right prospects to your business, and more.
Criteria for Marketing Qualified Leads
By setting precise MQL criteria, you ensure that the highest quality leads are sent to your sales team. Setting these criteria is also worthwhile as it helps marketing to determine what type of marketing materials, content, and offers will be best received by your target audiences who meet these criteria. In other words, setting solid MMS criteria is a win-win for marketing and sales.
Establishment with MQL criteria (plus examples of MQL criteria)
1. Establish a working marketing and sales team relationship.
As mentioned several times in this article, an essential aspect of MQL success is the process of maintaining open communication and alignment between the marketing and sales teams. Marketing cannot target or identify high quality leads without aligning with sales. And sales will not have access to MQLs without the help of marketing.
You can start by reiterating the importance of this relationship to the marketing and sales organizations so that they understand the value that comes from cross-team communication.
Then you can set up recurring meetings to discuss alignment as well as roles and areas for potential growth (such as what marketing content works best for prospects, what support materials are missing when selling, or get feedback from prospects directly from the sales reps source and can share them with marketers to aid in their campaign targeting, etc.).
During these meetings, there may be time for discussion about how to improve marketing and sales relationships and alignment, and additional time for feedback, ideas, and fact-sharing.
2. Create lead definitions.
Marketers and sales reps should also work together to develop lead definitions for your business. That means marketing should meet with sales to identify, explain, and record the key features and traits that make up an MMS on your team.
For example, your marketing managers can meet with your sales managers to create a definition of an MQL. This process will likely be very similar to the process you used to develop your buyer personas.
Here are some examples of questions to ask when defining MQLs:
- What kind of marketing content should one deal with in order to define someone as an MQL?
- What specific characteristics (demographic and firmographic) are necessary to designate someone as an MQL?
- What pain points or challenges should a person have to turn them into an MMS?
Based on the lead definitions you have created, you can go a little deeper and assign point values for various MQL qualifications to form the basis of a lead scoring system. This will ensure that high quality leads are delivered to your sales team in an organized manner so they can stay as productive as possible.
3. Review your lead definitions and regularly.
Over time, not only will your company, your internal teams, and your customer base grow, but also your prospects, buyer personalities, and leads. This is why it’s so important to come back to your lead definitions regularly and update them as needed.
For example, your marketing team might review your lead definitions quarterly – they might review them as a team, and then come up with any changes they think sales need to get their feedback. Or maybe Marketing and Sales review the definitions together and update them accordingly in a joint meeting.
In any case, remember that just because something works for you now doesn’t mean it will work for you in the future. Be aware that your lead definitions need to be updated to ensure that marketing is targeting, identifying, and presenting quality leads to and for sales reps.
Start creating and using MQLs
Now that you’ve seen the power of MQLs, it’s time to create your own. Remember the tips above to help you identify and convert more qualified leads.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2018 and has been updated for completeness.
