If you’re anything like me, you’re bored of the classic marketing stereotypes. Fluffy pens, colourful charts, ASOS deliveries and posh coffee. But it can be difficult to prove you’re more than that.
Enter the MQL: Marketing Qualified Leads. Designed to prove everyone that marketing is an essential part of your business. Let’s discuss why:
1 Track the progress of your strategy
Spending hours creating strategies, processes and content. Building emails, campaigns and audiences for one week’s send is exhausting. And if you aren’t reaping the benefits from it then it seems like a very pointless task. Or even, you are reaping the benefits but not following up.
MQLs help get it done. They allow you to identify the number of qualified leads fed to sales, and the conversion rates. Keep a close eye on these through the month to identify potential issues occurring over time.
2 Don’t change it just because sales say so
So, sales have started to blame the lack of their productivity on the lack of quality MQLs. That’s fine, delve into your data, do your homework, and analyse the crap out of your MQL criteria. Go back in history to identify where your sales were coming from 3 months ago; MQLs have a long sales cycle.
Although they are marketing qualified, they are not sales qualified. That’s a whole different ball game, and then there’s a whole other chain of stages it goes through until it hits the bank.
So, don’t just look at the past few weeks, or month. Identify the marketing source for recent conversions, sales-ready prospects and MQLs. That way you can prove your sales team right or wrong.
In the same breath, it’s important to be quick to change tact if the number of MQLs takes a downward dive. Identify, rectify and then multiply.
3 Make sure everyone is on the same page
There’s no point in the entire marketing team sitting down and discussing what they deem as an MQL. Then rolling the process out and informing sales there’s loads of quality leads coming their way.
It’s a criteria that many areas of the business need to agree on. Remember, your all working towards the same goal. From marketing to sales to creative designers to your finance squad.
Every stakeholder should share the same opinion that an MQL is, in fact, an MQL.
If you want to know how we can maximise your MQL funnel, check out our killer tried and tested workflows.
