What Did the Strong MQL Say to the Weak MQL? ‘Get in My Pipeline!’

By: Jacob Hanson

Marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are the Holy Grail of leads. Gaining them is a sign of successful marketing campaigns, and using them is a large part of prosperous sales.

As with most things marketing, no two MQLs are the same. They come from different sources, each with their own story and their own strengths. Strong MQLs lead to more conversions for sales and are a good indication that marketing is passing the right leads to sales at the right time.

So how do you work to take your weaker MQLs to the next level? I’ve got some tips and best practices for you to try.

1. Sales and marketing must communicate.

Do you know what a strong MQL is for your business and your sales team?

First, we must get past the totally normal (but completely unhelpful) sales and marketing debates around leads. Sales believes the leads aren’t any good, while marketing says sales should use the leads better. (Sound familiar? Check out our blog post “The Sales vs. Marketing Struggle: Your Prospects Need You Both”).

A better use of everyone’s time is to start asking the right questions to determine what a strong MQL is for your organization as a whole—not what it means for sales, and separately what it means for marketing. Here are three conversation-starters:

• Establish your BANT (Budget, authority, need and timing). What can and should you as a marketer be collecting from your prospects to ensure leads meet the threshold set by your teams?

• Determine the must-haves, the want-to-haves and the automatic disqualifiers. For example, many of us look at teachers as influencers, but in so many cases they have no say in the decision. Could this be a disqualifier?

• Discover the primary reasons that a lead says yes (or no) to purchasing from your company. Knowing those reasons will allow you as the marketer to develop the right content to address those areas or to disqualify a lead. Also, if budget is a primary issue, that might prompt your company to develop a funding-alignment strategy to support your leads.

After you’ve developed your initial standards for how a strong MQL looks, make sure you create a feedback loop between sales and marketing to keep the conversation going. If you’re mindful of keeping communication honest and open, the adversarial lead conversations may completely disappear.

2. Develop a lead-scoring strategy.

Another way to get sales and marketing on the same MQL page is to develop a common lead-scoring strategy. Your strategy should be chock full of mutually agreed-upon benchmarks (see above!) that a prospect needs to hit to become qualified. 

After you’ve determined your benchmarks, set specific goals and points your prospects receive after completing specific tasks. For example:

• Determine the value of prospects’ actions in the eyes of the marketer and of sales: what is important and what isn’t? Engagement is a big one. Are they opening emails, registering for webinars, visiting your site, downloading content, or subscribing to your blog? If so, what does that mean to you? 

• Will you include a negative lead-scoring strategy? Will points be deducted if a prospect hasn’t engaged for a certain period of time? If they unsubscribe from a specific email list or your blog?

• Include attractive attributes from your buyer persona(s) and buyer profile(s). What is the prospect’s title? What size district are they in? Is there any specific funding available to them? If your ideal customer is a CAO in a district with fewer than 50,000 students who is looking for a middle school math solution, ensure you weigh those appropriately. Conversely, you can use this for negative lead-scoring as well. If you need districts larger than 5,000 students; make sure that information is collected on a form so they never make it to sales.

A lead-scoring strategy will unite your teams and build strong MQLs. Don’t forget this is an ongoing process, so set regular times to review how the strategy is performing, both on your own and with sales. Learn more in our recent blog post “Sales and Marketing UNITE! 3 Ways a Lead-Scoring Strategy Will Connect Your Teams.”

3. Can the weak become strong?

If you’ve identified what makes a strong MQL for your organization through sales and marketing communication and a lead-scoring strategy, you’ve likely also found how a weak MQL looks. Weak MQLs offer the opportunity to review your marketing strategy to find what might be producing weaker MQLs. For example:

• Was the timing of your marketing campaign off?
• Was the budget of your marketing campaign off?
• Was there a specific need your marketing campaign failed to meet?

By asking yourself these questions, you certainly can strengthen your MQLs!

4. Are some MQLs simply better than others? Is that okay?

I believe some MQLs simply are better than others, and that can be okay. Let me explain. Leads qualify for a myriad of reasons, just as there are many reasons to purchase your product. For example, if you provide a reading solution, your prospects will be interested in your product to meet different needs, from struggling readers, to ELLs, to adult education…you get the point! These reasons will naturally set your MQLs apart depending on how well your product solves a specific problem. However, they should still all meet the same benchmarks you set above and fit into your lead-scoring strategy.

5. Never stop evaluating. 

Now can you wash, rinse, repeat, and call it a day? Sorry…if only it was so easy.

Evaluating your MQLs, having strong marketing and sales communication, and setting benchmarks is an ongoing process and should be treated as a living, breathing piece of your overall marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, just because the current process worked for a handful of prospects to close sales doesn’t mean the same strategy will continue to work indefinitely. The time of year, budget cycles, recent legislation, or even a natural disaster could be the catalyst for change in your qualifying strategy. Consistently evaluating your process allows it to be repeatable, adaptable, and ultimately extremely effective. Can you hear those strong MQLs? “Get in my pipeline!”

Thanks for sharing!