Quality, not Quantity: Marketing Qualified Leads

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are a necessary stepping stone to getting that smile on your sales rep’s face. Along with sales qualified leads (SQLs), MQLs in B2B identify companies with a good chance of becoming customers–especially when compared to ‘spray and pray’ sales techniques. The trick to success is understanding when an MQL is good enough to pass on to sales. Done right, you’ll generate maximum productivity for both the marketing and sales teams.

What is a marketing qualified lead (MQL) in B2B?

A marketing qualified lead in B2B is an organization or prospect that has shown some level of interest in your product. Usually this is by interacting with one of your marketing campaigns or assets. For example, an MQL will:

• Provide an email address when signing up for a newsletter
• Join your webinar
• Visit your website repeatedly

The “qualified” part comes from the fact that not every lead is equal. A lot depends on your lead scoring systems. But for most companies, a lead who took part in the Q&A session of a webinar should be qualified as having more potential than somebody who checked you out on LinkedIn once upon a time.

But then what? When your marketing team has a bunch of graded MQLs, they don’t keep them a secret. Instead, the leads are passed on to the sales department, which has its own magic potion for turning MQLs into SQLs. From that point, the sales team does its thing and hopefully converts many of them into paying customers.

What are examples of MQLs?

Any organization that connects with your company in some way that is traceable to a campaign or asset can be considered an MQL.

When we say “campaign,” we mean a marketing initiative that happens in parts. For instance, during an ebook campaign, you’ll create a few different assets – not just the ebook, but also the landing page, ads, etc. Ideally, every marketing campaign should include some way for the lead to reach out to you. This could be something like:

• Clicking on an email CTA to go to a product page
• Downloading gated content like white papers by providing contact details
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Clicking on a LinkedIn ad
• Using trial version software

Then there are leads that are generated through assets. These are marketing initiatives that are often part of the conversion funnel. They are not created as standalone efforts, as a campaign might be. Instead, they are already part of the customer journey. For example:

• Filling in a form for a demo
• Frequent website visits
• Adding items to a wish list or shopping cart

What about SQLs?

Remember that the ultimate goal of MQL grading is to send leads to sales, where they hopefully become sales qualified leads. How do you tell the difference between SQL vs. MQL? Here are some examples of SQLs:

• Completing a demo period
• A request for pricing information
• A request to be contacted by the sales department

What is a good MQL rate?

Speaking of SQLs, it can help to know the average rate at which your marketing and sales teams convert MQLs to sales qualified leads. Each organization has its own benchmarks that help you know if success rates are going up or down. But the overall MQL to SQL conversion rate is 21%.

How do you qualify marketing qualified leads?

If you’re starting from scratch, keep in mind that creating a lead generation process is not a one-off. That’s because some of your assets and campaigns will be more successful than others. You’ll need to do some experimenting with various aspects of marketing lead generation, like website customer journey, branding, and the types of marketing collateral you produce. But even the best MQL process still has room for improvement, so the name of the game is to analyze and experiment.

Communicate with sales

It’s the sales team that ends up working with the leads that marketing sends them, so their input is essential. You should discuss what kinds of leads they are looking for and try to include their ideas in your engagement process. For instance, if the sales team believes that senior managers for software companies have the highest conversion potential, then you should create marketing content that appeals to them.

Decide on scoring standards

It will again be a team effort to define lead scoring standards according to the types of intent data that result from your lead generation process. At what point should marketing send a lead’s info to sales? Does the lead only need to download one piece of collateral, or is more interaction with marketing assets required?

Set up campaigns and assets

There are countless examples of MQLs. You will need to figure out which ones have the highest conversion potential for you and start to build assets and campaigns around them. Obviously, a website is a basic requirement. But what else will you produce – white papers, blogs, videos, etc.?

Collect data and revise

Once those leads start rolling in, you should track:

• The channels that produce the most leads
• The leads that have the highest conversion rates
• The comparative cost per MQL (see below)

When you begin to realize which are your most productive channels, you should try to optimize them by analyzing response rates to different types of messaging, content, and customer journey setups. At the same time, consult with the sales team to figure out where they are succeeding as well. At some point, you will identify a “magic mix,” which reflects the kinds of leads that convert most often and how they primarily interact with your lead generation efforts.

What is “cost per MQL”?

So MQLs don’t just appear in your CRM (we wish); you’ve got to put effort into finding them. Is the process efficient? Are you taking steps that don’t produce results? You can start answering these questions by calculating cost per MQL.

Math? Unfortunately, yes. Like every important marketing and sales function, you need to monitor costs so you can determine productivity and adjust your methods. Over time, you’ll notice if costs are going down as you become more used to the process of figuring out MQLs..

In the case of MQLs, these costs include the price of marketing resources spent on attracting leads and the time the marketing team spends on qualifying them. Let’s say you just invested in a white paper campaign. How many leads resulted from this effort, and what did it cost? Overall, you can calculate cost per MQL like this:

Number of MQLs per Campaign or Asset / Total Cost per Campaign or Asset

A marketing gray area

Not every lead, or every expense, can be linked to an MQL. One classic “non-MQL” is a lead that you generate through mass-market advertising like a YouTube video. Although this is a marketing expense, the leads that it creates can’t easily be connected to specific engagement actions (unless you run some related surveys). So the resources spent on this type of advertising cannot be used when calculating cost per MQL.

Key Takeaways

• A marketing qualified lead has demonstrated a level of interest in your product by engaging with a marketing campaign or asset.
• Examples of MQLs include leads who attended a webinar and downloaded a trial version of your software.
• The process of qualifying marketing leads is ongoing, but is based on good communication between sales and marketing, constant data review, and revising your processes until you hit a peak MQL to SQL conversion rate.