Imagine you’re panning for gold—you dip a pan in the water, then swirl it around until the sand and silt wash away. If you’re in the right prospecting area and repeat this process enough, you might eventually see some glimmering nuggets.
This same prospecting principle applies to leads. While some will always be just names on a list (sadly, 79 percent of leads never convert), others have the potential to become valuable clients. Knowing how to mine through the muck to home in on the gold is the key to successful marketing.
What MQLs Are And Why They Matter
This “gold” is known as market qualified leads, or MQLs. Such leads:
- Have been identified by marketing as having desired qualities such as targeted job title, industry, company size, etc.
- Have also done something to indicate interest—visited a website, downloaded a white paper, or attended a webinar, for instance.
Focusing marketing efforts on MQLs yields greater efficiency since energy and resources go to those leads most likely to be converted into sales-qualified leads, or SQLs.
Hubspot aptly defines the difference between MQLs and SQLs in the following way:
“While a sales-qualified lead has been researched and vetted by your marketing department and is ready to talk to your sales department, a marketing-qualified lead is a lead who has engaged with your company and could become a customer if nurtured correctly. An MQL becomes an SQL once they’re ready to talk to the sales team.”
4 Steps for Identifying and Converting MQLs
- Define Your Criteria. Agreeing on clear criteria for MQLs ensures both marketing and sales are on the same page in terms of what constitutes a high-quality lead. This takes into consideration demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data.
- Utilize Content Marketing. Create and offer valuable content that addresses the pain points and needs of your target audience. This could include blog posts, eBooks, webinars, or case studies.
- Implement Lead Scoring. This assigns points to leads based on their characteristics and level of engagement with marketing. Tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and Salesforce can assist in automating this process.
- Practice Lead Nurturing. It’s marketing’s job to not only identify the MQLs but to nurture them until they are fully ready to talk to sales. So how do you go about this? As one example, drip-email campaigns can help nurture MQLs through regular contact to establish familiarity, educate, and make special offers. Another way to nurture MQLs is to engage with them on social media—by sharing valuable content and establishing dialog.
#ProTip: According to Forrester data, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower cost per lead.
Of course, it’s important to continuously monitor the performance of your MQL conversion strategies. By applying analytics, you can understand which tactics are most effective, which aren’t, and adjust your approach accordingly.
There’s Gold In Them Hills—So Go For It
Is that wheelbarrow full of leads you just received Fool’s Gold, or are some of them the real deal? The only way to know is to qualify your lead pool to identify the glimmering MQLs among the duds. Then, by focusing your marketing efforts on MQLs, and nurturing them to SQL status, it’s possible to optimize marketing spend and drive more efficient, effective sales processes.
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