When it comes to sales and marketing, the aim is to get leads that will translate to customers and eventually to sales. One of the best ways to get sales is by creating good leads. One of its aspects is a Marketing Qualified Lead. This article is going to give you the meaning of MQL, how to identify them, and its importance to your business.
What are Marketing Qualified Leads?
Now you may get a number of leads interacting with your business. But, you have to admit, no matter how targeted your marketing is, a huge chunk will be irrelevant.
A marketing qualified lead, on the other hand, is a lead that has met some preset criteria to move a step ahead in your sales funnel. Simply put, the leads that show enough interest in your products/services are termed qualified. They may or may not buy your products, but they would be open to nurturing. And they eventually may become your customer.
Some examples of MQL actions may include: filling out online forms, repetitive visits to your site, adding items to their carts, attending software demos, signing up for a trial, contacting you to request for more info and so on.
How to identify MQL
Now that you understand what an MQL is, the next step is to know how to identify one. First, you need to define what an MQL is for you. Because it differs from business to business, and sometimes even people in the same industry have different criteria for selecting a marketing qualified lead.
You can define these criteria by looking into your customer behavior. For example, see what they seem to be interested in the most, or their reactions to certain offerings. You also need to take into account their feedback as well as complaints.
Additionally, it’s very important to do some introspecting. You need to understand why customers buy from you, and what value you add to their lives. You should also know what differentiates you from your competition. When you answer these questions, it should be easy to know which leads you need to qualify.
[Also read: MQL vs. SQL]
The benefits of qualifying leads
Pretty simple! If you need business, you need to qualify leads. As a marketer, if you just send every lead that comes your way, your sales team is going to start cursing you. They do not have the time to deal with poor quality leads.
Here are some important benefits of qualifying leads:
Saves time and effort:
As I said before, the better qualified the leads, the less burden on your sales team. Not just that, it could just help tone down the ever going battle between the sales and marketing teams about lead quality. The sales team will then concentrate their efforts on those leads that actually will bring in revenue.
Improves Revenue:
When the sales team focuses only on qualified leads and doesn’t waste their efforts, it means that they spend more time on good leads. This will mean that they will increase the volume of their sales funnel as well. Subsequently, they will close deals faster, thereby increasing revenue.
Improved coordination between marketing and sales:
Where there is a means of identifying Marketing Qualified Leads, there is better communication between the sales and marketing team. This reduces friction. The better the alignment between the two teams, the more time they spend doing productive work. Additionally, they also avoid unnecessary conflicts.
Enhances Marketing Strategy:
A study found that 79 percent of marketing leads never make it to actual sales. This is definitely a cause for concern. The best way to tackle this would be to ensure that your marketing is more targeted. You need to review how you can attract better quality leads through their marketing.
Without this data, you will probably keep doing the same mistakes and not know what is going wrong. You can then fine-tune all your email campaigns, landing page copies, ad copies or any other BTL and ATL marketing activities.
Placing better priorities:
Now that you have enhanced your marketing strategies, you will also sort out your priorities. Maybe organic traffic is not giving you as many results as paid marketing. So, you can now re-route your efforts and spend to PPC campaigns. This way, you will focus more on channels that have higher ROI.
Improves ROI:
Marketing Qualified Leads enables your marketing team to know their specific target audience to direct their content to, thereby enhancing returns on investment. When specific groups are focused on, it leads to improved and quality content, which will eventually cause a return on investment.
Improves the quality of your business:
Quality is always better than quantity. Sometimes, you see hundreds or thousands of people go through your site or make enquires, or even go as far as filling online forms. You may think that you’ve gotten potential customers from the numbers only for it to record zero sales.
So it’s definitely better to have a small pool of quality leads with high purchasing power than an abundance of leads only interested in inquiries. The goal, therefore, should be to invest your resources and efforts into means that will not just increase your traffic, but traffic with a high number of qualified leads within your marketing scope. Quality leads will always lead to more sales and productivity.
In Conclusion
Every business no matter how different, has a lot to benefit from marketing qualified leads. It eliminates distractions and wasted effort by focusing the attention of the marketing and sales team on quality and profitable leads which will lead to increased productivity.
But, to do this well, you need a good tool that comes with built-in abilities. It should identify which leads meet the quality criteria, and how they are impacting your sales pipeline.
If you are on the lookout for such a tool, look no further. Why don’t you try LeadSquared? It has everything you are looking for to bring sales and marketing together.
