Lead generation is an extremely important step within a complete Marketing strategy because it is through it that you will build your customer portfolio!
This construction goes through some stages within a funnel that must be worked on continuously to reach the main objective: closing a sale!
In the middle of this process, you will find the MQLs: the leads that your Marketing strategy has actually qualified as those closest to becoming buyers!
You will learn how to generate qualified leads in this text — check it out!
Definition of MQL
Since MQL is the acronym for “Marketing Qualified Lead”, it is important to remember that a lead is any human being who provides their own information so that your company can contact them!
This exchange usually happens on landing pages and capture forms that your Digital Marketing strategy makes available to your visitors on the Internet, in exchange for some free, exclusive and valuable content — something that only your brand has.
So all your company knows about this new lead is that they have a name and an email address!
Your database doesn’t tell you exactly what their interests are, or why they’re interested in your business, or whether they’re ready to buy.
So, to separate the curious from those with real purchasing potential, the term MQL emerged: a lead qualified by Marketing who goes from being unknown to someone who fits the ideal customer profile and accepts an approach — and a sale — from your brand!
This qualification varies from business to business, since each Digital Marketing strategy is designed with the intention of making the companies’ financial objectives a reality.
They can involve lead scoring and other Marketing KPIs to determine which groups are hottest and which still need nurturing — topics that are widely explored here on the Enjoy Minder blog!
Why generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?
If filtering your prospects to nurture those with the highest potential to close a purchase isn’t enough of a benefit to generating MQLs for your business, I have a bunch of extra reasons that will make you think again!
What makes Digital Marketing so effective is the use of tools to capture behavioral data from potential customers and use it to inform the next steps in the company’s growth.
It means that all information about who the customer is at a demographic level (gender, region, age, etc.) and at a psychological level (interests, preferences, fears, etc.) is gold!
With data like this, it is possible to:
- Run increasingly persuasive and cost-effective marketing campaigns (because they are only shown to people with huge click potential);
- Consistently achieve the business’s financial goals (mainly through creating organic traffic flows);
- And predict the company’s profitability (and increase it) period by period.
MQL cataloging begins with the lead’s initial connection with the brand (whether by email, phone, in person or otherwise), in which a Marketing professional (one responsible for lead generation) will interact with that person to:
- Recommend customized solutions;
- Find out what customers’ needs are (or the reason behind a potential purchase);
- Share information about the products, services or opportunities offered by the company;
- And nurture leads with supporting materials (like e-books and webinars) until they’re ready for the next stage of the buying journey!
Before I take you on a deep dive into the benefits of generating MQLs, I think it’s important to show you how they differ from SQL!
Differences between MQL and SQL
A Marketing Qualified Lead is a potential customer who has shown interest and engaged with the company’s Marketing strategies.
When this MQL is ready to be approached by the sales team, it is sent to the sales team for analysis . When accepted, this lead becomes a SAL (a “Sales Accepted Lead”).
When the SAL is approached by the sales team and the team realizes that there is real business potential there, he effectively becomes an SQL — a “Sales Qualified Lead” in English, or a Sales Qualified Lead!
The difference is this graduation from “qualified by interest” to “qualified to buy” that occurs through the progression of the lead through the sales funnel prepared by the Digital Marketing strategy.
The deeper into the funnel, the more likely the lead is to close a deal!
Benefits of generating qualified leads
Increased sales cycle efficiency
The automatic categorization of MQLs through tools such as lead scoring considerably reduces the time between prospecting (bringing the brand closer to the ideal customer) and closing a sale.
This happens because qualified leads require fewer resources to generate more revenue in the same periods as a lead attraction plan without qualification!
With more customers willing to buy without much maintenance or convincing, the sales cycle becomes predictable, manageable and much shorter!
Improved conversion rate of leads into customers
Identifying which leads are ready to buy and separating them from almost-ready leads (and especially from not-ready leads) allows your Marketing strategies to be radically specific to their needs !
It becomes easier to convince someone in doubt (by providing an answer), present the brand to the curious (based on the most popular content) and offer personalized treatment to different segments of the general public , leading to a high — and continuous — flow of new customers.
Reduced sales cycle and customer acquisition cost
It is obvious that increasing sales efficiency and improving the conversion rate of leads into customers would decrease CAC — the customer acquisition cost!
A lower CAC means that your company is acquiring new customers with lower investments — which is easy to do with MQL, since only people “filtered” by Marketing approach the sales team!
Meanwhile, people who are not yet qualified are nurtured with valuable content and begin to develop a relationship with the brand — leading them to become new MQLs and future SQLs!
Strengthening the relationship between Marketing and Sales
The differences in the functions of Marketing and the sales team become very clear when it comes to MQL:
- Marketing prepares the system for attracting, engaging, converting and filtering leads that will be taken to the sales team;
- And the sales team is introduced to MQLs with much more flexibility, patience, dedication and willingness to convince them to become customers — since the team doesn’t need to waste energy on a bunch of crazy leads!
Knowing the role of each team and how fundamental they are to each other, they can help each other like never before.
After all, the marketing automation tools that help manage the entire business strategy (and that keep customer information in the database) also integrate the sales team’s different sales channels under a single platform!
That little spat between Marketing and Sales gives way to a union never seen before in history — and your company profits more because of it!
Highest Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)
By decreasing CAC and increasing the effectiveness of the sales process as a whole, MQLs tend to dramatically increase the ROI (Return on Investment) of Digital Marketing strategies!
Since the only way to generate good MQLs is by knowing the ideal buyer audience profile for your business (because only then will your business be able to know whether or not a lead is qualified to fit that profile), you need to focus on collecting as much data as you can about your users.
Data like this is used for much more than generating MQLs, but also to guide future paid media campaigns and optimize your business’s SEO strategy as a whole — basically everything that makes your investments increasingly lower and more profitable!
Lead Scoring: Maximizing Lead Qualification
When I said that lead scoring was a common option for qualifying leads, I was being modest, as this tool is able to score the leads in your database based on their level of interaction with key actions in your business automatically!
Each key action is an action on your website, social network, mailing list or blog that brings the lead closer to the possibility of buying something from your company.
These actions vary from strategy to strategy, but each of them is worth some point on a scale (like, say, 1 to 10).
When a lead completes a series of actions that bring them closer to becoming a customer (such as clicking the “request a quote” button or downloading content from your website), they earn one or more points that will be added to a total.
The more important the action, the higher the number of points awarded to the lead who completes it . In the previous example, clicking on the “request a quote” link shows that the lead is more willing to buy from the company (and is therefore worth more points in lead scoring) than downloading content from the website.
Once it reaches a total score above a certain number (say, 7 out of 10), it will become an MQL or SQL and will be sent to the appropriate department — either to be automatically nurtured by a new content stream or to be approached by the sales team!
Since this entire process happens automatically, all your team needs to do is define the scoring of key actions, what to do with MQLs and SQLs, and develop nurturing flows to increase lead scores — at increasingly lower costs!
How to improve your lead nurturing flow
Lead nurturing is important precisely because it warms up a cold lead after they reveal their identity by offering a communication channel with the company!
Audience segmentation is the soul of Digital Marketing because, as much as the audience has communal tendencies (such as the fact that all of your audience likes your brand), there are a number of tribes within that audience.
Knowing how to speak to each of them is the key to fascinating them — and all of this can be done through automated content flows that take into account differences such as:
- What is the level of proximity between the lead and the brand;
- What stage of the sales funnel the lead is in;
- And how he behaves on the Internet!
The only way to know if the nurturing flows are having an effect (bringing cold leads closer to the possibility of a purchase) is through continuous monitoring of the Marketing metrics related to this qualification — in addition to the lead scoring itself!
Metrics to analyze your MQLs
Among the main metrics to monitor when qualifying MQL leads, I can mention:
- Conversion rates ( from lead to MQL, from MQL to SAL, from SAL to SQL);
- And the engagement rates of MQLs with your brand’s content.
The important thing is to analyze these metrics quantitatively and qualitatively at the same time, where the number continues to be a concrete piece of data, but it doesn’t tell the whole story alone!
The context of the strategy, the number of sales, customer satisfaction and the satisfaction of your sales team with the entry of less laborious prospects, can also give clues about the health of your MQLs, so monitor them periodically!
Looking for more quality for your Marketing?
An MQL is the ultimate definition of quality for your business because it is through the filtering of qualified leads by Marketing that your company can:
- Generate lifetime traffic from people on the Internet who actually buy;
- Improve sales cycle efficiency and conversion rates;
- Greatly reduce customer acquisition costs;
- Unite the Marketing and Sales teams;
- And increase ROI!
The process of qualifying leads is the kind of investment that pays off forever, since your sales team stops wasting time with indecisive customers and only starts serving people filtered by lead scoring!
Implementation can be a bit challenging, but you can count on my team here at Enjoy Minder to install this filtering in your business and guarantee jaw-dropping results!
First, I recommend that you complete an audit to find out what you need to implement in your sales strategy — it takes no more than five minutes and will save you a lot of headaches!
Request a free Digital Marketing Diagnosis + Consulting and take advantage! Today is the best day for your company to sell much more!
