As economic conditions tighten budgets, marketing and sales departments face immense pressure to find marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
MQLs come from various sources: webinars, content downloads, digital and social outreach, and third-party providers like media and telesales agencies.
When you’re investing time and resources into finding MQLs but having little success, the question comes down to: Why is my investment not paying dividends?
Three Considerations for Successful Sourcing, Qualifying, and Converting Leads
There are three primary factors to consider when working toward converting your MQLs:
1. What Is the Source of the MQL?
Right now, there are numerous prospects researching products like yours and diving into topics relevant to the pain points your services address. While they may be invisible to you, their behavior and preferences are being carefully recorded by media tracking and market intelligence firms.
Today’s companies don’t invest enough in market intelligence. The current cultural trend in IT is to find audiences from scratch, on your own. While doable, you don’t necessarily need to compile your own market research, as others have already done the legwork.
Other MQLs will come from inbound channels. Leads can be qualified for MQLs when they click through marketing emails, download white papers, or attend a webinar.
2. Evaluate Your Conversion Strategy
MQLs are obviously not the end of the road for your prospects. As such, converting MQLs to sales qualified leads (SQLs) is just as important as their sourcing.
But before we get to the how, you first need to define how you qualify SQLs.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning a numerical value to the attributes or behavior exhibited by your leads. Once they pass a given threshold (determined by you) they’re ready for sales outreach.
You decide how much weight to give to these attributes or behavior based on their unique value to your company. Maybe you’ll give heavy weight to leads in the company size range or their professional position or give a little less weight if they download an early stage ebook.
When coming up with your lead scoring system, pay attention to the the “5 W’s” that comprise the discovery questions that need to be answered:
- Who is the economic buyer?
- What is their need or problem?
- Where are they in the buying journey?
- Why we can help?
- When is the decision going to made?
Your job is to help move them along the sales process, and thankfully, there are many ways this can be done. Lead them down the funnel with dynamic content optimization, keep them active with a newsletter subscription, retarget them with advertising, or send direct mail. The point is to keep them warm and tempt them with the best possible offers and the highest quality content.
3. Train Your Business Development Reps (BDRs) on How to Requalify the MQL Regardless of Source.
How do you convert MQLs into sales?
It’s simple. To truly convert, a sales rep needs to make an outbound call to the prospect.
If at First You Don’t Succeed …
Of course, most sales calls don’t connect during the first call attempt. Or the second. Purchasers are often busy or may otherwise be disinterested in hearing a sales pitch at the moment of contact.
In my work as a sales consultant, I often see my client’s sales reps give up after one or two attempts. The MQL falls into the salesforce black hole, lost forever.
As you might tell by my tone, that’s a mistake.
… Call, Call Again
As most B2B sales veterans know, it takes around four to six call attempts to connect with a prospect.
We put this method to the test with one of our clients. The client received approximately 200 white paper downloads from 200 unique prospects. The following day, we spent 10 hours making 200 calls. From that effort, we created eight lead opportunities, converted them into five sales qualified leads, and then confirmed four appointments.
In the end, our client walked away with a six-figure opportunity—all achieved thanks to repeated, timely calls.
The lesson? You don’t know the quality of your leads until you call (more than once).
In sales, there’s no silver bullet, no secret sauce. Pick up the phone and call.
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