What is a Marketing Qualified Lead?

Every business knows there is more to getting new leads than just generating volume. Yes you want leads, but what matters most is qualified leads or the more widely accepted term, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQLs).

Quality beats quantity every day of the week, no matter if you’re wanting B2B leads, or have a consumer focus. Qualifying leads is a major KPI for marketing and sales teams early in the sales process to avoid incorrect allocation of resources further downstream.

Marketing Qualified Lead Definition

The definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that (based on the information collected) appears to be ‘target market’. The easiest way to think of an MQL is asking yourself: “is it worth allocating sales resource to this lead?”

When a new lead is generated, the prospect should be evaluated against an approved marketing qualified lead criteria. This criteria can include:

Essentials

• Name
• Business Name
• Job Title
• Phone Number
• Email

Additional Information

• Location
• Industry
• Company Size: Headcount or Revenue
• LinkedIn Profile

You can also gather custom information with lead form/capture questions such as:

• “what is your annual spend on IT / marketing / R&D / professional development / etc?”
• “how are you currently doing X?”
• “when are you looking to implement a proven solution?”

How to Embed an MQL Process

The key to a good marketing qualified lead process is to have clear criteria about what constitutes your target market. From there, it’s a simple Yes or No answer. Here’s an example of three criteria you could use:

• Product
  Would this company benefit from our product?
  Example: Is it from a predefined list of industries
• Size
  Is the company big enough to afford our service?
  Example: Does its LinkedIn page show more than 10 team members
• Job Title
  Is the individual capable of approving/progressing a sale?
  Example: Does it match a predefined list of job titles

The process of MQLing should be quick. The purpose is to filter out obvious non-target market prospects.

It should also be recorded in your CRM and linked back to marketing campaigns. This allows you to assess each campaign on quantity AND quality.

Marketing qualified leads examples

In the process of qualifying a marketing lead, we can integrate the so-called Lead Qualifiers.

Lead qualifiers are questions, criteria or processes that help sales teams assess the likelihood of a prospect to convert into a paying customer based on their needs, interest, and financial capacity to afford our products or services.

If you are running any marketing activity (in-house or using a digital marketing agency), we’d assume that you’ve spent some time creating a detailed client persona (also known as Ideal Customer Profile, or client avatar).

The creation of this ideal customer profile will make all the qualification examples below become a lot clearer and easier for your team to execute.

In the creation of this profile it is extremely important that all teams come together to share their experience from a data analysis perspective but their insights from dealing with clients on a daily basis.

Below we present 3 simple ways on how to qualify a marketing lead:

Automated Lead Scoring

This process will allow you to set rules based on lead attributes and scoring criteria. In this process you assign points based on the actions or demographics that you consider most valuable for a lead. Hubspot scoring is a great example of this.

For example, a user that filled out a 2-min form and falls under your target audience’s age bracket and gender, may have a higher score than a user who has downloaded a lead magnet but the demographics do not fit your target audience.

The numerical scores attributed to each lead indicate their likelihood to become a client. This rule-based lead scoring can be automated by a CRM such as Hubspot or Salesforce.

Example
You run a Mortgage Advice Business and you’re looking to automatically qualify leads that come through your website. If you are after more refinance leads, a marketing qualified lead for refinance may have a higher score than a lead for first home buyers. Similarly mortgage size, or likelihood of purchasing another property in the next 18 months may be criteria you’re interested in.

Internal Staff Qualification

Some leads will reach the pipeline with incomplete information. In order to assess these leads, the internal staff may need to get in touch with them to find out more if they’re a good fit for their business. During this intro call, the team member will be able to ask the key qualifying/disqualifying questions mentioned above and decide wether there is potential to proceed.

Example
A financial business has a contact form on it’s website which only asks for name, phone and email. As you aren’t able to assess the industry, business size, or any other relevant information for your qualifying process, your team will contact this prospect to analyse against marketing qualified lead criteria so see if there is potential to progress with this lead.

Form-based Qualification

This is probably one of the most straightforward processes. We recommend using it if your business gets a very high number of leads that need to be pre-qualified, or if you don’t have the capacity to deal with all the enquiries that you’re currently getting.

Being able to marketing qualified leads using automation is great way to save time.

This method suggests that in your form you include a disqualifying question. If a user responds affirmatively to a disqualifying question, then he/she will be automatically disqualified by the CRM. This can be used simultaneously with the lead scoring where all the leads that are qualified, can still be attributed a score based on their relevance.

Example
Your software logistics company works solely with companies moving 50,000 containers a year. On your website enquiry form you have mandatory question which asks users to indicate their current volume. All the users that select values lower than 50,000 containers per year will be automatically disqualified from your marketing qualified lead list.

Who in a company should determine MQL criteria

It is fundamental that marketing, sales, and leadership teams come together to determine marketing qualified leads criteria.

The understanding that the Marketing team has around lead generation, user behaviour and user intent complements very well the knowledge of promising signals that have been observed in existing clients by the sales team. Leadership should supplement both with a high level of strategic and industry experience.

The combination can be very beneficial to a clean and efficient qualifying process. With the Ideal Customer Profile in mind, marketing and sales teams should come up with a clear set of criteria that can be used to manually qualify the leads, adjust the website forms for a higher refinement of the leads, or to automate the process via the CRM.

As leads begin populating the pipeline and the data comes in, adjustments can be made to strengthen or lesson the criteria to support better business outcomes.

Marketing Qualified Leads v Sales Qualified Leads

Once a lead has been deemed an MQL, it should promptly be actioned by the sales team.

At that point, the sales team will gather more information on the lead, and this starts a similar process of assessing for Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).

That process elaborates by assessing deeper sales questions, for example:

• Need
  Is there a need for our product/service?
• Timing
  Are they capable of proceeding to a sale in a timely manner?
• Budget
  Do they have budget for our product/service?
• Mindset
  Do they have the right mindset for a timely sale and success?

Summary

Taking the time to define and embed a Marketing Qualified Lead process will allow you to shift your focus from quantity to quality. This will result in a more productive sales team, better marketing campaigns and an improved bottom line for the business.