Not all leads are created equal. Most medium to large businesses out there have no issues generating leads. The issue is normally the quality of those leads.

What is a Marketing Qualified Lead?

In simple terms, a Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL is a prospect that has a much higher chance of becoming a customer because they have been “touched” by the marketing team is some shape of fashion. This touch can be in the form of a phone call, an eBook, a blog post view, or some other marketing tactic.

This warming up process can be achieved and measured in numerous ways depending on your marketing or sales strategy. At the end of the day, you’ll want to send your sales team MQLs that have some trust and knowledge of your brand so the sales conversations are easier to have.

1: Share Relevant Content

The content you send to your prospects should represent both who they are and where they are in the sales funnel. For example, if you’re prospecting Commercial Printing companies that are evaluating your “widget” solution and you are talking to COO’s, you’ll want to make sure your eBook, blog posts, etc truly makes sense to that particular person at that particular time. Here’s an example of a topic idea: “3 Ways a Commercial Printer Executive Team Can Choose the Right Widget”.

2: Nurture via Marketing Automation

Not every single lead that your marketing team comes in contact with will be ready to speak with a real human being or engage with your content. They may have a need for your product or service but it isn’t a high priority at the moment or maybe they don’t understand the true value of what your offering brings.

This is where tools like Hubspot, Marketo and other marketing automation platforms come into play.

You could create a series of follow up emails that come from your sales rep assigned to the lead. These emails could educate the prospect on things that keep them up at night, ultimately relating it to your product & service of course.

Once they start engaging with the content, you should be able to be notified by a lead score system that is setup. (Thus automatically moving them in your CRM to an MQL)

3: Use Video During the Sales Process

I’ve always been a huge video fan but the thought of having a production crew or large equipment has been intimidating.

You don’t have to have all of that.

There are several tools that you can use to grab screen-shares and even use your webcam on your laptop or phone camera to capture video to interject into the sales process and push general leads further down to an MQL.

BomBomb.com is an easy to use tool that allows you to send both follow up video emails that are branded to your company as well as sync into different marketing automation platforms.

Loom.com is an awesome screen grabbing tool that we at B2B Sumo use every single day to communicate internally as well as to make external videos for our clients.

4: Find Opportunities in Your Current Funnel

Sitting right under your nose are probably a ton of MQLs just waiting for your sales team to reach out to. Of course, an elaborate lead scoring system will be able to catch some of these. In addition to that, I recommend you analyze your funnel data each quarter to ensure that the analytics surrounding each stage of the buyer’s journey are not leaving any MQLs off the table. You may notice that some of the closed-won deals interacted more often in the Lead stage with a particular piece of content. Or specific types of MQLs aren’t very keen on receiving a call or SMS on, for example, day 3 of the follow up process.

Have a question about MQLs or B2B Pay for Performance Lead Generation? Chat or call us today.