MQL way of thinking is DEAD — Here is the reason !!
According to the HubSpot blog, MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is someone who has engaged with your content and has the possibility of becoming your customer in the future provided if you nurture them.
Here engagement is taken as a proxy for showing interest in what you have to offer and it might solve their need or want.
Why is the MQL theory irrelevant today?
With an unimaginable amount of content that is being pushed into everyone’s inbox, newsfeed, and all the available screens, the attention has greatly decreased which everyone is aware of. Hence a click or form submission is not the correct way to measure the engagement level of your prospective leads, especially in the B2B segment.
Why B2B marketing process is broken?
- The actual number of people involved in a B2B buying process is ever-increasing and each of the stakeholders has their own incentives and metrics to maximize.
- When someone responds to marketing communication, it could be a form submission, or enquiry via email or call, the chances of converting that particular lead is much greater if we could respond within 5 minutes of the enquiry.
- In the Harvard Business school study in 2016, only 5% of the companies were able to respond within that window. It is now all the more important for companies to capture the leads at that particular time frame to increase their chances of converting them.
Conversation Ready Leads:
When a prospect is ready to have that first conversation or in 2020 that zoom call or virtual meeting, we should consider them as potential customers, with the sheer number of communication that reaches the average person in 2020 is overwhelming, to say the least.
So when someone is ready to spend their valuable time in understanding your offering, they are showing genuine interest and our chances of converting them are really high.
Understanding why MQL is not scalable with sales targets
With sales targets skyrocketing each quarter, we can’t realistically keep up with increasing the top of the funnel with limited budget.
- The Cost Per Lead for the first 1000 leads is much smaller than the next 1000 Leads. Needless to say, quality also drops significantly. To compensate for the loss in the quality we ought to increase the quantity of the leads which in-turn starts a vicious cycle.
Is it possible to have the only Conversation Ready leads and achieve the desired result?
Absolutely not, at least not to begin with. There are only a finite number of CRL available to you at any point in time. These will not be sufficient to drive your sales and reach your goals.
What’s the way ahead?
- We suggest you prioritize the CRL over the normal MQL leads that come through traditional channels.
- Capturing the leads the moment when they show they are ready to be engaged is of utmost importance.
- Let’s be honest, the form submission is gone, no one wants to fill up the boring form, convert all your web forms to conversation-based chats.
- Treat your MQL as actual people who are looking to solve a problem and not a contact with the potential to spend.
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