MQL v. SQL: How Businesses Should Define B2B Leads

The marketing funnel is a strategic tool for both B2B marketing and sales teams to use to classify leads, enhance the nurturing strategy, and more effectively measure conversions. Marketing funnels can be made up of many different stages specific to your individual B2B business but most include some version of the following six stages:

1. Prospect

2. Lead

3. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

4. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

5. Opportunity

6. Client

The marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead classifications are the most important designations when it comes to the lead nurturing strategy so let’s take a deeper dive below:

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

Marketing qualified leads are people that have interacted with your business in a way that shows they might be interested in a relevant topic but are not necessarily ready to buy your product or service.

Let’s say you run the marketing team for a manufacturing company. You have many prospects visiting your website and interacting in many different ways - perusing your blogs, reading about your products, etc. The prospects that are willing to go a step further and trade their information for a content upgrade around one of their pain points are the ones you can classify as marketing qualified leads. They’ve essentially told you that they are interested in learning more about a relevant topic but not to the point of being interested in buying… yet.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

Sales qualified leads are your hand-raisers. These are the people that are asking you for more information about your product/service and showing real buyer intent.

To continue our example from above, a prospect or MQL may visit your website and request more information about a specific product or fill out a ‘Let’s Talk’ form asking for a salesperson to reach out. The people then become sales qualified leads because they are showing buying intent, taking them further down the marketing funnel.

Automating lead classification

Many customer relationship management (CRM) software allow you to automate marketing funnel classifications based on which pages the lead explores, which content they engage with, which forms they submit, etc.

Lead scoring is another step that can help enhance your lead follow-up strategy. This strategy allows you to take even more attributes and behaviors into consideration in order to designate a score between 1 to 100 measuring their likeliness to close.

What to do with lead classifications

The intention of classifying your B2B leads as MQLs or SQLs and lead scoring is to help your team be more strategic with their lead follow-up approach and nurturing leads lower in the funnel with the ultimate goal of creating new customers.

Marketing Qualified Lead

By setting up email automation workflows based on previous behaviors that led to becoming a marketing qualified lead, your team can strategically follow-up with leads on a large scale while still giving a personal feel. Workflows should be focused on nurturing the lead by offering them additional helpful and related content, valuable advice, and other types of offers that might encourage them to look to your company to fix their pain points.

Sales Qualified Lead

When a lead is determined to be sales qualified, its time to send them to the sales team to interact with directly on a more personal level. The goal should be for a salesperson to reach out within 5 minutes of the lead becoming sales qualified because 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. What’s more, Dr. James Oldroyd published the Lead Response Management Study, which found that the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.

Measuring Marketing Funnel Effectiveness

Tracking marketing funnel movement is the first step to improving your marketing and sales strategy effectiveness. Start by asking yourself the following two questions:

• Are you increasing the number of leads at each stage each month?

• Are you converting more MQLs to SQLs each month?

If you are not driving more leads each month then you can start by offering more opportunities for prospects to submit their information in trade for valuable content upgrades.

If you are not converting more leads from MQL to SQL then you need to work on improving your lead nurturing strategy by offering leads additional helpful and related content, valuable advice, etc.

Ready to follow up with your inbound leads and reach them at the right time?

Using our expertise in lead generation and sales, we’ve tested several strategies in our own business and on behalf of our clients. Across the board, we found that the ideal inbound lead follow-up strategy requires 2 things:

1. Urgency in response

2. Commitment to sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer

In this download, you’ll receive:

• A successful sample sales cadence to get in touch with your leads

• Details on WHY this works and how it helps your company drive more business.

How to Run a Successful Event for B2B Lead Generation

If you’re looking to generate high-quality leads, you’re going to need to add in-person events to your B2B lead generation strategy.

Hosting a successful event takes time, planning and a solid strategy. The payoffs? Making relationships with quality leads that need your expertise and insight.

Below are the most critical steps to remember when planning a successful lead generation event.

Before the Event

Finding Your Audience

First and foremost, you need to know who you’re targeting for the event. Who’s in need of the content you’ll be sharing? What are the demographics of the target audience you want to close a deal with?

You should always consider the industry, job title and location when creating an audience. It will save you loads of time and money to understand the persona that you’re targeting – once you get that down, you’ll know that the signups are quality leads.

Value Proposition

Before launching any advertising for your event, make sure you understand your value proposition – what problem are you solving for your attendees? After you know the key topics you’re going to cover, create the content you’ll be sharing at the event.

This will guide the rest of your advertising. You’ll be able to create ads, landing pages and posts that are centered around real content that attendees can expect to walk away with.

Budgeting and Goals

Sit down with your sales and marketing team and figure out what budget makes sense – what amount can you spend to produce the most valuable ROI? How much ad spend is enough to bring in quality prospects?

Set up specific goals that you want to shoot for too. Decide how many signups you’re aiming for and how many leads or deals you’re looking to walk away with after the event. Afterwards you’ll be able to compare your spend to your end result to see if the event paid off.

Advertising

Advertising is the most tedious part of event planning. Since you’re in the B2B industry, marketing your event on LinkedIn and Facebook is crucial. In fact, LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of B2B leads from social media.  

To read more in-depth about social media best practices for B2B events, read our blog: __________

Your efforts should be strategic from the second someone hears about your event to the second they arrive. Create forms that aren’t invasive and make sure that the landing page leads prospects directly to your form to sign up. It’s a fact that B2B leads need nurtured throughout the sales funnel process, so remember to send out email reminders to those who signed up to keep them interested in attending.

During the Event

Explaining Your Product or Service

Explaining who your company is and what product/service you offer creates a foundation for the rest of the event. This gives your audience context and shows that you have experience in the topics you’re going to cover.

While you don’t want to be too salsey, you still want to let them know that you’re an industry leader.

You’ll also want to sympathize with your guests’ pain points. Explain that you understand their struggle or situation, then outline how you’re going to provide them solutions.

Presenting Relevant Information

If you targeted your audience correctly, your lead generation event will gather a group of individuals that share the same frustrations and struggles.

With that being said, your content is going to have to be helpful and address their specific pain points. Don’t present information that goes over their head and isn’t applicable to their industry. In the same sense, stray away from discussing material that they’re already aware of.

Presenting the right information to the right market is key – your attendees will turn into leads in no time.

Networking

While you’re excited to educate and help your guests, you’re also in a great place to make new relationships or rekindle old ones – so, network! Do your research on key business leaders that you’d love to continue a conversation with.

Being prepared never goes unnoticed. Start a discussion with someone who you know would benefit from your product or service and offer support and insight.

Offering Discounts

Again, while you don’t want to be too salsey, your guests are there to find solutions. Connect with your audience and let them know that you’re able to help them beyond the event.

Offering a discount shows that you truly want to help them overcome their struggles – you aren’t solely in this for the money. Making the discount a limited time offer is a great strategy as well. It’s moving conversations along a little quicker, and with more urgency.

After the Event

Following Up

Your guests are already aware of your services, so let them know that you’re able to answer any questions they didn’t have a chance to ask at the event.

Sharing even more helpful content is always appreciated as well. Continue to nurture these leads by adding one of your informative blog posts to the follow-up email.

Sending a Survey

You should always be looking to make improvements for your next event. Within your follow-up email, attach a survey that your attendees can fill out anonymously.

The responses will give you tons of insight on what your audience actually walked away with and how much they benefited from your topics and content. You’ll have a better understanding of what to continue to do and what you might need to change.

Recording Your Findings

Reviewing your results is crucial. Whether you’re placing guests in different funnel points or you’re going over survey results, write it down. Every piece of information you walked away with is extremely important.

Put together a deck that outlines attendance, spend, survey results and key takeaways from the discussions that took place. Share this deck with your team so they have insight on everything too. The notes will be helpful for everyone to reference back to with future events and conversations.  

Reviewing Your Goals

Take a step back and review the goals that you set before the event. How close did you get? What changes can you make to assure that you’ll hit your goal next time? Should you shift your focus to other goals?

Seeing how close or far away you were to your goal allows you and your team to revisit the event strategy that you took.

If you’re looking to accelerate your sales cycle and grow your business, plan a lead generation event that covers the above steps. You’ll be surprised how many high-quality leads enter your sales cycle and become the clients you’ve been waiting to do business with.

Ready to follow up with your inbound leads and reach them at the right time?

Using our expertise in lead generation and sales, we’ve tested several strategies in our own business and on behalf of our clients. Across the board, we found that the ideal inbound lead follow-up strategy requires 2 things:

1. Urgency in response

2. Commitment to sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer

In this download, you’ll receive:

• A successful sample sales cadence to get in touch with your leads

• Details on WHY this works and how it helps your company drive more business.

6 B2B Prospecting Tools You Need to Grow A Business

Every business wants to grow, but do they know how to best do it?

Because we help generate warm sales leads for growing businesses, we want to share the B2B prospecting tools that we’ve found work best for our clients.

We know that you want to spend most of your time closing the deal, but did you know that prospecting for your B2B business is as (if not more) important as sales calls and meetings? If we look at the sales funnel, you’ll naturally need more prospects at the top due to most falling off after continued qualifying.

Therefore, in order to keep the top of your sales funnel filled with activity, you’ll want to use one (or several!) of these B2B prospecting tools to grow your business.

Custom List Creation

The first thing you’ll want to do when you’re prospecting for new clients is to create a custom, targeted list. Whether you perform this activity internally or outsource to a lead generation partner, if you don’t know who or what businesses you’re targeting, it’ll be that much harder for your team to help the business grow.

Long gone are the days of buying an email list in hopes of hitting the jackpot of qualified contacts only to find out that most of the “leads” aren’t even at the listed company anymore.

Nothing is more frustrating than taking the time to build out a contact list and reaching out to the emails and phone numbers only to find it useless.

Through years of industry knowledge and access to market intelligence, our sales lead generation experts work directly with your team to create a targeted list of sales leads that fit your company’s needs. Our team helps you find the RIGHT lead at the RIGHT company based on who you determine the key decision maker is at these companies.

Click here to learn more about custom list creation and it’s benefits

Direct Mail

Have you ever considered using direct mail (AKA snail mail) to reach potential clients? With everyone receiving countless technological touch-points each day, taking a different approach with physical mail could be just what your target client needs!

And, when you think about how you feel when you get cool things in the mail, isn’t it a fun feeling?! Now, imagine you send a personalized package to a target client. They’d be so excited at the thought you put into a gift for them that when you reach out to follow up, they’ll be a warmer lead and therefore easier to convert than cold calling.

We love the idea of sending personalized gifts that relate to your business and/or your clients. Even including something that they’ll actually use, like a cool tumbler or a travel mug with some drinks specific to where you’re located is a fun way to engage potential clients!

Email

We know we just hyped up direct mail, but that doesn’t mean email is now obsolete! Email is great for quickly reaching out and making a connection with your business prospects.

We also get that people are busy (who isn’t these days?!) and might have missed a call or email you recently sent. So, we utilize email throughout our lead follow-up sequence to ensure that we connect with our prospect at the right time.

Tip: Following up multiple times via email is actually not creepy or annoying. Sometimes, your contact has opened your email, simply forgot to reply, and just needs a little follow-up to remind them to respond.

Social Media

With about 3.48 billion people on social media (that about 45% of the world’s population), you’re bound to reach and connect with your target clients online.

What’s amazing about using social media for B2B prospecting is that there are so many ways you can utilize it! Here are some ways that we’ve found it to be beneficial for us and our clients:

1. Connecting with other business for collaborations – Not every interaction on social media will (or should) have a goal of driving a sale. We’ve found that interacting and simply making connections with other businesses have opened the doors for collaborations, which are mutually beneficial for getting in front of new audiences of people who could be interested in your services.

2. LinkedIn Targeted Campaigns – LinkedIn is great for creating hyper-targeted campaigns to generate qualified leads. You can target users based on their industry, job title, and even specific groups for even more specific targeting. We’ve used LinkedIn marketing to market for upcoming events and have found an increase in ROI due to targeting more qualified prospects.

3. Facebook Retargeting Ads – We all know that someone more familiar with your brand is more likely to convert. And when the average number of touch-points being 7 before a someone converts to a lead, retargeting them with more information on your business can only help them better understand how you can help.

Related Post: How to Use Facebook for B2B Lead Generation

Networking

Yes, we mean getting out from behind your computer or phone and interacting person-to-person. While technology makes it easy for your business to reach places outside of where your business is located, personal relationships still are key in business.

From attending conferences and making connections to hosting your own small event to bring business leaders together, we’ve found that forming relationships adds another level to our prospecting to better qualify leads.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is great for allowing prospects to tell you exactly what they want so you can connect at the right time with the right content. You can utilize the prospecting tactic through blog content, content upgrades (to collect emails by providing extra value), social media ads, and email marketing.

An example of an inbound marketing funnel could be:

1. Blog post

2. Content upgrade

3. Email marketing welcome sequence

4. Retarget using Facebook ads

 What to do Next:

 Now that we’ve gone over several essential prospecting tools you need to help your business grow, you’re probably wondering what to do next. When creating a system for your marketing and sales funnels, you’ll want to have something in place to warm your newly created leads.

Don’t worry, we have you covered with the optimal lead follow-up strategy to make sure you reach your leads at the best time. If you don’t have a strategy for following up with leads, download our free guide below. We discuss our tried-and-true method that we use for ourselves and clients that can help you too!

Ready to follow up with your inbound leads and reach them at the right time?

Using our expertise in lead generation and sales, we’ve tested several strategies in our own business and on behalf of our clients. Across the board, we found that the ideal inbound lead follow-up strategy requires 2 things:

1. Urgency in response

2. Commitment to sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer

In this download, you’ll receive:

• A successful sample sales cadence to get in touch with your leads

• Details on WHY this works and how it helps your company drive more business.

4 Ways to Improve Your Top of the Funnel Sales Activity for B2B Businesses

The overall understanding of the B2B sales funnel is extremely important. It’s a useful tool for visualizing each prospects journey from their initial awareness all the way to their loyalty and retention. Some businesses’ sales funnels look slightly different than others in the sense that their sales cycle is much longer and includes more nurturing along the way.

There is one thing that each business has in common when it comes to their B2B lead generation funnel system, and that is the importance of fresh leads and the need to keep their funnel full. Below are four way to improve your top of the funnel sales activity.

Differentiation

What is it that sets your B2B business apart from your competitors? Start with the simple question, “Why?”

Why do you do what you do?

Simon Sinek said it best during his famous Ted Talk, “People don’t buy ‘what’ you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it.” This is something that brands like Apple and Nike have perfected over the years showing that, when your brand is truly and meaningfully differentiated, it works as a magnet to attract new customers.

Outbound B2B Marketing

Unlike Inbound Marketing where prospects find you, Outbound Marketing is a great way for you to explore new verticals and find them. Talking to your potential prospects over the phone, at seminars, and/or trade shows are all great ways to introduce yourself and start to build an initial relationship.

Related Post: How to Follow Up With Trade Show or Conference Leads

Don’t Deep Dive

By this we mean, keep it simple. The top of your sales funnel should be full of people either aware of or considering your products/services. This is not the place to be aggressive and sell sell sell. Allow your leads to be nurtured throughout the funnel at an appropriate rate.

Online Presence

This fourth and final piece is extremely crucial for the success of every B2B business today. We’re currently living in an era where everything is being able to be found online and it’s almost always the first step someone makes in their initial discovery.

Make sure your website stays up to date and is user friendly, engage with others on social media, share your content through blog posts, encourage employees and customers to advocate to help attract new followers and leads alike!

Related Post: How Digital Marketing Can Help Your B2B Lead Generation Strategy

Once you’ve mastered the above, you’ll be in a great position to keep your funnel full with new leads!

Are you following up with your inbound leads as quickly as you need to?

Using our expertise in lead generation and sales, we’ve tested several strategies in our own business and on behalf of our clients. Across the board, we found that the ideal inbound lead follow-up strategy requires 2 things:

1. Urgency in response

2. Commitment to sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer

In this download, you’ll receive:

• A successful sample sales cadence to get in touch with your leads

• Details on WHY this works and how it helps your company drive more business.

6 Questions to Ask B2B Lead Generation Companies

So, you have taken that first step and decided to look for a B2B lead generation company, but what questions do you ask them?

With so many companies out there that do lead generation, it can be challenging to choose the right one, especially in B2B markets. Below are some of the questions that will help you and your company make that decision.

1. What services does the lead generation vendor provide and how well does it match up with your sales cycle and model?

This is an extremely important question to ask early on so that you and your company can understand how the B2B lead generation vendor is going to help you achieve your goals. Do they offer telemarketing, e-mail marketing, event-related services, digital campaigns and/or other multi-channel approaches? Once you have an understanding of what they offer you will be more equipped to choose the best possible match.

2. Who are their current clients and are they able to provide references?

Understanding the lead generation company’s current experience in a specific industry or sector will help determine how much experience they have to join your company and help you reach your goals.

It will also be valuable to see testimonials or speak with one of their current clients. This allows you to learn more about the lead generation vendor’s capabilities and what type of experiences they have had.

3. What type of results have they provided for other clients?

Asking a prospective lead generation company to provide reports showing the number of leads they’ve generated for others can help you understand what kind of results they have achieved and possibly, what you can expect. 

4. What type of systems do they use for reporting and/or do they have experience in the customer relationship management system that you are already using.

Many lead generation companies have experience in multiple customer relationship management (CRM) systems along with having their own internal reporting system. Before making a decision, it is important to know if they are able to navigate within your current system and what type of reporting they will be sending your team. If you have a preference of how you and your team would like to receive the lead information, verify ahead of time that the lead generation company can do so.

5. Who is supplying the list?

This is a question that can sometimes be forgotten when first looking into a lead generation company, but can be very important! Do you already have a list of prospects that you would like a lead generation partner to work from or are you relying on them to build the list for you?

Some companies already have an internal or external source; however, you need to understand whether or not those will be valuable to your company. Other lead generation companies can also provide a customer list creation for you, which will give your team the best possible opportunities right out of the gate.

6. What is the price for your services?

This seems self-explanatory; however, you want to make sure that the price of the services matches up with the potential growth that you are looking for and how far down the funnel you would like the lead carried. Many lead generation companies have one flat rate for all lead generation, but finding a company with tiered packages can be a better fit depending on your needs.

---

Now that you have an idea of what questions to ask lead generation companies you can start looking for a partner that will understand you sales model, help grow your business and that can operate as an extension of your team. Don’t be afraid to ask those hard questions; the right partner will be ready and willing to share their experiences.

Download our guide to improve your lead generation and appointment setting strategy!

Creating a pipeline of leads can be challenging and time consuming especially when you’re selling a product or service that requires an appointment for a one on one conversation or meeting.

While there’s no secret formula for generating leads that works across every business and industry, there are several tools that we have found make the odds of success higher and faster and we’d like to share them with you!