Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) refers to a contact that has shown a real interest in your product or service and has a set of features or qualifications to advance the sales funnel.
But before you start talking about the importance of this rating, you have to understand about lead generation and its rankings.
A lead can be defined as a contact that showed some interest in your content and that has converted some action.
This action can be a record of the newsletter, a form that is filled in to download a digital book, the registration of a free course or any other type of action in which a user transfers his data in exchange for some benefit.
In Inbound Marketing strategies , it is necessary to create rich content that generates leads to capture, identify and nurture them. Subsequently, those leads will be rated. And if you want to know more about this matter, keep reading this post!
Why rate leads?
In any successful action, organization, analysis and qualification are needed.
Managers, for example, organize their daily activities into lists and define which tasks are priority and which can be solved later.
Lead qualification occurs for the same reason.
The marketing and sales sectors need to create strategies to address leads and convince them to continue in the sales funnel.
Thus, it is necessary to create criteria that segment contacts and show your team who is already ready for boarding and who still needs to know your product or service a little better.
Is Your Lead Really Sales Qualified
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that has already entered your database and you need to nurture and give content to make it a customer.
MCLs already know they have a problem and are looking for information to meet that demand. Therefore, that audience consumes many articles, statistics, tools and analysis.
This stage is very important in the digital marketing strategy , since it focuses on the quality of the lead and not on the number of contacts.
This is where the marketing sector will carefully analyze each contact and select the ones that deserve the most attention.
Therefore, it is much better to have a small, but highly qualified group, than to own thousands of leads that do not consume your product .
What are the steps to identify an MCL?
It takes a lot of knowledge of the marketing sector to make a good identification of Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).
In addition to knowing the product sold very well, the sector needs to know deeply the buyer person you want to reach and also identify the best way to attract that audience.
This means that the work of the marketing team begins with the development of good content, SEO optimization, paid ad strategies, campaign segmentation, data analysis, social media work, among other assignments.
If all these actions have good results, without a doubt, the conversion rate will increase and sales will increase.
In addition, when the marketing sector identifies a good lead and nurtures it in the best way, the sales team has less work to convert contacts into real customers.
There are platforms that help in this qualification and show you, for example, how long that contact is in the sales funnel, how many and what content has been downloaded or read, what email you have opened, among other information.
After that, it is necessary to create a list with criteria and segment the contacts.
In the end, it will be easier to realize which ones are at the most advanced levels and which have no relation to your segment.
What are the benefits of working with qualified leads?
There are several benefits to using Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) in your strategies, check out:
Time and effort optimization
At first, it may seem complicated to organize and sort all contacts. But later, the result will be worth it.
In addition, with the organized system and the criteria listed, it will suffice to classify new leads periodically.
This will give the marketing team more time to think about new strategies, leaving the larger conversion rates in much less time.
Increase of equipment performance
As the two sectors are interconnected, the goals of both teams will increase.
When marketing is concerned with capturing more qualified leads, it is more natural for the sales sector to make these contacts become customers.
Thus, the commercial sector will be able to concentrate its contact on the best leads, stopping wasting time with users who were not so ready or had no affinity with the product or service you offer.
Alignment between internal teams
The current scenario is changing within organizations. Before, the marketing and sales sectors did not work in an integrated manner and had separate metrics and action plans. However, these areas need to walk together for sales to increase.
When the two teams are not aligned, there is some frustration and de motivation. The marketing team can generate many leads, but the sales sector may not convert them due to lack of qualification.
It is the job of the marketing sector to prepare the leads and the sales sector to convert them. Thus, with goals together, both will work in favor of the same objective.
ROI improvement
Another positive point when investing in the qualification of leads is to reduce the cost involved in the operations.
As the marketing team has already nurtured the lead to the point that it wants to acquire the product or service, the commercial will spend less time with negotiations and proposals.
In addition, marketing must pass to the sales sector all the data stored during the work carried out.
The more information about potential customers, the less time it will take to conquer them and solve possible doubts, improving your ROI.
Why put these actions into practice?
After this text, it became easier to understand the terms and phases of the lead acquisition, qualification and conversion process.
It is important to remember that Marketing Qualified Lead helps you recognize contacts that already know they have a problem and are looking for a solution. It will therefore be a duty of the marketing team to keep the lead active and motivated for a possible business.
In addition, these processes facilitate and optimize the focus of the sectors. If before, with market marketing , it was necessary to approach people without any qualification or prior contact, today, the sales sector puts all its effort into the candidates who have really shown interest in the product and, probably, in the purchase.
Are you interested and want to continue learning about how to feed leads?
