🕵🏻♂️ MQLs
Why ditching MQLs without fixing the broken playbook behind them might cost you your career, and how to fix the MQLs handover drama.
Everybody on LinkedIn talks about ditching MQLs. The problem, though, is that nobody gives you alternatives.
If you come to your CFO or CEO today, and say: “Hey, we are going to ditch MQLs today, because the thought leaders on LinkedIn say it’s a useless metric”, it might cost you your career.
The problem is not in MQLs. The problem is in the broken playbook that MQLs have triggered in the last two decades.
Today we’ll cover:
The broken MQL playbook, the real benchmarks, and the consequences for the marketing function
What is MQL? Fixing the definition and MQL criteria.
How to develop shared marketing and sales playbooks to engage and nurture MQLs instead of passing them to sales
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The Broken MQL Playbook.
We all know this fantasy funnel.
Gated content & Run webinars -> Transfer to sales for qualification -> Sales pitches a demo.
We wanted to make marketing predictable, created an intermediate metric to prove marketing efficiency, and developed an MQL handover playbook to transfer the problem to sales.
*Jon Miller brilliantly articulated the problem about “predictable revenue marketing” here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/revenue-marketing
But does it really work?
All 35 CMOs we've recently interviewed for The State of Full-Funnel Marketing confirmed miserable conversions from MQLs to Closed Won.
The most outstanding stats were provided once by a CMO of our client, Ken Roden: 0.2% conversion rate from MQL to Closed-Won.
The MQL - SQL broken playbook just facilitated marketing & sales silos, distracted the eyeballs from the fundamental problem, and led to endess debates about “garbage marketing leads.”
We just must accept the reality and fix it.
Instead of passing MQLs to sales and creating more silos, we should analyze the engagement signals and develop shared marketing and sales playbooks based on the contact's intent level.
Below we’ll share how.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
What is MQL? Fixing the definition.
MQL alone as a contact metric is absolutely useless in B2B. You need to pair it with account awareness, engagement, and penetration (hence, that’s why we prefer to track Engaged Accounts instead of MQLs).
In this scenario, MQLs are:
The members of the buying group from your target account list / accounts that fit your ICP criteria
Have demonstrated some level of engagement with your content (signed up for the webinar, visited website pages, downloaded gated content, etc.)
Don’t have the buying intent and are not sales-ready (if they were, they'd book a demo call straight from your website)
You need to pair this engagement with the historical account interactions and engagement to make sense of the level of intent and next meaningful steps.
Here are a few examples.
Creating shared marketing and sales playbooks aligned with the level of intent.
The lowest-hanging fruit - create simple actions for marketing and sales based on the level of demand and buying intent. Here are some examples of the playbooks you might co-create with sales for “MQLs”.
*Check our post about different levels of demand here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/demand-generation-for-long-sales
𝐄𝐍𝐆𝐀𝐆𝐄𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓
𝘈𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯: A buyer downloads a piece of content, or registers for a webinar
𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵: Learning more about a specific topic
Next steps aligned with the intent:
Connect before the webinar (or after content download) to ask what they expect or want to learn
Progressive profiling: collecting more information about needs, goals, and priorities.
Follow up after the webinar asking for their feedback, and offering more resources on the topic
Add to the demand gen retargeting layer
Account Nurturing
If there was a historical engagement with the account your “MQL” works for, that would trigger 1-1 planning for Tier 1 & Tier 2 accounts.
Use this as a signal to re-engage other buying committee members (E.g. Joe from your team downloaded our research about the TOPIC. Are you working on this CHALLENGE now?).
If it’s a first-time engagement (account is not in Active Focus list or Pipeline), here are the actions you’d take:
1. Do account qualification. Leave Tier 3 accounts in your demand gen retargeting layer. Agree, if sales can run low-touchpoing playbooks from above.
Move Tier 1 & Tier 2 accounts to the next steps:
2.Progressive profiling of MQL: collecting more info about needs, priorities and current buyer journey stage of your engaged contact.
3. Run in-depth account research
4. Buying committee mapping
5. Involving buying committee into the existing ABM or demand gen program (e.g. invite to an upcoming webinar)
With this approach, you prioritize your marketing and sales resources to engage “big whales” instead of spreading your time across multiple accounts.
What we’d stop doing
What we absolutely stop doing, because it anyway doesn't work:
1. Transfer MQLs to sales and forget about them.
Marketing teams inherited "lifecycle stage" playbooks where a contact that reached a specific score/MQL lifecycle stage should be transferred to sales.
We used to open champagne and celebrate marketing wins while sales were struggling to push the deal forward. The stats I shared earlier prove it doesn’t work.
But when sales started to complain, we invented a "scalable nurturing solution”.
2. Run automated email nurturing cadences to promote a demo call.
Here is the truth.
Sending automated lead nurturing emails in which we reminded our leads how valuable our product is and why it's time to book a demo/talk to expert/ (put your CTA).
The problem?
We completely bought into the idea of "finding the right CTA" and "nurturing at scale" that we forgot about the buying process.
If the deal is not moving forward, there could be multiple reasons:
The prospect is not in the market and is just looking for information.
The initial engagement happened because of the early stage research, not an actual buying intent.
There are internal conversations happening with the entire buying committee group, and the engaged contact is not ready to move forward.
This list could be endless, but the entire point is:
If an engaged contact is not asking for the next stage, they are not ready to buy.
Hence, it doesn't matter how many "personalized, nurturing emails" we send asking them to book a new call; they will be ignored.
Actually, the more emails we send, the faster we'll facilitate the disengagement because of the mismatch with the interests and needs of that prospect.
3.Report on MQLs as a core marketing performance metric
MQL is just another engagement signal that should be paired with historical account interactions and engagement. It's not a pipeline, revenue metric, or marketing efficiency metric that marketing should report on.
If you have MQL targets, you MUST change the rules of the game. Here is the proces:
Collect the detailed buyer journeys of 2-3 recent deals
Expand the buying committee group (how many people were actually involved)
Share the insights with the leadership and explain that it’s far from transacational linear funnels
Suggest to use engaged accounts / account awareness, and account penetration as substitution for MQLs
To measure the marketing efficiency, you need to report on revenue metrics, but it’s another story.
*We shared the entire attribution & marketing measurement change management process here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/attribution
BECOME A FULL-FUNNEL B2B MARKETER
Full-Funnel Academy is a comprehensive B2B marketing training and Slack community for B2B marketers who care about revenue and want to move the needle.
Academy includes:
All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, Demand Gen Playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren't available publicly + all upcoming courses.
Private Slack community to answer all your questions
Personalized learning plan. If you are not sure what skills you’d develop in the first place and how to get maximum from the program, we can create a personalized learning plan accordingly to the time you can dedicate to education.
Behind-the-scenes sessions. See what’s working and what doesn’t work and why on the “behind the scenes” sessions where we review the campaigns we are running for our clients and us.