Marketing qualified lead criteria for planning

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hello and welcome to another episode of the digital strategy newsletter the video bit in today's episode we're going to be looking at a question that comes up frequently when i'm both teaching and when i'm implementing crm with my clients and that question is what is a marketing qualified lead to answer that question we're going to have a look at this diagram that was put together some years ago by hubspot looking at a fairly typical sales and marketing funnel on there you can see at the top of the funnel we have prospects and visitors these are the anonymous users that visit our websites each and every day and beneath that we have leads these are people that have filled out a form maybe downloaded an e-book or white paper maybe registered for a webinar something like that and we know a little bit about them now in the idea world every one of these leads would be thrown over the fence to our colleagues in sales teams for them to follow up with but the truth is at this stage in the sales process some of those leads aren't quite ready so that's where we need to make sure we're generating marketing qualified leads as distinct from just ordinary leads in order to feed our sales teams in an ideal world we're delivering from marketing a steady supply of marketing qualified leads to our sales teams and we're generating leads and they're good quality and sales teams are closing them at a great rate it's not always the case though but the question that always comes up more specifically from my clients is how do we define a marketing qualified lead what does it even look like well let's start out with thinking about who our ideal buyer is let's say we're a software company selling accountancy software now we're looking to sell in to small and medium-sized businesses we're not selling to the enterprise and we want to reach the senior decision makers ideally we want to speak to the people in charge of finance within those organizations so we want to speak to people in finance roles of smes and we want them to be uk based and we want them to be senior decision makers now let's imagine that we put together an ebook for that audience so we make it available on our website we put it behind a form we make it freely available for everyone to download and all we ask for is an exchange of a few details we ask them some basic information their name their email address and their job title and then we start generating some leads once we've started to generate leads we then need a process of filtering them out now obviously in this scenario we're trying to target senior decision makers in uk based companies that are in the sme space rather than in the enterprise now in the first round of leads that we've generated we've captured the details of a finance director and a finance manager but is that really enough to tell us anything about them in order to hand them over to the sales team to sell to well not really we don't know the size of the organization we don't know where they're based but we do know that one of them is more senior than the other but it's still not really enough to go on so we crank out the content marketing engine once more we've generated the leads but now we need to qualify them a little further so we put together a great sounding webinar a very enticing offer we put that in front of our leads now what happens then they all register for our webinar and in doing so they tell us a bit more information now we're not going to ask them their job title on the form we already know that about them so we use progressive profiling on our form to get more data about these individuals now when they submit the form this time we know a little bit more about them so let's take a look at what we know about them now okay now we're getting somewhere now we know that we've got a finance director at a sme and the finance manager is working for a large enterprise organization and that is not our target market now the other thing that we know about both of these leads is that they're quite engaged with our content so not only do we know that they're engaged but now we know which one is a senior decision maker working in the target sector and if we use ip tracking with our lead generation as well we can identify that the finance director is based in the uk and that makes them a marketing qualified lead marketing has identified somebody who is engaged with our content they're the right fit for our organization in that they work in the uk they're a senior decision maker in a finance based role and they work for an sme fantastic we can now pass them over to the sales team now that is a marketing qualified lead it's about gathering as much information as you can in before you pass the lead over to the sales team you want to make sure that sales teams are working on the best quality leads and they're not doing all of that pre-qualification filtering out the week from the chaff they're going to be doing some of that anyway so the more that we can front load the better so one of the questions i always get asked at this point is so what should be our qualification criteria for a marketing qualified lead well that's a difficult question to answer there are many different ways that you can qualify a lead you might look at the role the seniority their location but also you want to be looking at behavior are they visiting your website often are they engaging with your content are they reading your pricing page and studying your case studies to be honest all of that factors in and really any other information that you can garner through a form field could also be considered what you want to do is basically use it as a way of filtering your sales team from getting overwhelmed with junk leads and to be perfectly frank if your sales team aren't being overwhelmed with leads at all you might even want to skip the marketing qualification stage and just pass all of the leads over to the sales team so that they're just active and following up all the leads you get that's it from me today thank you so much for watching i really do appreciate this quite often it does feel like it's just me sat in a dark little office talking to myself i'd be fascinated to know how you qualify your leads how do you generate leads let me know in the comments or drop me an email tell me on linkedin i'm always interested to know how organizations are improving their sales processes and optimizing their conversions so thanks for watching bye