Marketing qualified leads: Why is it important?

When it comes to sales and marketing, everyone is out to get leads. It is however worthy of note to know that not every leads that are created match each other concerning quality. One of the factors that have an impact on your bottom line is your leads, and they are marketing qualified leads often shortened as MQLs. What are the exact things that make these MQLs very special? In this article, we will be revealing the things that make MQLs so unique as well as where they can be found.

What is a marketing qualified lead?

To briefly explain what a qualified marketing lead means in simple terms, it simply refers to the prospects that the marketing department has judged as being likely to transform into a customer based on their lead intelligence and analytics.

To understand this better, imagine that you are single, and you have a lot of suitors knocking on your door. Your MQLs are those suitors that have higher chances of becoming your choice based on your standards, qualification as well as objectives honed to a smooth edge as a result of several years of relationships and dating.

All businesses out there have their ways and criteria of assessing the quality of any lead. Most of the time, this is because they have downloaded an eBook, made an inquiry on the web or over the phone. Whatever way, it is left to the marketing department to make a judgment based on a standard scoring system.

Click here to know 7 ways to get more qualified leads.

Why is Marketing Qualified Lead so important?

The importance of marketing qualified leads cannot overemphasize as they focus more on the quality of their leads than quantity. For instance, it is way better to have a mini group of highly qualified marketing quality leads with very high purchasing power as well compared to receiving hundreds to thousands of mildly interested inquiries through a webinar organized.

Another example that further describes this is in C-suite marketing. It is much more preferable to have a small group of C-suite executive leads than gathering hundreds of non-C-suite leads since the C-suite group are far more likely to become a decision maker. Also, quality outweighs quantity as the non-C-suite leads usually end up a harder sell despite the fact that you are in possession of quite a number of them.

This is not to say that quality wins entirely over all other factors. Over 70% of marketers hammer on the need for higher quality leads in the generation of leads initiatives. Having a high conversion rate usually leads to more efficient sales as well as marketing processes. Therefore you should be investing your efforts into things that will not only improve your overall traffic but traffic with a high number of qualified leads within your marketing scope.

Benefits of implementing MQLs

Better sales workload

No one likes to spend their entire time chasing shadows. It is evident that sales representatives will not flow with the idea of spending their time and energy on prospects that will lead them nowhere. More importantly is the fact that most businesses will not want to waste their limited resources in pursuing bad and "non-quality" leads. Knowing and identifying MQLs assist firms to thrive and improve the workloads of their teams to ensure that they are expending their resources only on prospects that can give them the highest ROI.

Improved alignment for marketing and sales teams Marketing quality leads are significant when it comes to creating SLA between sales and marketing teams. When a criterion has already been set to determine the kind of leads that passed to the sales team, there is a general reduction in misunderstanding and confusion.

Improved alignment helps the flow of feedback between the sales and marketing teams. This implies that there is a lower rejection rate for the sales reps since the lead scoring system is focused more getting “easier” leads. Once there is smooth communication and hand-off process between the teams, then the resources of the business are much more spent efficiently.

Better content marketing

According to a marketing survey, it discovered that more than 80% of the marketing leads never make sales. This poses a great challenge to businesses as well as other areas where MQL identification can help.

Marketing quality leads benefits content marketers as they get to know the exact set of people to target with their content and also improve the ROI of the lead nurturing initiatives.

Efficient use of time and effort

Knowing and identifying your marketing quality leads helps to make sure that the work of the marketing teams does not get wasted. Once MQLs are directed and handed over to the sales, then the marketing teams can rest assured that their sales teams are actively pursuing the hottest possible leads that they can get out there.

Simultaneously, the sales teams can be rest assured that they are not just looking for needles in a haystack. Employing the use of MQLs makes sure that the sales teams are more targeted and also more likely to result in some sales.

MQLs assist in qualifying your priorities

Identifying the leads that will lead to the generation of some of the most prominent opportunities contributes businesses to fine-tune their sales and marketing priorities. Which would you prefer between investment of resources in converting leads from several hundreds of inquiries and trying to extract quality leads from a minimal list with high chances of patronizing your business?

Conclusion

No business or industry is left out when it comes to benefiting from the identification as well as the pursuit of marketing qualified leads. In summary, it helps to keep your sales representatives in check and that they are not just handling some list of random numbers to call, but that they are pursuing prospects.

The overall result is an improvement in productivity as well as increased sales conversions for the company. Furthermore, it ensures that your marketing teams are executing campaigns that are inclined more to leads that have very high potential to turn into customers.