I have been trying to immerse myself in sales blog posts, podcast, and articles this month and my eyes have been opened to a ton of different strategies and ideas. Recently, I read a couple articles about the communication between your marketing and sales team. Specifically, what popped out at me was the importance of your team understanding what makes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and what makes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
Some companies don’t have any system for defining exactly what these two should look like. They instead will use people’s instinct to decide when they have an MQL or SQL. This can work depending on what your company does and if you have experienced marketers, but even then, you run the risk of error, and in reality, you’re just giving your marketers and sales reps another thing to worry about.
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Pamela Vaughan on the sales and marketing funnel. On defining an MQL, she says:
“Whichever approach you chose, base your definitions on data — not on gut instinct. Even experienced marketers and salespeople can be way off base in their assumptions about what makes a good lead.”
If you have a very clear cut definition of what makes an MQL and SQL, you can take away the guessing game of when the right time is for your marketing department to hand your leads over to your sales department.
The more organized the better. I always think of the saying: “Communication is difficult, at best.” It is very important for your marketing and sales team to be on the same page when defining what your leads should look like. This will help to provide the smoothest transition possible for your leads. It’s also important for the teams to sit down on a routine basis and update their metrics for lead qualification. The marketing team may have found a new approach that is consistently getting more people interested, or the sales team may have found that people with a certain background almost always fail to get to the bottom of your sales funnel.
In any case, you must keep up to date on how you are most efficiently converting from the first contact to a buy and when the right time for switching to different stages of your funnel is. If you can really get this process streamlined, your ratio of lead to customer will drastically increase.
I’m still learning different strategies for all of these things and the CRM software’s that help, but this is a great starting block to launch from.
Only after you understand your customers will you truly understand your business.