If your marketing is working the way you designed it to, you’re delivering marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to your sales team on a regular basis. But what’s happening to those leads once you’ve handed them off?
If you’re not following up on those leads and the stages they move through your CRM, you’re missing an opportunity to further optimize your marketing. Learn why it’s so important to track the progress of your MQLs and the five post-MQL metrics you should be tracking.
An MQL is a lead that your marketing team deems qualified enough to hand off to sales. But that determination should never be made by gut or instinct. Instead, you need a systematic approach to lead scoring.
With lead scoring, you assign scores based on the behavior of your leads and their demographic data. Leads gain “points” by visiting web pages, filling out forms and consuming your content. They also gain points based on their job titles and the organizations in which they work.
For instance, two visitors to your site might visit the same pages, read the same blogs and fill out the same forms. But if one of them has a job title that indicates they are a decision-maker in the buying process, while the other has a job title that indicates they are an influencer, the decision-maker will get a higher lead score.
As a marketer, you want to get credit when your marketing results in a closed deal. But tracking MQLs isn’t just about credit where credit is due.
You need to track your MQLs after you qualify them, because you need to see which of your marketing channels and tactics are actually leading to revenue. If you focus all of your analysis and measurement on which channels and tactics are just yielding MQLs, you might not be seeing the whole picture.
For instance, you may get a sizable portion of your MQLs from pay-per-click ads in Google Ads. Seeing this, you may be inclined to invest more heavily in your Google ad spend. But are those ad-generated MQLs actually turning into revenue? If you follow up on your MQLs, you’ll know for sure.
On the other hand, you may only get a small percentage of MQLs from organic search. This may lead to you reducing your investment in search engine optimization (SEO). But what if that small bucket of leads from organic is actually leading to more closed business than PPC? If revenue is your endgame (and it is), then you’re putting your budget in the wrong place.
You need to invest your marketing dollars into the channels that drive revenue, not leads.
As far as getting credit for the MQLs who turn into revenue goes, that’s actually really important too. Why? Because if your marketing team isn’t getting credit for revenue they help drive, they may not be getting the budget they need to drive more revenue.
When your marketing is working (leading to revenue), you need to know so you can invest appropriately.
The way you track your leads will depend on how you’ve set up your CRM. But you do need to follow your MQLs through the rest of their buyer journeys as they are moved to different stages in your CRM. Here are the five metrics to track:
If you have a firm grasp on how your marketing impacts revenue, then you have the information you need to make dramatic improvements to your strategies, tactics and channels. You can also make a clear business case for the value of marketing, which leads to bigger budgets and better results.
The key to these improvements is having the knowledge you need to make them, and to refocus your thinking that revenue growth is more important than lead acquisition.