How to Get More Marketing-Qualified Leads

How to Get More Marketing-Qualified Leads

In a scene from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, the top office sends a hotshot salesperson to confront the mediocre sales staff, telling them to close their leads or face termination. However, Jack Lemmon's character, a salesperson, is having none of it, telling him that the leads are weak.

Marketing provides qualified leads that are ready for closing to sales teams. Our goal as marketers creating a lead funnel is to guide thousands of potential customers through the stages of discovery and awareness, brand and sales messaging, education and consideration, and, perhaps, closing the deal.

The ROI of our marketing expenditure, expressed in terms of revenue and sales pipeline, is the only indicator we consider when allocating our yearly marketing budget. Thousands of prospects drop out of the sales funnel for a variety of reasons, causing significant attrition. However, the objective is to convert as many prospects as possible into Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), or leads who are interested enough in our offering to be passed along to Sales.

After classifying the leads as "good" or "weak," the sales team moves on to the next stage of the sales process, converting MQLs into Sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

Since no one wants to hear "the leads are weak," we must always work to increase the quality of leads in all marketing channels.

Prospect involvement is a key component of lead qualification.

Demand generation teams that handle local events, field marketing teams that oversee corporate conferences or tradeshows, and marketing event teams that organize webinars and social media campaigns have all found it particularly difficult to generate quality leads during the past year.

Since events have been particularly severely impacted by social alienation, let's concentrate on them.

Event teams have reinvested in webinars and virtual events after being forced to shelve plans for live events, conferences, and tradeshows. These are excellent means of bringing together sizable crowds, but the virtual environment leaves out an essential sales tool that is typically part of live events: in-person meetings with potential clients and consumers.

Meetings with prospects are a crucial part of building the B2B sales pipeline, which is the primary source of revenue. Prospects are moved from awareness to the phases of education, contemplation, and decision-making in an enterprise sale process. When the emphasis is placed on one-on-one meetings, product demos, expert meetings, executive meetings, partner meetings, etc. in B2B sales scenarios, the last three phases produce greater outcomes.

Today, marketing and sales teams are concentrating on virtual meetings because those important in-person interactions are unattainable. A marketing-qualified meeting (MQM), which is even more valuable than a marketing-qualified lead, can be obtained by sales if marketers can accomplish that at scale.

Hundreds or perhaps thousands of MQMs are produced by marketing departments for prosperous businesses. These teams have come to the conclusion that merely delivering a MQL is no longer adequate. Although MQLs remain crucial, you cannot afford to end the process at producing MQLs from unprocessed leads.

We must provide more leads if prospects' consultations with our executives and specialists are worth more than just lead generation.

When consumers wanted to witness a demo in the past, they would go to a roadshow, event, or breakout session. However, those will remain virtual for the time being. Before making a multimillion dollar purchase, a consumer can still request a "meet the expert" briefing or a VIP meeting; it will only take place online.

The same holds true for roundtables with distributors, consumers, and partners, as well as any other circumstance in which a group of individuals get together to solve issues and brainstorm solutions.

One of the most effective ways to shorten the buyer's journey these days is through webinars and other virtual events, and consulting with partners and experts is always necessary to persuade clients to switch to a new product or service.

You have to expand your pipeline before you can expand your revenue. Since pipeline is the leading indication of revenue (which is a lagging indicator of marketing performance), the greater the revenue target, the more pipeline you need to put in place.

Focusing on maximizing scheduled B2B client meetings and other engagements is the most reliable method for predicting and building pipeline.

To put it briefly, MQMs fuel pipeline, which fuels income.

Many meeting requests will be generated by a successful MQM program; these requests need to be carefully monitored and handled for efficacy and follow-up. If done manually, scheduling a meeting with a prospect or client can take up to twelve emails and phone calls; therefore, businesses who are serious about scheduling MQMs on a large scale ought to utilize a meeting automation platform (MAP).

Consider adding MQMs to your multichannel digital marketing campaigns on a regional and worldwide scale. You may reduce the length of your sales cycle and increase the number of wins from your sales pipeline by scheduling more virtual customer meetings.

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Jifflenow, the leading meeting automation platform provider in the globe, employs Ravi Chalaka as its CMO and vice president of product marketing. He has knowledge of enterprise IT systems, software, and SaaS.

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