Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) are the two most essential terms in a B2B lead management process.
Senior B2B sales and marketing leaders must clarify what the terms mean within their organization and why they are so crucial to sales and marketing success.
Leadership’s dissatisfaction with lead generation efforts is often due to a lack of alignment and measurement of MQLs and SQLs. However, the definitions vary by company and sometimes by business unit or sales team.
Here’s a simplified MQL and SQL guide for leaders:
Responses generated from marketing initiatives are NOT leads. They start as Inquiries.
We use the Inquiry term because, in most cases, marketing has no idea if the responder individual or company fits the criteria for passing the Inquiry to the sales team. The concept of Inquiry is vital for leaders to understand since a large portion of Inquiries may not be suitable to hand off to the sales team.
Leader Tip: Not everything that marketing generates is worthy of the term Lead.
A lead may be a person and company you’ve never worked with before. However, a lead can also be a new individual from an existing customer or prospect. Or, a lead can be a person from a different business unit, department or replacing someone that left the company.
Leader Tip: Leads aren’t always potential new logos.
Marketing’s definition and criteria of a qualified lead must be embraced and confirmed by the sales team. It is essential to gain agreement and establish expectations of how quickly salespeople will follow up with a Lead and how they will document and manage the lead management effort.
Sales and marketing alignment on MQL criteria may lower the number of MQLs, but you’ll also see a meaningful increase in MQL conversion to Opportunities.
As marketing receives inquiries from their efforts, they should review them to determine if they meet the agreed-upon MQL criteria – often they won’t, so it’s up to marketing to get more information or kill the Lead. The salesperson is responsible for lead follow-up and documenting their lead management activities. If the Lead doesn’t pan out, they’ll need to document brief reasons so marketing can evaluate if future marketing efforts are worthwhile.
Leader Tip: Sales and marketing must align on the MQL definition and sales’ responsibility for managing the Lead.
A lead becomes sales qualified (SQL) when the salesperson converts the Lead to an opportunity. In most situations, the salesperson should be responsible for converting the Lead rather than marketing. Marketing must properly train salespeople to manage and convert leads, or process execution will fail.
Leader Tip: SQL means that the salesperson converted the Lead to an opportunity. Train salespeople to convert and manage leads.
There you have it – a simplified view of MQL and SQL.
If the sales and marketing teams align behind MQL and SQL criteria and a lead management process, you’ll see an MQL move quickly to an SQL. If the move takes too long, likely, the MQL criteria aren’t correct. MQL to SQL conversion rate can assist in further adjusting and refining the lead management processes as you go along.