After a webinar that drew 600 attendees, I reached out one by one to the people who hadn't requested a consultation. Some of them didn't even remember signing up for the webinar.
At the time, I'd been doing both marketing and sales for six months. Marketing gathers potential customers' contact information, "leads," and hands them to sales; sales contacts those leads and turns them into contracts. Having been on both the handing-off side and the receiving side, one thing became clear: a long list of contacts doesn't start anything on its own.
Many B2B marketing organizations make MQLs1 their key performance indicator. Put simply, it's "the number of potential customers who showed interest, such as by downloading a resource or signing up for a webinar." I deliberately dropped this metric from how I measured success. Instead, I used "consultation requests from companies that fit our ICP2," that is, the number of companies our product is a perfect fit for that reached out to ask for a consultation themselves, and I got that up to 100 a month.
Splitting leads into MQLs and SQLs3 was originally meant for when there are too many leads for sales to contact them all, to prioritize who to contact first. But things are different at an early-stage or growth-stage B2B organization with a small sales team and not yet enough customers reaching out first4. Rather than sorting leads into tiers, it's far more important to get even one of them into an actual consultation.
Unmanaged MQLs are like an accumulation of bad debt. They sit on the books as assets, but like money that never actually gets collected. If they have no reason to keep taking our calls and no occasion to ever reach out to us first, that lead means nothing now and nothing in the future.
So instead of collecting lots of leads, what do you do to get them to request a consultation? In the next post, I'll talk about what I actually did.
각주
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MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): among the leads acquired through marketing activities, one the marketing team judges to "look like it has purchase interest" based on behavior or information. ↩
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ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): the conditions, defined by industry, company size, work environment and so on, that describe the customer companies our product can deliver the most value to. ↩
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SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): an MQL the sales team has reviewed and judged worth actively pursuing. ↩
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These are called "inbound leads." The opposite, where the company reaches out to potential customers first, is called "outbound." ↩
