MQLs Aren’t Dead—But Your Definition Might Be

Brandi Starr [00:00:36]:
Welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandy Star and today it's just me. So you get your recovery leaders take raw, unfiltered and straight to the point. There is a lot of noise out there for revenue leaders. Ideas that are too generalized, not actionable, or just flat out wrong. And so in these solo episodes I help make sense of it all, challenging common approaches and giving you strategies that you can actually use. So let's get into it. A few weeks ago I came across a LinkedIn post that totally stopped me mid scroll.

Brandi Starr [00:01:20]:
It said not an MQL webinar attendee, not an MQL webpage visitor, not an MQL blog page view, not not an MQL newsletter subscription, not an MQL podcast listener. I think you get the point. The list went on and on and on and on and on. And I didn't have time to respond to the post then, but as I read through it I let out an audible yes because I agree completely. And so this episode really is a yes and moment. So yes, marketing needs to stop handling a hand handing sales a pile of barely warm leads just to hit a number. And we need to get clear on what a marketing qualified lead actually is. Because the problem isn't the term, it is the lack of alignment.

Brandi Starr [00:02:15]:
So if we haven't met before, I am Brandy Star, author, speaker and middle of Funnel Strategist, and as the CEO at Tegretta, I help B2B companies optimize the middle of the funnel to drive scalable, predictable growth. And so we have all seen the MQLs are dead takes that happen every few months or so on LinkedIn and other places. The conversation keeps coming back because the real problem is that companies still count any prospect with a pulse as a marketing qualified lead. And so as a result sales ignores the MQLs. Marketing blame sales. And we've got all of this friction because sales isn't following up and sales says they don't have time to follow up on crap and marketing says it's not crap. We all know. And so this bad definition of what an MQL is leads to wasted time and effort.

Brandi Starr [00:03:18]:
It leads to sales and marketing trust breakdown and and it leads to less revenue. So the the Term MQL is not the problem. The definition is broken. So what is an mql? Let's start with a lead, not a marketing qualified lead. A lead is just someone who has arrived at the middle of the funnel. They have done some action to engage with the company and now is the opportunity that marketing has to be able to nurture them to figure out if they are qualified and ready to engage with the sales team. An MQL is simply an agreement between marketing and sales that at this stage sales should get involved. So an MQL purely is an agreement.

Brandi Starr [00:04:13]:
And it's one of those things I've seen people debate where they'll say, well you know, I've seen marketing leaders say, well who defines an mql? Certainly not me. And that's true. It's never me. No matter who me is, no matter what your role is, it's never a me. It is a collective us. This has to be an agreed upon point between sales and marketing that this is where sales should engage. And so when this is done right, MQLs should help to accelerate velocity, they should help to increase deal size and they should build on that sales and marketing trust. So how do we actually qualify the right way? In my opinion, there is no single action that should trigger sales involvement unless it is a direct hand raise.

Brandi Starr [00:05:08]:
Now this is one of those things that really can vary industry by industry and size of company. So for large companies, an MQL or not large companies, for people with a large audience, a large total addressable market, this is one of those things that quite often when there are a ton of people who can buy from you, that company may only deem qualified leads. Those who are hand raisers who have said clearly I would like someone to engage me, whether that's a demo request or a request for contact or whatever that is. For companies that are more niche and have a smaller market, generally the MQL is some agreed upon activity. And in B2B that activity is usually not just from a single contact. Because most times if someone is ready to, if an organization is ready to engage with a sales team, you're going to see activity happening across multiple contacts. Tax because we're talking about a buying committee. And so once we have a lead again, someone who has shown some level of interest, marketing's role is then to support the.

Brandi Starr [00:06:24]:
What I'm seeing now is 80% of the buying journey. That happens before someone is ready to engage with sales. And so marketing's role is to take that lead and get it to qualified and that can be a really wide journey. You know, the, the top of the funnel is typically very small. The bottom of the funnel is typically very small. The middle of the funnel can be huge depending on what you sell, what the price point is, how risk averse your audience is, what they need to go through in order to be ready to engage. But the key here is that the bulk of that journey, the bulk of that buying journey is, is happening in the middle of the funnel and it is happening to get people from lead to qualified. And so one of the things that I like to think about when we talk about qualified though, because some people will make the argument that until sales is involved, it is not actually qualified.

Brandi Starr [00:07:25]:
And while I do agree to a certain level, I would say that there are different definitions of qualification. To me, a marketing qualified. So the big Q, as my guest last week called it, the, the big cue, the qualification is that marketing has identified that it meets the qualification to get sales involved. And this is again that agreed upon definition that we have. So by deeming something an mql, marketing is saying, yes, this is the place where we have now identified that it meets the agreed upon criteria, it is qualified for sales involvement, not that it is a qualified opportunity because I do agree with many people that that has to happen with, with sales. And so if we are thinking about the place where we've got to fix that handoff between marketing and sales and so, you know, this is where we get into the different layers. So again we have a lead, someone has shown some level of interest. This is where you can take those people that have shown they've got a pulse.

Brandi Starr [00:08:41]:
We're going to nurture them in the middle until they meet the qualification criteria that marketing and sales has agreed on upon to get sales involved. This is where it then turns into a sales accepted lead because that is where sales then says, yes, marketing, you've done your job. This lead meets the criteria that we have agreed upon and I am willing to take it and work it and see where it goes. That percentage between marketing qualified and sales accepted should be extremely high. It should be as damn near close to a hundred percent as possible. If the definition is clear and marketing is doing their job from there, that is where I believe sales then works that lead and further qualifies it. And that's where it becomes a sales qualified opportunity or a stage one opportunity. There's all sorts of different terms.

Brandi Starr [00:09:40]:
And this is one of those things that if we do this right, sales is not going to ignore those MQLs because we have agreed on. They have said this is the circumstance by which I am willing to spend my time to engage with this organization. And so if sales ignores an mql that means either the definition is wrong, like what they said they wanted ain't what they actually wanted, which happens or marketing has not met the threshold that was agreed upon. And if that's the case, that's a place that we can always go back that we can look and say okay, we're passing unready leads. If there gets to a point where this criteria no longer makes sense. This is where marketing and sales come back together other and re agree on what that definition is. And so an MQL really is a checkpoint in the journey. It is not a finish line.

Brandi Starr [00:10:42]:
It is not saying this person is ready to buy because to me if they're a hand raiser and they meet, you know, the ICP and all those sorts of things, they, they're quality, you know, they are at the basis level qualified and ready to engage. But a marketing qualified mean leads means that by marketing standards it qualifies for human engagement or you know, engagement by sales. And so when we think about like how do we get there, how do we get to a clear agreement? And I want to focus less on the terms because some people say it should be marketing qualified opportunities or it should be called marketing generated leads or there's all sorts of different terms. It's, it's less about the terms and more about the meaning behind it because there needs to be that official handshake between marketing of sales, of when sales should get involved. And the other thing that I want to clarify, and this is one of the things that frustrates me often is so often the mentality is that marketing is throwing a lead over the fence like they're throwing it to sales as if once they throw it over it's, you know, our hands are done. And that's in most organizations is not the way that it should work. If you haven't listened to the last episode, after finishing this episode, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to Mahak because she talks about the importance of really understanding what that journey looks like and that the journey is not linear. And even once they're engaged with sales, marketing still has a role of communicating things to the buyers that they may not directly escalate.

Brandi Starr [00:12:28]:
With sales there's, you know, the buying committee. The latest study that I saw showed that the buying committee can be as large as 22 people. So that is 22 people with different needs, different Perspectives that we've got to be giving them the information that they need to be comfortable with making this purchase. And that's not always going to happen with direct sales involvement. And so this is where I'm saying the MQL is that agreement of when sales should be brought in to the process, not where marketing is lobbing something over the fence. And so how do we get this right? Like I want to, you know, always like to get to, how do we fix this? And so if you get this right, here's what happens. Number one, marketing and sales are working together. There is no more your lead suck complaints.

Brandi Starr [00:13:25]:
There's no more. Why didn't you follow up on my leads? Why are these sitting there? Why? Why me? It's like that Spider man meme where everybody's pointing at each other. That doesn't happen when we have agreed upon definitions and process. The second thing that happens, pipeline quality improves. Because those people that are getting to sales and getting into pipeline have been educated. They have the information to overcome their objections, to make sure that what they need aligns to what you're offering, that they have the content to build the business case internally. All of these things happen through that middle of funnel nurture process. And so pipeline improves.

Brandi Starr [00:14:12]:
Better nurtured leads is faster conversion and most often larger deal size. And also that means revenue grows because we have a higher conversion rate into opportunity, into close one. We have faster velocity, which means sales can move on to work on something else and we have larger deal size. So when we get this right, it works for everyone. And so what are the steps to fix that? So number one, we gotta align with sales, we gotta talk to each other and we gotta talk and have deep conversations about what is an MQL and what are the real buying signals that indicate they may be ready to actually engage with someone or that they may be ripe or open to someone reaching out to them. So it's one of those things that's super important, like when does sales actually want to engage? And then not only talk about when do they want to engage, but how do we identify that in our systems? Like what is the digital body language or the demographic firmographic information that we have to have in order for sales to say, yes, that is someone that I want to talk to. And so once we have understood the sales process, um, and when someone may want to engage, we've worked with sales to define what is that marketing qualified lead, Then we need to think about what is, you know, where are there some intent signals that we could leverage how does that play a role in the qualified lead? In some cases, intent signals are used to qualify or as a part of qualification. In other cases, intent signals are used a different way.

Brandi Starr [00:16:09]:
And so this is one of those things that we have to think about and move beyond just lead scoring and focus on what is really showing buyer intent. I know I used to be way back when, thinking back when I first implemented Eloqua, this is probably almost 20 years ago now, at least 15. And lead scoring functionality first came out and I was so, so, so stoked about getting this functionality because we could overlay, you know, all of the profile fields to identify our icp. So, you know, you had the criteria that identified we wanted to do business with them and then we could identify these different things that identified that they wanted to do business with us. And I was so excited about that. It was, you know, cutting edge at the time and it was great. You had your A ones, that was your hot leads and you know, then you had certain people that you wanted to nurture to get more information or nurture to get them to engage. That was great because we didn't have more deeper level understanding of intent and looking at intent signals that could be using an intent technology, you know, like a sixth sense or a Bombora.

Brandi Starr [00:17:31]:
But it could also be really looking more deeply around what sort of activities may be signaling buyer intent. So for example, in old lead scoring, we often look at download as one of the criteria that you got points for in lead scoring. But not all downloads are created equal. Someone that is downloading a white paper that is more thought leadership or an industry report reporting on the state of things, that is a very different download than someone downloading a product spec sheet or a buying guide on how to choose the right thing or something that is more specific to the product. And so even without intent technology, you can actually think about what are some of the activities that are signaling intent. Is someone getting more than 50% through a recorded demo, is someone attending a webinar that is clearly about the product and you know, not one of those webinars that is a billed as a webinar, but it's a, you know, it really is a demo. But in some cases we could could have one of those deeper level how to webinars, someone attending that is going to be very different than something that is more thought leadership. And so this is where we can focus on intent and being able to identify that criteria of where we should get sales involved.

Brandi Starr [00:19:03]:
If we've got intent technology, that's awesome. And that's better. But even without the tech, you know, I'm a firm believer, I've said this before, that we have to start where we are, start with what we have. And, and pretty much any marketing automation platform is going to have the capabilities to identify certain types of actions that you can use and you know, as your intent. These are things that are signaling intent. And then the other piece is, it is so important to have a feedback loop. We have to make sure that in order to improve MQL quality and actually have this process work, we've got to continue talking to each other. So talking to each other is not just something that we need to do when we are trying to define an mql.

Brandi Starr [00:19:54]:
We need to later look at what activities did someone do to become an mql? What was the output or the outcome of what happened once they went over to sales? Are there activities that we assumed were showing intense signals that in the end, really we're not like? There's a lot of analysis that we can do, both looking at the data, but also having some conversations about what happened in the sales process and not just analyzing those opportunities that we won. Let's look at the ones that we lost as well. Are there any patterns and consistent things that we are able to see as a result of that? And so this is one of those, like where they say, this is a hill I'm willing to die on, which is that MQLs are not dead. It is the bad definition or lack of definition or defining the things that were in that LinkedIn post that is basically a customer or prospect showing they have a pulse being defined as an mql. And so if sales isn't closing the marketing leads, if they aren't working the marketing leads, then that means you've got a problem with having a clearly defined process. And so, you know, this is one of those that you got to stop measuring MQLs by volume and you've got to focus on pipeline impact. You know, in our book CMO to CRO, we talk about the domino effect and how people are measured. What gets measured gets done.

Brandi Starr [00:21:31]:
I can remember being a marketer and my bonus was on number of qualified leads. And at that time, did I have some scenarios where I loosely defined what a lead was to make sure I hit my numbers? Yeah, I can admit that, like, you know, it's. I was incented for volume and they got volume. Now most of the time my leads were good. Uh, it's not like I was passing over somebody just because they visited the website. But at the same time we definitely played with the criteria because then we didn't have an agreed upon criteria. Um, however, when we shifted to be measured on the only what was sales accepted, which was not only count, but percentage, that changed the game in terms of how I approach things because I wanted to make sure it was really ready before going over to sales. And so now as a leader, we're having those same conversations, not only internally, but I have these conversations with our clients as well in coming up with what is the real definition.

Brandi Starr [00:22:43]:
And so you know, that's your next step is that alignment with clear qualification criteria. And then, you know, we gotta fix the middle of the funnel in order to fix revenue. The middle of the funnel is not just a couple of nurture emails. It's not dripping out some product specific stuff. The buyer journey at one point was very linear and we were able to account for all the steps. It is not linear now. It's like a ball of yarn or a bowl of spaghetti or whatever analogy that you want to use. But we do still have the ability to orchestrate that journey in an effective way if we really think it through and actually spend the time.

Brandi Starr [00:23:29]:
And so this is where we've got and this is why really, like, honestly, my whole career has been middle of the funnel, even when I didn't know that that was the right term to call it. This is why there's so much depending on, on getting that middle of the funnel, right? Because there's so much of the buying journey that lives there. And so if we fix our middle, then that's where we are able to fix our revenue. And a key part of fixing the middle is defining where does that middle start and where does that middle end? And that middle ends at that MQL where it is an agree that agreed upon definition of when sales should get involved. And so, you know, thinking about this like it is, it's one of those things that is, I mean it's honestly the, the biggest thing you got to focus on. If you cannot find the document or the knowledge base card or you know, whatever. The thing is that you have tracked it. If you can't find that and, and pull it up quickly to say this is our definition, then you have an MQL problem.

Brandi Starr [00:24:38]:
So what is the takeaway from all of this? Let me make sure that I leave you with something you can actually use. So again, the biggest mindset shift is an MQL isn't just a lead, it is a decision point. If sales is ignoring your MQLs the problem isn't the term, it's that you haven't defined it in a way that makes sense for your business. An MQL should be clear, agreed upon moment when sales wants to engage because the lead is truly ready. So let's stop focusing on MQL volume and start focusing on alignment. Get this right and you will speed up your deals, you'll increase your win rate, and finally get sales and marketing on the same page. So if you have enjoyed this episode, let's keep the conversation going. Follow me on LinkedIn @brandy star, you will see my smiling face where I break down more revenue strategies and challenge the status quo.

Brandi Starr [00:25:41]:
And of course, this podcast is powered by Tegrada where we don't just talk about middle of funnel strategy, we build revenue driving engines that actually work. If you're tired of best practices that don't move the needle, let's talk. You can learn more@techrada.com that is all for today. See you next time on Revenue Rehab. Bye bye.