Let’s examine in detail what this abbreviation means.
MQL – stands for Marketing Qualified Lead.
SQL – stands for Sales Qualified Lead.
Every company aims to generate leads, but not everyone tries to deeply understand their qualification.
And this is a big mistake…
Assigning a lead the status of MQL or SQL significantly influences its further movement through the sales funnel and determines a specific employee of the company who will work with it and be responsible for it.
In most IT companies operating in the B2B segment, lead generation and deal closing are handled by different departments and employees.
Depending on whether it’s about Inbound channels (such as a button on the website for a call-back) or Outbound (for example, cold emails), these can be:
- Marketing Specialist
- Lead Generation Manager
- SDR - Sales Development Representative
- Sales Manager
- Sales Executive
Always follow the sales funnel for your leads
Each of these positions has its own responsibilities and requires different qualifications and skills to work with different categories of leaders.
If each employee is responsible and in their place, they will be better able to handle the tasks of taking leads through their stage of the sales funnel and moving them to a deal at the bottom of the funnel.
An MQL is a lead that has shown interest in the product or service of the company that attracted it. Although he is still quite “fresh”, he has an interest, which may indicate that during your lead generation you may have highlighted some of his “pain”.
MQL has a lot of questions at this point, or maybe he just didn’t understand what your company offers and decided to clarify.
It is still too early to transfer such a leader to the Sales Department, he still needs to be “warmed up” a little. In the funnel, it is now in the “Awareness” stage.
The next stage of working with an MQL is to direct it in the right direction, identify its needs, get to know the specifics of your product in depth and determine which product/service from the assortment it may need.
While, in many cases, it is still too early to call him, if he does not ask for it.
For such a lead, it is not necessary to send “general information” about your company and how many thousands of customers are in your database – it must be warmed by working with the identified “bill”.
He needs “narrow information” according to his request, and if he is inactive and stopped in the funnel, then you can include a newsletter with thematic content, links to the site, social networks, promotional articles and other company content.
And after his “repeated” activity, you can offer to arrange a meeting and transfer him from MQL to SQL.
Thus, by translating the lead into SQL, we already understand that he has the intention to consider your products/services for purchase and move to the “Consideration” stage of the funnel.
And that’s where it’s critical to hand it off from Marketing or SDR to someone more experienced in closing the deal in sales, qualifying as a buyer, pitching, and closing the deal – depending on how it moves down the funnel.
