Got Leads? Part 1: Understanding the Funnel
You’ve been tasked to generate leads…now what? You’ve probably got a lot of questions:
What kind of leads, are they all the same?
Why did the boss give this task to me…doesn’t Karen look like she wants this project more than me?
If you’ve got any of these questions (except the one about Karen…when the boss brought the project up we all saw her hide under the desk), then this blog series can help. In this series we’ll answer every question you had (and even a few you didn’t know you had) about lead generation.
Question 1: What kind of leads, are they all the same?
Leads 101: The Funnel
As a marketer, when you’re asked for leads the first question should be what kind? There are different types of leads with different levels of qualification. Usually if sales is asking for leads they’re asking for sales qualified leads (SQLs). But it’s difficult to bring leads directly into the database at the SQL stage. Understanding your customer journey is key in deciding the best way to produce the leads you’re being asked for.
Let’s take a look at the complete lead funnel from top to bottom to establish what leads are at each stage, and how marketing can help.
Leads: We know, we know. This is technically what your boss asked for—give me the leads! Really they probably didn’t want these. Leads at the very top of the marketing funnel are of unknown qualification. These folks could come from tradeshow attendee lists and other sources where we didn’t necessarily talk to the lead and qualify them. At this stage they’re just swimming in the big pool of our database and marketing’s job is to sleuth out who is qualified.
We usually do this by nurturing them with content and attempting to get them to convert (fill out a form) to access a piece of content. This signals that they’re interested and are ready to move to the next stage of the funnel.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): MQLs are leads who have expressed interest either by a conversion on content, or behaving in a way that implies interest (think product page visits, reading articles, etc.). Some sales teams like to work MQLs but usually outreach to this group of leads is handled by inside sales organizations vs. outside sales teams. They require more nurturing and usually aren’t ready to have a sales conversation. Make sure your organization has a definition of what makes a MQL so you can collect the data that the team needs to consider them marketing qualified.
At this stage the marketing goal is to nurture these leads with targeted content based on their behavior with the goal of getting them to raise their hand for a sales conversation.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): Now THIS is probably what the boss wanted. These leads are the pinnacle of marketing achievement—the ones who want to talk to sales! Sometimes we can bring them in right at a SQL status but that usually requires an enticing sales offer, and even so, we’re usually converting leads in an MQL status on those offers, not brining in net new leads to the database from cold to sales qualified.
SQLs are typically more expensive to generate than MQLs. In our experience MQLs cost around $7-50 to generate depending on market and content (more on that later in the series), where SQLs usually cost $100-$300 each.
Our goal at this stage is to quickly hand the leads off to sales and make sure we’ve got tracking in place to measure sales results.
Opportunities: At this point the success of the sale is out of our hands—but we still want to know what happened. Use a CRM to tag opportunities to campaigns so you can track revenue generated from each of your marketing campaigns.
Marketing can support sales during this stage, often we help if deals get stalled in the sales process. We can create nurturing sequences designed to reactivate stalled deals. Usually these contain content like ROI case studies and other bottom of funnel content.
Sales: At last…we’ve reached our goal….a sale!
Up Next…Question 2: Where do these elusive leads hang out?
Need help getting leads?
Red Brick Partners specializes in generating MQLs and SQLs. Contact us today to get started.