A vice president of Marketing for a global manufacturing company and I are working on his marketing plan and one of the three primary legs of the plan is demand generation;

As we're talking, he emphasizes how important it will be for his team to produce more marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

I ask him, "How does your organization define an MQL? And "What does an MQL mean to the sales team?" He takes a moment and says, "A name, a direct number, a position in the company, and in what solution he/she is interested. We then pass this information on to a sales person for that market and product." 

I say, "Really? This seems more like contact information that something the sales person can act on." He replies, "They do seem to have a bit of trouble moving these opportunities forward into the pipeline." This is a very common and familiar conversation these days as we work with our customers. What did we do next? 

I suggested that we talk about the customer buying process and when an opportunity is sales worthy vs. sales ready. He liked the idea and so we stepped back from the planning work and began to:

1. Outline the typical steps in chronological order for each buyer persona for each segment. This step also opened up the conversation about buyer personas, something else we needed to address during this process.

2. Discuss where each of the buying steps fit into the customer engagement and decision making process. This was eye opening because it helped him realize how far away what he was collecting was from when the customer was truly ready to engage.

3. Define which behaviors and characteristics determine whether an opportunity was sales-worthy and when it became sales-ready.

What does it mean to be sales-worthy vs. sales ready? That may vary for your company, but it is a critical difference that needs clarifying. For this customer, sales-worthy really means a customer who fits the profile and has exhibited behaviors such as visiting the website and subscribing to their newsletter. 

On the other hand, sales-ready really means opportunities where a buyer is actually prepared to initiate a purchasing step including a formal quote, formal proposal, or request for trial.

The customer then divided sales-worthy into two groups: those that needed further attention from marketing and those that had demonstrated at least two consideration behaviors such as downloading a specific product spec, an application white paper, and/or a video demonstration of the product for a particular application. The VP decided that it is this second group of sales-worthy opportunities that really constitute marketing qualified leads to be handed-off to the sales team.

Armed with this information he was now ready to specify how many marketing qualified leads his demand generation team needed to produce for each buyer persona in each market. We returned to the marketing plan effort where the specific performance targets were integrated into the appropriate demand generation marketing objectives. This approach helped clarify which segments, which personas and what marketing needs to do to impact and contribute to the pipeline. 

Have you had this conversation with your VP Sales? How does this definition and process match up to what you use? We look forward to hearing from you.

Laura Patterson is president and co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing, Inc., a recognized leader in enabling organizations to leverage data and analytics to facilitate marketing accountability. Laura’s newest book, Marketing Metrics in Action: Creating a Performance-Driven Marketing Organization (Racom: www.racombooks.com ), is a useful primer for improving marketing measurement and performance. Visit: www.visionedgemarketing.com

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