Did you know? 68% of businesses never tend to maintain or measure their sales pipelines, and they managed to convert only ~21% of their leads to customers. It is important to generate new leads and close deals to grow revenue for your business, and this can be done efficiently with a few best practices.
An efficient lead conversion rate is nearly impossible without a working sales pipeline. 37% of marketers report that prospecting is the most difficult part of their job, and building a sales pipeline is essential.
This blog post outlines how MQM can help generate more leads for you. This, in turn, also ensures that you convert the generated MQLs into customers.
What is a Sales Pipeline?
A tool to help you visualize and organize your sales process. It helps you keep track of multiple potential buyers’ statuses and the stage of the sales process they are currently in.
If we compare your business to a car, your sales team is the driver, and the sales pipeline is the GPS/navigation device. Without a sales pipeline, your sales team is driving blind towards the destination of higher sales numbers – it seldom works and poses a huge risk to your business running out of money.
What is a Marketing Qualified Lead?
A marketing-qualified lead (often indicated as MQL) is a prospect who has shown identifiable interest in your brand solely based on your inbound marketing efforts. Such prospects are 9x more likely to convert when you follow up with them within five minutes of expressing interest in your business.
Over 50% of a marketing team’s budget goes into lead generation, as reported by 53% of marketers. However, lead nurturing and conversion are as challenging as lead generation, despite 61% of marketers reporting lead generation as their greatest hurdle.
What is a Marketing Qualified Meeting?
A marketing qualified meeting(MQM) is a session held by your marketing team to educate and engage prospective customers interested in your business’ brand. Such sessions are usually held one-on-one, providing a level of personal service while trying to generate more high-quality leads.
Also Read: A Comprehensive Guide of MQM
With only 1% of leads making it through the lead conversion process, it has become a priority for more businesses to integrate MQMs into their lead conversion funnel. Trust-building is a huge part of generating leads, and MQM is a surefire way to achieve that efficiently.
Using MQM and MQL to Improve Your Sales Pipeline
As discussed, building a sales funnel is the first step to growing your sales pipeline. Although they are used interchangeably, a sales funnel fundamentally differs from a sales pipeline. A sales pipeline is about purchases, deals, and tangible revenue, whereas a sales funnel is about lead management.
Despite their differences, sales pipelines and funnels go hand-in-hand, and a sales funnel is often a precursor to a scalable sales pipeline. A typical B2B sales pipeline has 5 stages in general, depicted below:
The above depiction is a template you can build upon and personalize for your business.
There are three possible outcomes when you ask a buyer to purchase – “yes”, “no”, or “later”. Leads are either converted, discarded, or nurtured further depending on the response. The demo is important in determining the buyer’s mindset before purchase and is often held as a sales-qualified meeting. While this turns the tables in your favor (which is why they are a great revenue catalyst), they are not scalable if the inbound lead numbers are not ramping up.
So, to grow your sales pipeline, it is vital to increase the initial parts of the pipeline—lead generation and qualification. Both of these are possible by using MQL and MQM.
Also Read: The differences between MQL and MQM run deeper than their definitions.
Marketing qualified meetings are a great way to build your database of prospects and leads, as leads that are currently not interested in your business can be welcomed back by introducing new products/services. MQM is also a great way to quantify and measure how well your lead generation and qualification strategies are working, thereby serving as a key performance indicator. By holding more MQMs, the lead database grows quickly, increasing the number of qualified leads moving forward. This, however, does not increase your lead conversion rates.
MQM must be used along with secondary lead nurturing and management strategies such as lead scoring and target content marketing to help increase lead conversion rates. By using long-term plans, you are ensuring that the influx of leads is constantly growing, thereby scaling your sales pipeline consistently. While new leads can be generated efficiently using marketing automation platforms, revisiting old leads with a relationship foundation and history gives you a better shot at converting them into paying customers.
Once you have a pool of qualified leads, focus on converting them into MQMs. Use tools like Calendly or HubSpot Meetings to streamline the scheduling process. Ensure your sales team is well-prepared for these meetings by providing relevant information about the lead’s interests and pain points. A successful MQM should aim to address the lead’s specific needs and demonstrate how your product or service can solve their problems.
Conclusion
Growing your sales pipeline using MQLs and MQMs involves a strategic approach that combines targeted marketing, compelling content, automation, and effective collaboration between marketing and sales teams. By generating high-quality leads and converting them into meaningful meetings, you can drive significant growth for your business and achieve long-term
MQM makes sales pipeline growth possible, and FunnL makes MQM possible. FunnL is a global pioneer in B2B lead generation and qualification services. With an AI-powered lead generation solution and over 25,000 successful qualified meetings conducted, our team of professionals is well-experienced in what they do, which is why we are the best at what we do.
