With the acute onset of the pandemic, all major businesses and industry pioneers have set up remote workplaces and virtual salesforces in place to keep them afloat. With hundreds of ideas being generated and experimented with in parallel, the ones that show great promise often spread quickly to all industries. One such optimistic concept is the idea of marketing-qualified meetings, often abbreviated as MQM.

In every industry, there has always been the idea of appropriate application – how much of something needs to be applied to attain maximum results. Often, strategies (including marketing-qualified meetings) come attached with the strings of diminishing returns, which can be visualized using the bell curve. All other points are non-optimal returns due to lower/higher expenses.

In our context, the question thus becomes clear – is your team generating enough MQMs? What are your upper and lower bounds for marketing-qualified meetings?

MQM in a nutshell:

An MQM, in our context, is defined as a marketing-qualified meeting. It happens after all meetings that your team has generated for qualified prospects who are at least 30% likely to convert into customers. This metric can be tracked and monitored over time so you know when it does or doesn’t make sense to increase investments on a particular channel.

It is common for many organizations to have numerous lead generation activities running simultaneously. This often increases overall profitability and lead conversion rates, which makes your sales numbers go from good to great! However, as with every business tactic, there is a need to optimize MQM so that the right number of such meetings grant the greatest profitability.

You can read more about the basics of MQM and ways to utilize them to generate high-quality leads before moving on to the next topic.

Optimal MQM numbers:

Not all businesses can run on a constant, arbitrary number of MQMs on a per-day or per-week basis. With that being said, this is a general guideline to average MQM numbers for the most successful businesses. Regardless of your company’s industry or size, there are certain benchmarks and statistics you should strive to achieve to maximize lead conversion rates:

• Collecting at least five marketing-qualified meetings per day.
• Generating between 30 and 40 marketing-qualified meetings every week.

With those statistics out of the way, how can you ensure that you are generating optimal MQM for your business?

• To increase your lead conversion rates, you must be advertising correctly. To do this, you need to be targeting the appropriate audience and adjusting for seasonal changes in online behavior as well – only then will marketing-qualified meetings come easier! For example, a company in the restaurant industry would want to advertise on platforms with a lot of people who are looking for lunch – like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. If you’re not seeing any marketing-qualified meetings, there might be something wrong with your advertisement strategy and this is why it’s so important to make sure that you have the correct one!
• It is important to understand that MQM is about the meetings that come in and how you convert them. MQMs are your opportunities to increase brand awareness and customer conversions – so every meeting opportunity must be properly planned and qualified for conversion. While too many meetings with the same prospect can turn into a waste of time, too few meetings might mean entering into a B2B relationship without enough knowledge for either partner. Ideally, information exchange and clarity should be maximized by the third MQM session.
• Understand and distinguish between the reasons for prioritizing maximal MQM generation. Are you doing it to market your business, or are you doing it to increase your conversion rates? Both are valid reasons, but they cannot coexist at a profitable scale in the long run. Ensuring that your marketing team is doing everything they can to make prospective MQLs available whenever required is key to reaching the high point of the bell curve. This makes it so that they feel comfortable returning to your business to know more about what you are offering.

We at FunnL hope this clears up any confusion around meeting management and helps leads convert into customers who will keep coming back for more. FunnL is a global pioneer in SQM and MQM, and B2B lead generation is our only service. With over a portfolio of 25,000+ successful qualified meetings between businesses and a team of expertly-trained professionals, we are ready to help! Contact us today to know more.