With the acute onset of the pandemic, all major businesses and industry pioneers have set up remote workplaces and virtual salesforces to keep them afloat. Hundreds of ideas are generated and experimented with in parallel, and the ones that show great promise often spread quickly to all industries. One such optimistic concept is marketing-qualified meetings, often abbreviated as MQM.
In every industry, the idea of appropriate application has always been – 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 becomes clear: Is your team generating enough MQMs? What are your upper and lower bounds for marketing-qualified meetings?
MQM in a Nutshell:
In our context, an MQM 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 makes sense to increase investments in 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 improves sales numbers! However, as with every business tactic, there is a need to optimize MQM so that the right number of such meetings yields 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 per day or per week. 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 target the appropriate audience and adjust for seasonal changes in online behavior; only then will marketing qualified meetings become 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; this is why it’s so important to ensure you have the correct one!
- It is important to understand that MQM is about meetings 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 waste 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 profitably 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 them feel comfortable returning to your business to know more about what you are offering.
We at FunnL hope this clears up any confusion around the sales meeting setup and helps leads convert into customers who will keep returning for more. FunnL is a global pioneer in SQM and MQM, and B2B lead generation services are our only service. We have over 25,000+ successful qualified meetings between businesses and a team of expertly trained professionals.
