Streamline Marketing & Sales Handoff

Speaker 1
00:00
Hey everybody. Welcome to a new episode of our podcast series, Diving into the Marketing Funnel. Today we're going to be talking about marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads. How do we streamline that handoff process from the marketing team to the sales team? How do we make sure that goes smoothly and everybody's happy? Easier said than done for sure. When we're diving into this, what does marketing miss that stops a lead from becoming sales ready? Are there things that marketing miss? Mrs. In this process, something that I've seen is missing on specific pain points. So a lot of time marketing can be broad. We're trying to cover all our buyer Personas, we're trying to talk about things that apply to Everybody, right? But Mrs. 

Speaker 2
00:50
Pinpointing the maybe one of our buyer Personas urgent need, they need a solution by Q2 or they need to get in front of something more quickly. So it's specifying who we're talking to and the pain points that we're talking about. Again, I've seen a lot of kind of shotgun approach here. We're going to try touch on things that apply to all of our buyer Personas, but that can leave things pretty vague and pretty general. Another thing that stops a lead from becoming sales ready might be the cost of inaction or the cost of a lack of urgency. Marketing should help build a business case and some related urgency through their content messaging. So marketing often nails the what of what we're talking about, right? The benefits, the features, the solutions. But we don't always talk about the why. 

Speaker 1
01:38
Why do these things matter? I explain it often to my students that, like, as a marketing function, you got to think of your brand, your business as, think of it like a person, right? If you're talking around someone who only talks about themselves and how great they are and why xyz, you know, here's all the things I'm great at. They're going to tune you out pretty quickly if you're able to switch that and you met somebody who you're new to. But they're talking about all the things that you know they're good at and why they're. Why they're helpful to you. So switch that frame. Where is that value coming from? How can we frame this to be customer focused and value focused. 

Speaker 2
02:22
So again, not talking about the features, the benefits, the solutions, but like, what's the original pain point that we need to connect with our audience first and foremost before we start talking about features, benefits and solutions. Why are these things popping up? Why Are they frustrating? Why is, you know, why do we want to avoid xyz? Why do we want to achieve xyz? So leaning into the why of things. And then another one that I saw here is just budget clarity. Failing to qualify. If the leads have the funds to buy, there's no point passing customers who aren't qualified on so budget clarity. But even maybe just qualifying that lead in the first place, are they the right business size? Do they have enough employees? Do they have the kind of right. Do they have the needs that we can provide to. 

Speaker 2
03:12
So a failure to qualify just through budget is pretty common. Another failure to qualify, are they decision makers? Right. This is another one that's big. Are we talking to influencers that might help our case or are we talking to people who actually are going to sign the deal? Failing to qualify if the lead has the fund right? If they have the funds or the just the status, the ability to make that buyer decision. And then lastly, my note here is timing, intent. So not asking when do you need. This leaves sales chasing leads who aren't ready. So if we're not qualifying, what's your timeframe for making a decision here? Do you need something immediately? Is it in the next six months? Is it two years from now? What are the things we can do to try to qualify some of those leads? 

Speaker 1
04:00
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Speaker 2
04:33
Seth, do you have any additions or thoughts when it comes to the things that marketing teams often miss in this process? 

Speaker 3
04:41
Yeah, when thinking about the implementation of this, you might be thinking about a contact form like okay, marketing pulls in a lead from the contact form. Are they going to really have budget clarity? All of these parameters. It could be a quiz or an ROI calculation. And part of that is budget drop down. Like hey, what's your annual budget? Or it's in the chat widget that's essentially doing some of this qualification of the lead before they're marked as an mql. So there are ways of doing this in an automated fashion based on the ux, you know, and the offering that you have out there. Does that make sense? 

Speaker 2
05:34
Yeah, yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. Zach, any other thoughts here? 

Speaker 1
05:39
Yeah, I think that, you know, having that initial like before a discovery call, for instance, just the budget, is this the decision maker? Is anyone else going to be on the call? Timing, intent, what their current operations might look like or whatever problem we're trying to solve, you know, have them address that ahead of time. It just helps the discovery call for sales as it goes into that process. So those things to me, I think are the main ones to add. 

Speaker 2
06:08
Yeah, yeah. And there's little like you said, are the quizzes. There's things I've done, I've seen done too. Is even in like a webinar asking like poll that you can offer to people, questions you can offer to people. You can qualify leads that way, right? By getting information, getting them to opt in a lot of different ways to do that. But yeah, if we're not properly taking these steps to qualify our leads, we're passing on bad leads to the sales team, which is going to cause an issue for sure. So another question here. What is a signal that a lead has been sitting too long between the MQL and SQL process? One thing I saw here is, right, we've talked about it before, it's just being ghosted, right. If you're not a millennial or Gen Z, that would mean someone's ignoring you. 

Speaker 2
06:55
You're getting silence, you're getting dead silence. No response to a follow up email or call within 48 hours or so, right. They're just, they've gone quiet. So that's a signal that a lead has been sitting too long. Maybe they found another solution. Another one is rep complaints. So sales grumbling about cold leads piling up, right? If the sales team are going to be the people interacting with our clients and our leads the most on a one to one basis a lot of the time, right? Marketing people, we're talking to a large group of people. Sales is going to be, when it's that one one, they're going to have a lot of face to face time with your buyer Personas, with your audience. 

Speaker 2
07:34
If the sales aren't being qualified, if the leads aren't being qualified before they get to sales, the sales teams are probably going to let you know. So you should talk to them, you should be having regular meetings, you should be discussing that with them. What are you hearing on these calls? Is it good news? Is it bad news? Are they qualified people? Do they have the right budget? Xyz yeah. Any other thoughts here from you Guys. 

Speaker 1
07:57
Yeah. I think that when you hear complaints from sales on cold leads piling up, it's just like, well, have they told us no yet? Have we gotten a no, have we gotten a, you know, stop reaching out? And at the same side here, what they have to say as well, like, hey, the leads coming in, like, they're just not ready to buy. It's like, okay, we need to add more conversation. But I would say that there's a lot of silence and complaints from the sales team that these leads are piling up. Just like, well, have they told you no? Get that clarification. And then you can start doing information gathering on why they're saying no, why they're not responding back. But I'd say those are the first things. Just have they. Have they said no? 

Speaker 1
08:39
Have they told you, stop texting me, stop calling, stop emailing? Then they stopped piling up at that point? 

Speaker 2
08:48
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, next topic. Want to dive into here a little bit? When we're talking about the handoff process between marketing and sales, what's the most common issue you've seen in that process? In that handoff process, One of the things that I've seen that's pretty common, unfortunately, is there's no feedback loop. Right. So the sales team and the marketing team aren't talking with one another. The sales team isn't communicating to the marketing team why sales aren't, why leads are flopping, what's wrong? So the junk just keeps flowing in. There's a lack of communication between the two groups. So when these two groups don't talk, and ironically, sales and marketing kind of at the end of the day have similar jobs. Right. We're both trying to grow the business. We should be on the same team. 

Speaker 2
09:39
We should be working in coordination with one another. If we're not having that feedback loop, if we're not asking the sales team what they're hearing, what they're getting back, how can you make an adjustment there? So feedback loops, regular communication, regular scheduled meetings with the sales between the sales and marketing team is really important. Another one that I've seen, unfortunately, pretty commonly is just a vague handoff process. So when does it turn from a marketing qualified lead into a sales lead? We don't really know. A lead's passed through with no context. Maybe just a name and an email. There's notes or tracking of where this came from. Right. You got a list of names and emails, and the sales team starts calling them up and emailing them. Yeah. They're left in the dark. Who is this? Why do they come to us? 

Speaker 2
10:29
Where, what industry are they from? How long have they been like looking around? So yeah, again lack of communication there. And the handoff itself, when does it marking specifically when does it go from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualifier lead and why? Making sure the sales team has that information. And then lastly, yeah, just assumed qualifications. Sales gets leads marketing thinks are ready but they lack the budget or authority and waste everyone's time. So right, marketing is thinking these leads are qualified, but they're not actually qualified. They don't have the budget, they're not decision makers. We're passing bad leads on again to this, to the sales marketing, to the sales team from marketing. So don't assume qualifications. Right. Make sure that the leads are passing through are qualified. 

Speaker 2
11:23
Any other thoughts on any other common mistakes you guys have seen in this handoff process? 

Speaker 1
11:28
So I've seen this mistake in sales to marketing, but it's even worse when you have a product team as well. So these consistent meetings are super important. Looking at the data, I think this is something that we've wanted to push more as a digital sales room. I think as the market gets more and more spread out, more information, more conversations, it might be something to kind of break down that feedback loop is to have more of a digital sales room process. As for sales not telling marketing why leads flop or honestly vice versa, I think it should be more of a talk with each other, not talk to each other. I think that those conversations tend to get a little heated sometimes when KPIs are being measured specifically focused on the conversion, not everything else in between. 

Speaker 1
12:23
So kind of, I think I'll always probably say that is just if you can have set KPIs for every single portion, these conversations and feedback, it becomes so much easier. Like okay, well I think this is where it's happening, this is why. This is how we'll fix it. Here's how we're going to test it. But just having those with conversations not to conversations is going to be very important. Anything vague as well should have already been optimized on these meetings and you know, qualification as well. Sometimes people don't necessarily know what they're pushing on there. Or they might say they have a budget and they don't. That's obviously no one's fault. So there's a lot of things that are always going to go wrong in that handoff. That's just how it works, especially with people's attention spans. 

Speaker 1
13:10
But if you can have a much more centralized area for feedback, for communications and then use that to qualify your next leads coming through a little bit better then I think that's the best way to do it. 

Speaker 2
13:23
Yeah, yeah, I love that. All right, and then to wrap up our discussion here, last discussion point. How do you test if your mql, your marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads process is leaking? Right. How do we test to see if things are falling out here? First thing that I thought of when, when looking into this is right. Are we just. Are you even tracking your conversion rates to begin with? What is your rate from MQL to SQL? What is your rate from SQL to close? Right. Where are the ratios? And, and when we look into this, the dips show where leads vanish. So when there's a down point, right. We can, when, oh, we have all these MQLs, but none of them are convening to sales qualified leads. All right, that's where we need to lean in. Right. 

Speaker 2
14:10
Or if it's SQL to close, right. Are we qualifying them appropriately? So just getting that data, tracking that information, I know a lot of people will track your close rates when you get a sale from the sales team. Not a lot of people track the MQL to SQL conversion. And if you do that far enough, you can really place some numbers behind the efforts that you're doing. If you get that conversion rate up from MQL to SQL, you can track, I mean you can take this all the way back to like what a follower on LinkedIn is worth financially or a new email address is worth financially. There's a lot of analytics and data and numbers you need to have in order to do that. 

Speaker 2
14:49
But even just tracking these basic conversion rates, most importantly MQL to SQL and then obviously SQL to close will show us where things are being tripped up. Another one I was thinking of is just again talking to the sales, asking the sales rep, you know what percentage of the leads are duds. Are you getting junk in these pile of leads? That means that's going to tell you something's off target. So again, communication like you said Zach, talk with, not to the sales team, talk with them and try to get that information. Another one. This is great. Especially when I'm working with a new client. I will do this all the time to test out their current systems. 

Speaker 2
15:30
But run a dummy lead, run a test, submit your right, go through a lead yourself, add a personal email or fake email, whatever, see what it looks like, see what the follow through, what the follow up emails look like. Are people reaching out? Are you getting calls, texts, emails, LinkedIn requests you can audit? Literally put yourself in the shoes of your own audience and experience what this looks like in that process. You might see, oh, you took a week and a half to get back after I downloaded something or the messaging here didn't make sense and it was confusing. So running a dummy lead helps us experience that marketing funnel from our audience's perspective and gives us a lot of good information there might be able to pick up on some things. 

Speaker 2
16:17
And then lastly, use your CRM data to find where leads stop engaging. Again, go back to your funnel. The CRM should be the host of where all this data is. Ideally it's your kind of single source of truth when it comes to your marketing funnel. So use your CRM data to find when are leads not engaging. The post marketing qualified lead, but pre sales qualified lead in this like nebulous zone is typically where companies have issue where that person's going to drop off. They downloaded a lead magnet, they indicated that they're interested, right? And something in there, it fell off. So use your CRM to see was it an email they didn't respond to a subject line that they didn't want to open links they didn't feel like clicking. Do some research, find out that information and then make the adjustments. 

Speaker 2
17:12
You guys have any other thoughts in terms of testing that MQL to SQL process? 

Speaker 3
17:18sa
I think that's, you know, that's pretty good. Sometimes at a more fundamental or basic level, you know, the very tech stack that you're using is not optimized, right? Like are you doing proper lead scoring and now there's AI based lead scoring and you know, are you nurturing between MQL to SQL? Like there's all these little gotchas that can exist. Are you enriching your CRM data, right? Or are you just passing over a name and email and nobody really knows who it is? So for those organizations, sometimes a third party audit or someone that's more up on the latest tech can be useful here because sometimes it's not always process, it's the tech stack and how it's being used or configured or the tech stack itself. Something to think about. 

Speaker 2
18:16
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Zach, any other thoughts? 

Speaker 1
18:21
I just think that instead of just saying something is a leak, there should be a reason to it, there should be some research done and then having those conversations. So I think one of the other big problems that kind of affects this is people aren't willing to take that extra step. So just always view it as there can be something that we can iterate on. Especially between that MQL and SQL stage. There's always going to be something that's going to shift. I mean, it might even shift with the holiday, right? It might even shift with certain events in your Persona's life or whatever it is. Really take that time, to be honest. Very scientific with it. And as Seth mentioned, there's a lot of AI out there. There's a lot of automation that can do this for you. 

Speaker 1
19:05
You just need to know how to use that asset. 

Speaker 2
19:08
Yeah. Love that. All right, thank you for your input here. Thank you everybody for following along. That wraps up our series on simplifying the marketing funnel. I hope you appreciated it. Hope you learned a lot. Don't forget to subscribe to like to share. Add your comments, any questions or topics you want to dive into and we'll take a look. Thank you again and we'll see you soon.