mql

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How They Improved It

1. He hosts a weekly meeting with sales to review conversion and lead health.

AJ hosts a weekly meeting with sales to get continual feedback on lead quality, and to learn how many marketing-driven leads are either becoming opportunities or leading to pipeline revenue.

This helps him:

• make sure marketing and sales are rowing in the same direction
• refine their ICP over time
• understand which campaigns are most effective, in real time

For example:

Sales may share that prospective healthcare clients will be facing open enrollment in a few months, and need to scale their SDR team. So AJ might decide to run a special seasonal campaign to support sales efforts.

2. He made a big investment in building brand trust and awareness.

AJ’s goal is establishing demandDrive’s name in the outsourced sales space, growing awareness and trust through valuable content. This contributed to a 3x increase in overall inbound leads: people that have consumed their content, but haven’t said they’d like to learn more about the service/offering (yet). They’d learn about demandDrive, but weren’t ready to learn more.

3. Created a marketing automation system to nurture inbound leads, and help more of them convert to MQLs.

As inbound grew, AJ realized he had a big opportunity to keep these people engaged until they decided they wanted to learn more or might be a good fit for demandDrive. Since it was primarily valuable, organic content that grabbed the prospect’s attention in the first place, AJ served them up more of the same in the nurture phase.

This meant that most of the messaging they’d receive from demandDrive was just valuable content. If a prospect consumed a large amount of content (e.g. read blog posts dozens of times), or raised their hand and said they wanted to learn more, they’d be moved into the MQL stage.

4. He crafted more effective sales-driven emails by studying the most effective outbound messages.

Once in the “nurture” stage, prospects were mostly sent valuable content. But once in a while, they’d receive a more sales-oriented message. To make the sales-oriented messaging more impactful, AJ would find messaging that was resonating well in outbound campaigns, and adapt talking points to fit his needs in marketing.

5. He started manually evaluating lead quality, and handpicking the best leads to make sure they went to sales more quickly.

He’ll send those directly to sales because they look like companies that have had a lot of success with demandDrive in the past.

6. He started ungating most content.

AJ found that the gated content just didn’t perform better than any ungated content they’d release, so they’ve been moving to ungate just about everything. This likely contributed to the 3x increase in inbound leads they’ve seen.

7. He baked in more CTAs to talk to sales, or opt-in to the marketing automation system in content.

If a reader wanted to learn more, they could either opt in and join the nurture campaign (marketing automation), or get in touch directly with the sales team.

Results

As a result, they grew Inbound Lead to MQL conversion from 40% to 60%, and MQL to SAO conversion from 52% to 73%. And in May 2022, they did more business (total new logos & revenue) than all of 2020 combined.

When you take a marketing leadership position for a startup where the opportunity is wide open, what do you prioritize?

That’s the situation Matt Dilworth faced back in February (2022) when he joined Anduin, a fintech SaaS startup that streamlines private market transactions. 

Having followed CEO Eliot Hodges whom he’d worked with previously at Blend. Dilworth found that partner marketing was the biggest low-hanging fruit opportunity because the company already had established relationships that could be leveraged. 

Also, especially important since private equity, venture capital and hedge funds work largely by referral.

He was also a bit shocked by the direct referrals to come from public relations and attributes their success by being holistic and organic about the communities they wanted to penetrate. 

Dilworth has a lot of great advice for marketing leaders that find themselves with a growing startup in need of prioritization and direction including:

• Leveraging of current relationships to bolster referrals, 
• How to use public relations to communicate with existing networks and carry your messages to broader communities,
• And leveraging partner marketing to take some pressure off early sales and marketing teams so they can establish long-term initiatives that create customers. 

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Is your messaging a sales ally or sneaky saboteur? Let us help with our free content audit.

We’ll look at your website’s messaging, content, and conversion potential from the eyes of today’s buyer and deliver a presentation with new combinations to more sales conversations and demos.

And the best part? It’s absolutely free.

Get started today!

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Why MQLs?

If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you might see any number of posts proclaiming that “the MQL is dead”. But Ollie and his marketing team at VanillaSoft don’t think so.

In fact, MQLs are the primary metric Ollie works to move the needle on. They share a common metric with the sales team to ensure that they’re driving high value MQLs who have a higher likelihood of converting.

To do that, they employ a number of channels, ranging from paid ads, to SEO, trade shows, and webinars. Until recently, they had never tried virtual events.

How They Improved It

The prior quarter, Ollie’s team had a big, scary MQL goal. They hit it, but only barely.

Then, in the next quarter, the goal was raised significantly. Ollie knew they’d have to change their approach in order to hit it.

So he decided to invest heavily into virtual events.

In the prior quarter, Ollie’s team hosted an all-day virtual event. It was imperfect and exhausting, but they learned from it. He was determined to host another one (new and improved), in order to secure the new MQLs he needed.

Here’s how he did it…

He got great speakers, who could also help promote the event.

He chose speakers who were incredibly smart and well-spoken. But more than that, they had to be able to help promote the event to a relevant audience, so the content would actually get seen.

He made the event 1-month long.

The first conference they ran was an 8-hour day, jam-packed with back-to-back sessions. That format was rough on both the team and attendees, so this time, they tried a new approach.

They’d aim for 2 sessions a day, 30 minutes each session, for 1 month straight. That worked out to 45 total speakers, presenting 45 sessions, across 22 days.

This new format took longer to plan, but provided 4 main benefits:

Benefit 1: It was more relaxed.

Attendees could consume events they were interested in all month, without giving up an entire day of work.

Benefit 2: It provided ongoing content to market.

Ollie found that with their single-day event: they promoted it, and it was done. By changing the format they were able to continually promote new material and build on the success of past sessions.

Benefit 3: It provided social proof to help them secure additional speakers and sponsors.

The day the conference launched with its initial lineup, Ollie was able to keep doing outreach and gain an additional 14 speakers and sponsors. Prospective speakers or sponsors were able to see what they’d be participating in. They could also opt-in late in the game, without feeling like they’d missed the opportunity.

Benefit 4: It drove more attendance.

With 45 speakers, if each speaker brought just a handful of their audience, Ollie knew they’d have great attendance.

Ollie promoted 1 new speaker, every few days.

He felt he couldn’t do justice to all 45 speakers if he tried to promote them all in 1 big announcement.

So instead, he’d focus on promoting a new speaker every few days. This allowed him to properly highlight the skills, expertise, and session that each speaker was bringing to the table.

They created generous, strategic sponsorships.

Some of the sponsors came from ABM accounts. This gave them the ability to continue building those relationships, while offering them something of value. And some were friends of Ollie’s, who came from smaller companies.

They didn’t charge these sponsors. Ollie wanted to be able to have the relationships be truly win-win. VanillaSoft would get the benefit of more promotion and attendees. And the Sponsors could gain leads and exposure without risking a huge budget.

They used HeySummit to host an event website.

This provided each speaker with their own landing & registration page, one place to house live and on-demand content, and a sponsors page.

Results

The pace was exhausting but drove massive results:

Ollie and his team exceeded their high quarterly goal, bringing in 1,200 new MQLs from the event.

Must Contain is back with season 2! 

Join Kristin and Kristin who are back and better than ever. This first episode covers some hot takes on MQL with Tara Robertson, Senior Manager of Demand Generation at Chili Piper. 

Is it M-Q-L or Mequel? Twitter says MQLs are dead, is it true? Why should sales care about MQLs? Why should marketing? Get answers to these questions and more. 

Short on time? Skip ahead to 17:22 to hear the three things you need to know about MQL in 2022. 

Part 4 of Jake’s 5 Part “What’s Not In The Modern Outbound Playbook” series.

This week’s episode is the “Ultimate Webinar Follow-Up Play for Warm Leads, and how you can re-engage old opportunities with video.”

Jake’s Poll:

Does your marketing team currently run or have plans to run webinars in 2022?

Only 50% of teams are using webinars!

Ultimate Webinar Follow-Up Play for Warm Leads 
Marketers- Just because someone signs up for a webinar does NOT mean they are a warm lead. 

Pro Tips:

#1 Quick follow-up is important in this play, so it’s best to have your messaging and sequences written and videos ready to go the day of the event.

#2 Since these are warm leads, eGift cards for coffee or lunch tend to work well as a way to get them just over the hump and say yes to a meeting.

Reengage Old Opportunities with Video

Go back to your old close/lost opportunities from 2020 and 2021, send a personalized video and message on LinkedIn. 

Suggested Tools: 

Outreach and Vidyard 

Pro Tip:

When sending your personalized video, bullet out or summarize your key points/value props in the body of your email as well.

Jake Poll:

What’s your #1 concern when it comes to outbound this quarter:

Generic messaging - 29%

Too focused on quantity - 33% 

Not iterating - 25% 

Sequence strategy old - 13% 

Link To Download “The Modern Outbound Playbook”:

https://skaled.com/insights/modern-outbound-playbook-modern-sales-tech/

If you haven’t already, hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out on upcoming episodes of The Jake Dunlap Show.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jake Dunlap, CEO and Founder of Skaled Consulting, is an industry influencer and C-Level Sales leader with more than a decade of experience. Jake has developed and led high-performing sales and operational functions for Fortune 500, Global 2000, and start-up organizations. Jake and the team at Skaled specialize in building out repeatable, sustainable processes.

As a thought-leader with more than 60,000 followers across his platforms, Jake's audience gains valuable insights into scaling an organization, sales best practices, and general career motivation.

Prior to Skaled, Jake was the first sales hire and VP of Sales at Glassdoor which was acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2Billion in 2018.

►Connect with Jake Dunlap

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jake_dunlap_/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaketdunlap

Website: https://www.jakedunlap.com/

First off, we are sorry for the lapse in podcasts! We have just been so busy with some cool projects around and away from the office. 

But Tim and I were finally together in person long enough to sit down and have a good pod sesh!

I also have to apologize for the sound quality on this one! It's not terrible but we are in a car for the record. Tim and I were on a video shoot in Chicago when we recorded this episode. 

Let's get into the juice!!!!!!

This episode is all about chatbots. Why now? Why a chatbot? What's the difference between chatbots and live chat?

All this and more is covered in this episode. Plus, Tim and I break down the one thing every chatbot needs.

That one thing is INTENT. If you don't have the right intent on your chatbot, you're likely using it wrong. 

There are a lot of different uses, but it's important to ask yourself: "Am I hoping to generate leads?", "Am I hoping to help guide customers on my site?", "Am I hoping to sell products in my chat?"

These questions, in combination with what page the chatbot is placed on, are extremely important when creating a new chatbot. 

Let's get started!

Support the show (https://www.hubspot.com/agencies/web-canopy-studio)

The first episode of Under the Canopy (the podcast)! Join hosts Tim, Raquel, Matt and Larry as they share their favorite stories, triumphs and failures as digital marketers.

How do you choose a name for your podcast? The four hosts debate on what to call our new podcast. 

When you start getting quality leads, how do you define MQLs vs  SQLs with a client? This is a constant challenge we see at our agency. We want to make sure we are setting our clients up for success. Sometime's it's important to manage expectations while setting them up for success. 

Support the show (https://www.hubspot.com/agencies/web-canopy-studio)