Before we dive into the types, let’s get some basics straight and understand who can be classified as a qualified lead
What is a qualified lead?
In simple words, a qualified lead is a potential customer – someone who’s interested in purchasing from your business but hasn’t made the decision yet. Qualified leads need to meet certain criteria, including behavior and demographic, as set forth by you.
Some examples of a qualified lead are a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) who signed up for your webinar or a shopper who subscribed to your offers email list.
To make the process more qualitative, qualified leads are classified into three types, which we’ll discuss below.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
MQL is a lead qualified by the marketing team as more likely to purchase than others. Qualification here is undertaken mainly on behavior.
An example of MQL is someone who performs any of these actions:
- Visits your website frequently
- Subscribes to your newsletters
- Downloads a guide from your website
- Interacts with your social posts
MQLs aren’t part of the selling stage but classify under pre-selling. They’re further passed on to the sales teams by different methods such as “closed-loop reporting.” Herein, the marketing team is kept in the loop (or informed) about the lead’s movement through the sales funnel.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Once the marketing team vets qualified leads, they’re passed on to the sales team, where they’re known as SQLs. These leads are ready to become customers, showing increasing interest in your product or service. SQLs fall within the selling stage.
While your marketing team may be tempted to qualify leads quickly and pass them on to sales, determining the difference between each is crucial. Lead scoring between MQL and SQL phases ensures that the marketing team passes on only those leads ready to have a more serious discussion about their needs, encouraging them to convert.
But how does marketing know if they can convert an MQL to SQL? Some ways to identify SQLs are when the lead performs one of these actions:
- Registers for your targeted webinar
- Fills out contact forms on your website
- Responds to your email
Highly Qualified Lead (HQL)
While everyone follows the MQL-SQL route, few know about HQLs.
Conventionally, an MQL becomes an SQL after it has passed the marketing team’s qualification criteria. However, marketing and sales teams have rarely been in sync, which affects the quality of leads. For instance, the marketing team could ask only a few questions regarding the prospect’s requirements, such as their name, designation, and email address.
Marketers and salespersons need to create and follow the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to convert MQLs to HQLs. ICP is a tailored, extremely specific outline of your ideal customer’s environmental, behavioral, and demographic characteristics.
To qualify leads based on your ICP, you need a sharper set of questions like:
- What is your Revenue/Profit?
- What is your Budget?
- What are your 6 or 12-month goals?
- What are you hoping to achieve with our product/service?
- What are the challenges you’re facing?
- When are you looking to get started with our product/service?
HQLs are always driven by your ICP and, therefore, are the ultimate decision-making buyers with a higher level of purchase intent. They’ll also have multiple interactions through just one specific domain (for instance, email) and can be tracked to that domain.
The Bottom Line
While MQLs and SQLs are data-driven enough to start with, your business should aspire to attract HQLs for better sales opportunities and higher revenue.
If you don’t know where to start, reach out to us. At Market Boats, we’ve automated the process of nurturing HQLs through our custom built software CALS, so that you get maximum returns on your marketing efforts.