Audit Your Funnel: Are Your “Qualified” Leads Actually Qualified?

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the B2B sales and marketing Hotline.

Speaker A: Dialing up the latest tactics and hottest trends, we're here to help you take your B2B game from stagnant to stellar.

Speaker B: I'm Emily.

Speaker A: And I'm Marianne. And together we're ready to answer your burning B2B sales and marketing questions.

Speaker B: Each episode will tackle a need to know topic in the ever evolving world of B2B sales and marketing. We'll break it down with actionable takeaways you can implement right away.

Speaker A: And because you don't get results without real talk, we're wrapping up every show with a quick Q and a segment. So fire away with your burning questions.

Speaker B: Whether you're a seasoned sales leader or a marketing veteran, the B2B Sales and Marketing Hotline is your one stop shop to take your B2B effort to the next level. Hi, Marianne. Hi. We're back again, ah, for another episode. And today we are going to be talking about qualifying leads. Everyone wants leads, everyone's trying to generate leads. Um, but then when it comes to the actual qualifying and the next step after the lead is brought in, um, people are doing it the old fashioned way that we used to do, you know, five plus years ago, uh, where we would just blanket, say everybody who fills out a form is a marketing qualified lead. And there are new ways and we'll talk about all of them, but there are new ways and new things that people should be doing when qualifying leads. So that's what we're talking about today.

Speaker A: I love it and I feel like this could go in lots of different directions. So we have a different episode on lead scoring if you want to learn more about that. Yeah, um, but yeah, I think we need to focus in and talk about what the different lifecycle stages are. How are we defining what a lead is and how to qualify it? I think the standard used to be what you said, right. Mql, their marketing qualified lead. When they fill out a form. Um, and those traditional signals for MQL were form fills. Oh, email opens. If they open an email, we're gonna, we're gonna continue to market to them. They must be a marketing qualified lead. Um, or even downloading content right in the inbound marketing methodology, making people who download content are an mql. That was kind of the gold standard for, for reporting, um, for lead generation. But the reality is not all people who fill out a form on your website are really a qualified MQL or are sales ready. They might not be a sales qualified lead either.

Speaker B: Yep, absolutely right yeah. And I think there are so many different ways now that we can, um, measure and qualify. And like Marianne said, we do have another episode entirely on lead scoring. So, um, we'll mention lead scoring, but we won't go into detail. So if you're curious about lead scoring, go to that episode. Okay. So the shifting of the buyer's journey, how people are purchasing and making purchasing decisions, um, you know, people are entering the funnel at different phases. People are in the research phase or ready to purchase, and those decisions that they're making along the way, they're going to take actions on your website and at different times. And, um, think about when you're buying a car or making a big home purchase. There might be things that you do on the front end that you're not sales qualified at all yet. You're not marketing qualified even. You're just doing some research, some preliminary information, and you're potentially putting in your, your information to get an ROI calculator or see the inventory, but you're not actually ready to make a purchase. And having a salesperson call you right away feels daunting and scary. So, you know, having the, taking into account the buyer's journey and how people are approaching each of the form fills is a really important way to qualify the lead.

Speaker A: Yes. So how does that like, equate to actually measuring what they are, um, and how they're becoming an actual opportunity? Like, how are they getting through that deals pipeline to get to the opportunity phase or the opportunity life cycle stage? Um, and a lot of that's going to be your own data. Like how fast are leads even progressing through your buyer's journey through your deals pipeline? Um, and looking at the data of what people are when they download certain things on your website or when they fill out certain forms, like, what are your win rates? You know what I mean? Like our leads actually converting. Are the people who download that brand new ebook that you've been promoting in that campaign actually converting? Um, I think those are the different things that you should be measuring. Right. So like the lead to customer rate, tracking that full journey and seeing what, what people are doing when they download content on your site, where they go,

Speaker B: yeah, because all forms are not created equal. Right. So every form you should be critically thinking about what the next step is. You know, if they fill out this form, what do I want to happen? Like, do I want them to be nurtured for a bit and we put them marketing qualified and we, if they take additional action, or is it the type of form where we should probably have sales reach out, but in a not salesy, super consulted way where we can just have a quick sequence that triggers like you have to kind of think in each form differently. And I think that is the almost like paradigm shift of what people used to do, which was just like blanket mql, we're just going to market to them. Whereas now like every form really does need its own lead path.

Speaker A: Yeah. And also like, are you measuring traffic or are you measuring revenue? Of course you want traffic to turn into revenue on your pipeline. Um, but what are you measuring? What are, what does the life cycle stage, you're changing them to, uh, represent to you?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think it's, you know, with anything that we're talking about in terms of leads, generating leads, nurturing leads, anything at all, it's important to just consider like marketing and sales needs to communicate through the entire thing. We need marketing to be generating the right leads and then we need sales to be looking at that path and understanding the next steps and then communicating back to marketing what we need to do next based on that information. So it would be, I would be remiss to not say that, you know, marketing and sales needs to be communicating through this entire process and making sure that, um, yeah, like how we qualify leads and how we think about marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads and opportunities is totally in line with, um, both departments, marketing and sales.

Speaker A: No, that's absolutely true. And then also deciding like, what are our vanity metrics? What are the things that really aren't that important to marketing or sales? But because you have reporting on them, you look at them and you probably spend too much time on them because we all get sucked in by the vanity metrics. Um, email opens is like the most basic vanity metric. Especially with the privacy laws changing what, two years ago now? It's been a minute, um, it was a vanity metric before, but now it definitely is because that the email opens can be very skewed. So, um, but you know, even, um, just clicks, click, click, CTAs can be a vanity metric. Anything can be, unless you're doing something with it.

Speaker B: Right, right.

Speaker A: So like what's your revenue aligned marketing? Um, metrics? What are you looking at that aligns with your, with your revenue drive and your revenue analytics? Right? Uh, right.

Speaker B: Every, every single metric that you track should, should have a straight line to revenue. So like open rate means nothing. Click rate means nothing. Unless that click equals more sales, more deals in the pipeline. Like we could have thousands of people clicking on an email but if no one actually fills out the form on the other side of that click, like do we care what is the next. You know what I mean? So having vanity metrics are, um, yeah, like open rate. I could definitely see as a vanity metric. Clicks, um, any basic, like website traffic, like seeing traffic increase but like not form fills increase. That to me like a clear sign of an issue. I agree. Yeah. Um, yeah. And then just scoring in general. So having scores tied to people so based on the actions they take. So you know, we're saying clicks and opens and all that are vanity metrics, but it might not be in terms of like actually scoring someone's interest. So if someone comes to the website, fills out a form, we're not quite ready for them to talk to sales. But then we want to track all the opens and all the clicks that they do and kind of gauge their interest and have their score actually increase based on that. Then I would say that's not a vanity metric. That's something worth tracking if it's on an individual tool and when it's part

Speaker A: of the bigger picture and added into other actions and other things that you can measure. But just looking at that number as its own can be a vanity metric. Um, but AI can help with that. Um, AI helps a lot with lead scoring. AI can help a lot with, um, looking bigger picture and diving into each person to pull out metrics and then add them together for you to get a holistic view of what people are doing and um, how it equates to moving them further along in their journey.

Speaker B: AI can also help you, um, come up with good email templates or good, like nurture sequences for after action is taken on a website. So, you know, you're not ready to send it to sales yet, but maybe you could have um, you know, a lead nurturing workflow trigger off when they do a specific action and that. And you could have AI actually help you come up with what that's going to look like, like what those steps will be.

Speaker A: Um, I loved diving into this and just kind of talking about the different stages and how we need to measure and um, not just lead score, but identify who leads really are and where they are in your life cycle.

Speaker B: Yeah, so like practical takeaways for the listeners here today. Um, I would say look at your life cycle stages and just make sure that they match your marketing and your sales strategy. Um, and audit the people that are in those stages. Make sure that people that are in more marketing qualified are actually marketing qualified and make sure that people in Sales qualified are assigned to sales and sales are actively going after them. Um, and just make sure that generally speaking, you have all the life cycle stages that you need and that you don't have any that you're not using. Just do a little audit of your stages.

Speaker A: Great takeaways. The only thing I would add is just that success isn't necessarily just leads. Right. It's leads driving the pipeline, leads getting to revenue. Right. I mean, that sounds so basic. But thinking back through on how you qualify, are they really a marketing qualified lead, is that the end goal? Or is the end goal a marketing qualified lead that turns to revenue?

Speaker B: Yeah, I've had clients before say, oh, this is a, uh, you know, a fake lead. They only downloaded an ebook or something like that. And I think people just need to reframe too how they think about leads. And all leads are different. They're all in different stages of the buyer's journey. So you just need to make sure that you're qualifying of them. Like, just because someone only downloaded an ebook doesn't mean that they're a bad lead or a fake lead. It just means that they're a lower, they're not as bottom in the funnel. And it's important to nurture them and treat them differently than someone who books a demo or schedules a consultation. It's just a different type of fleet. So make sure your stages match and that you're nurturing appropriately.

Speaker A: And call Ninja if you need help with that because we have many consultants on our team who are experts that agree.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Okay, let's dive into the Q and A. We had two submitted questions, um, from our last episode. So I'll read it. Um, we can kind of go through these. The first is Hey y'. All Southerner. Love them. Okay. Hi y'.

Speaker B: All.

Speaker A: That's what they said. Uh, love hearing about ways to make sales and marketing more aligned. But what do you recommend when both teams have different priorities or KPIs, what's the best way to handle conflicts when this happens and find a way forward?

Speaker B: Mhm. So like I'm interpreting this as marketing. KPIs are more marketing focused. So they're like website traffic, clicks, opens, converts on forms. Like much more marketing focused. Whereas sales KPIs are probably revenue focused. So like closed opportunities, deals in the pipeline. I've seen this a lot. So that's why I'm like kind of interpreting it this way of like marketing feeling like, oh, well, I generated the lead, you know, uh, what happens after that is my business.

Speaker A: Yeah. And by using it a lot, you really mean with every single client we have. I can't think of anybody who doesn't have this problem.

Speaker B: I know. And I think that this is a good opportunity to align on. I mean, just like, have an honest conversation around metrics and the importance of closed deals in terms of roi. Because at the end of the day, no metric really matters as much as ROI does. The closed deals and the revenue. And so like we said before with vanity metrics, I think it's just, it's important to kind of see the, the bigger picture of. Yeah, I mean, website traffic might be increasing, but if our goal is sales and we're not seeing sales from, uh, it, why is that like, like diving deeper into the root of the issue? Because I do think that a lot of times marketing teams and sales teams just don't naturally have the same KPIs.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. You're exactly right.

Speaker B: That's like Shameless Plug. That's like, really why a lot of people love working with lead. You too? Because we are definitely not the type of people that are just like, oh, leads generated by. We help on the back end too. So once the lead comes in, um, we want to help your sales team sell it. We're going to give them resources to sell it. Writing blog posts for them to use in their outreach. Um, you're really arming them with sales enablement to get that closed. So, I mean, it might be worth sales, you know, marketing, looking at sales and helping them with, um, closing the deals as well.

Speaker A: I love it. You're exactly right. Okay, second question. We've considered implementing live chat or AI chatbots, but we're hesitant. When does it make sense for a B2B company to adopt these tools?

Speaker B: I would ask, like, why they're hesitant. I think I. My first question would be like, why are you hesitant? Because to me, removing the friction from a sales process is never a bad idea. I mean, it takes time to get it set up. So maybe they're hesitant because they don't know if the time is worth the value. Um, but I don't think there's any need to be hesitant in terms of doing it or not doing it. Because anytime you can take one step out of someone's sales process, when someone's ready to buy, or if they have a question they want that, uh, answered fast. And there's no better way to get an answer answered fast.

Speaker A: Can we be kind of blunt with this and just say, like, um, it's 2025, like the time is yesterday. Like you need to do this with other. Your competition is doing this. Like you need a live chat or an AI chatbot or a way to chat because it's 2025. Yeah, sorry. That's not too harsh. I love it. I love it. No, it's true.

Speaker B: And I mean the ability to have AI and program it with a knowledge base now and have it actually an questions for you in real time without a human having to man it. There's no better time than now to make. Easier than ever.

Speaker A: Easier than ever. Yeah. Okay, great. Um, well, awesome. Great answers, Emily. And what a fun podcast to talk to this, um, about this with you. So thanks everybody for listening. Feel free to connect with us. You can find our contact info in the Show Notes and tune in again next time. See ya.

Speaker B: Uh, thanks.

Speaker A: Bye. Thanks so much for tuning in to the B2B sales and marketing hotline.

Speaker B: Don't forget to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts so that you never miss an episode. And if you've got a question for us, head to the Show Notes and let us know what's on your mind.

Speaker A: And Visit our website, leeg2.com where you can find even more helpful B2B sales and marketing resources.