What if you don’t follow MQLS? | Farmer

What if you ignore your high intentions signals-no follow-ups, no phone calls, no e-mails to see or to identify and reach leads?

It sounds contraindic, but if a lead is really interested (at least according to your score tools), should they not finally fill in a form or call you? That is the experiment that we have carried out.

In the past six weeks we have kept Web traffic, testing something that many customers would like to try, but that is not possible: no outgoing calls, pushes or follow-ups all-observation.

The experiment setup

With hot use we set parameters around ICPs, copper persona’s and intentions of the first and third parties. For this test, visitors had to meet two criteria:

• Spend at least 28 seconds on the site.
• Visit at least two pages.

The results: who showed up

After filtering competitors and consultants, 15 visitors of the last 45 days met the criteria:

• 10 moderate confidence problems.
• 3 Members High Controls.
• 2 very high -quality leads.

The terms “lead” and “reliability level” are determined by the tools that follow their activity.

Our highest intent visitor returned 24 times in two weeks and spent 26 minutes on pages such as team, services, solutions and blogs. That sounds qualified, right? We are still waiting for a submission of the form.

Dieper deeper: 5 suggestions for going beyond MQLS

Why didn’t they convert?

A further look revealed four likely reasons:

• Bad information: Some contacts were incorrectly categorized, such as people who are bound to a company, but no longer employed there.
• Bad descriptors: The tool evokes visitors and their behavior “leads”, which is too confident.
• Fault: Our personality profiling showed that some visitors investigated on behalf of others or just casually browse.
• The nature of our company – We do not sell widgets. We sell consultative, promotional services. Our sales cycle is longer and strongly depends on trust and timing.

The MQL game that everyone plays

Imagine that we have pushed these visitors in HubSpot as leads, like most organizations. Here is the dirty little secret that both marketing and selling know (but rarely say out loud):

• Marketing knows that many of these leads are not qualified, but still have goals to turn, so they are passed on.
• Sales know it too, but SDRs need something to chase.

And so the cycle continues.

With the explosion of tools that record everyone who looks at a website, we generate more contacts than ever. But they call leads is misleading. In the best case they are answers.

This creates a wrinkle effect within organizations.

• SDRs spend their days chasing people who have never asked to contact us, which blows up activity statistics but do not move the income ahead.
• Marketing feels busy to prove ROI by pushing names by the funnel.
• Sales waste energy -qualifying people who were never prospects in the first place.

It was disguised as a pipeline. Even worse, it damages brand perception. Think of the buyer’s experience. They casually browse through a blog and within 24 hours they get cold reach from a representative who assumes that they are ready to buy.

Instead of building trust, that approach affects it. The prospects completely stop involving, unsubscribing or ghost. What could have become a warm, organic relationship now feels like a intrusive sales game.

Sales teams, as soon as they quickly ignore these non-qualified names, now burn the REP capacity that tries to convert the reactions into leads. It sounds ridiculous because it is.

But here is the thing: I have never met a sales leader who will have to give up workforce. The mentality is: “The more repetitions I have, the greater the chance that I will touch a quota.” And the game continues.

Dig deeper: Why the MQL model fails B2B marketing and what to use instead

Cycle

The only way out is that marketing and sales become brutally honest about how ineffective this cycle is – and starts to align with realistic performance goals.

The winners? Potential everyone:

• Marketing stops chasing vanity statistics.
• Sales spend time on really qualified conversations.
• The prospects are given the freedom to explore without being chased when they click.

Forward -looking organizations are already reconsidering the model. Instead of measuring success by the number of MQLs, they shift to deeper funnel statistics that reflect the actual purchase intention:

• Meetings or demos requested.
• Samples.
• Even hand -widthers who explicitly ask for help.

The difference is that these signals come from prospects on their conditions, not from any threshold in a marketing automation tool. Only because you can follow every visitor does not mean that you have to hand them over.

Give prospects room to explore your company, your services and your value at their own pace – and let them raise their hand when they are ready. This saves your team time and energy and leads to better conversations when the moment is good.

Stop counting MQLS – Start counting conversations

If you want to build a real pipeline, shift the focus away from vanity numbers (because the sale does not believe them) and to real intention.

Be concerned when they are ready, not when your main scoring system says they should do that. That is where confidence starts – and where growth actually happens.

Dig deeper: How strong brands build stronger B2B pipelines