How to Increase Your Sales Lead Acceptance Rate with Smarter MQL Scoring Rules

Lead scoring is critical to building an efficient transition from Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Accepted Lead (SAL), and as a marketer, that conversion rate should be one of your most carefully watched metrics, as it quantifies the quality of leads your scoring is pushing over the fence to Sales. Modern marketing automation systems generally include, by default, some kind of “Lead Score” functionality, but the problem is that is not nearly enough to ensure consistent value for your Sales counterparts.

The issue with a single lead score is that it can be skewed too heavily by one type of measurement. For example, in an organization that increments one point for every page viewed on the website, a lead can amass 20 points simply by reading a lot of content on your site, no matter what type of content that might be. If you have implemented a marketing qualified lead (MQL) threshold of 15, that person would be triggered and flow through your MQL campaign. Leads are good, so that's okay, right? Not exactly.

To the rep receiving your lead, they may know that the person is viewing a lot of content on your site. They do not necessarily know if the person is at a buyer-level in the organization (Director, VP, C-level, etc.) or an intern. They do not know if it is a student doing research or a job hunter looking for potential openings. They also do not know whether the company is even a fit for their services. If you sell highly specialized components in a niche industry, there may be a lot of visitors that, no matter how good your content is, will never buy from you.

In any of these situations, Sales is not going to enjoy getting leads that are supposedly “marketing qualified” and yet have no chance of buying from you. This feeds the very common fire of having a disconnect between Marketing and Sales, where Marketing feels Sales doesn’t follow up on good leads, and Sales thinks Marketing sends over virtually anything and everything. None of that is healthy for companies trying to grow, and it makes for a lot of wasted time and effort.

So how do you ensure your MQLs are indeed quality leads, and not skewed by one particular scoring rule?

There are multiple levels of complexity you can use, but the basic premise is using three different scoring buckets and requiring minimum scores in each in order to qualify as an MQL.

But wait, won’t that lower my number of MQLs? Absolutely, and that’s a glorious thing. No, I’m not crazy – stay with me here. Conversion rates from step to step in the sales cycle “success path” are extremely important metrics to follow, and one of the most important is the “handoff” from when marketing pre-qualifies a lead and gives it to sales.

How many of those leads does sales actually accept? How many of those accepted leads become opportunities? Would it make a difference if only 1 out of 10 of your MQLs were considered prospects by your sales team? What if that was 9 out of 10? How do you think that difference would affect your relationship with Sales?

If a significant number of your MQLs are being ignored or trashed by sales, they shouldn’t be MQLs to begin with. By setting a higher standard for your MQLs, you increase the odds of them being accepted and moved through the sales cycle, meaning you require fewer MQLs to reach the same goals. Now that sounds good, doesn’t it?

So let’s get down to it. Here are the three buckets for lead scoring:

• Behavioral. These are all the activity-based scoring rules. Site visits, whitepaper and eBook downloads, clicks in your emails, etc. When users DO something, it’s behavioral. For anyone to be considered “warm” or “hot,” there HAS to be some behavior behind that classification.

• Demographic. These are the person-specific, non-behavioral scoring rules. Job Title, job function, job level, age, gender, years of service, etc. Knowing WHO your users and prospects are is just as important as what they are doing. If someone isn’t in the position to purchase from you, regardless of their behavior, they should not be considered qualified (unless you are specifically targeting them in a particular campaign).

• Firmographic. What-o-graphic? These are the company-level scoring rules. Industry, number of employees, annual revenue, number of stores, etc. If you only sell to specific types of companies, it’s very important to know which types qualifies before claiming they are marketing-qualified.

Each of these three buckets are important and should feed into the one “Lead Score” field for easy sorting. Require minimum scores in each bucket in order to be an MQL, so lopsided scoring in any one bucket will not send an unqualified person to Sales. In the below example, a lead must hit a minimum threshold in each bucket of 5 (with a minimum total Lead Score of 15). In this case, the lead meets the minimum threshold in both behavioral and demographic buckets, but not for firmographic - at least not yet. If you pushed this lead to Sales now, they would not know enough about the company to verify it is a viable lead. This inflates the number of MQLs, and wastes Sales rep time investigating information they should already have for a marketing-generated lead.

The biggest concern here is when it’s not realistic or feasible to get enough information in the demographic or firmographic buckets to know if they are truly qualified. In those cases, it’s often acceptable to find a good-enough proxy and use that until you have the most desirable data.

Implementing a multi-step lead scoring system like this takes more time to plan out than it does to actually implement, especially if you have a user-friendly platform like Marketo, which has a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Once implemented, closely monitor your MQL to SAL conversion rates and tweak your scoring rules as necessary. It costs you nothing and gives you more credibility within your organization. In addition, you will be pleasantly surprised at the improvements, not only in the acceptance rate of your leads by sales, but in the overall relationship between your departments. Win-win!

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