What is an SQL?
A sales qualified lead is a prospective customer that has been researched and vetted, first by an organization’s marketing department and then by the sales team, and is deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process.
An SQL has displayed intent to buy a company’s products and has met an organization’s lead qualification criteria that determine whether a buyer is a right fit. The label is applied to a prospect that has gone past the engagement stage and is ready to be pursued for conversion into a full-fledged customer.
Why is it Important to Identify SQLs?
The reason a business spends so much time identifying their SQLs is because it helps highlight the prospects that are best suited to your product or service. It’s a form of qualification that helps your B2B sales team focus on selling to those prospects that are most likely to convert, instead of chasing those that aren’t ready to buy.
How are SQLs Different from MQLs?
A marketing-qualified lead (or MQL) is a prospect that your marketing team considers more likely to eventually turn into a sale than other leads, but isn’t quite ready to buy yet. This is usually decided based on lead intelligence, often informed by closed-loop analytics. These leads require additional marketing assistance before they’re ready to receive a sales call.
SQLs are different from MQLs because:
- An SQL has already progressed past the engagement stage
- They have been thoroughly analyzed by both marketing and sales
- They’ve been deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process, which is a direct sales push. .
So, while a sales qualified lead has been researched and vetted by your marketing department and is ready to talk to your sales department, a MQL is a lead who has engaged with your company and could become a customer if nurtured correctly. Once an MQL is ready to talk to the sales team, they become an SQL.
How Do You Get More SQLs?
If you want to get more sales-qualified leads, it’s not as simple as turning up your lead generation efforts. Your entire lead generation strategies need to be reconsidered, whether that’s optimizing landing pages for more conversions, refining your targeting to pursue your ideal customer profile (ICP), aligning sales and marketing teams, and beyond.
Refine Your Marketing Funnel at Each Stage
With robust reporting and analysis, you can refine your funnel to drive more MQLs and eventually SQLs. You should examine your data to determine the kinds of content and events that are most likely to convert inbound leads into SQLs by reviewing what’s already working, and thinking about what you can continue or do more of.
As you analyze reports on each stage of the funnel, you can also apply any key learnings to improve your sales close rates.
Make sure you have the right tech stack to get the best insight on what’s happening with your website. For example, website visitor tracking tools like Lead Forensics will tell you which companies are on your domain and show you what their user journey actually looks like, so you can see where you need to remove friction.
Optimize the Entire Journey From Lead to SQL
Just like the buyer’s journey, there’s a prospect journey from lead to MQL to SQL. Looking closely at the hows and whys of past leads who converted into SQLs can drive higher quality leads.
It helps to explore opportunities to improve conversion rates for each of these lifecycle stages. For example, can you extend what you know converts leads with valuable data from your CRM and your sales team? After conversion, refine targeting to create new audiences based on past MQLs who converted to SQLs.
Use Lead Scoring for SQLs
Lead scoring is the process of identifying and moving leads from MQL to SQL. Leads are assigned scores based on attributes and metrics that are customized, personalized, and prioritized for your company.
During this process, you gather as much information as you can about your lead like job title, company size, industry and geographic location. You might also want to track the frequency and quality of their interaction with your content and specific webpages, so you can build a more detailed picture of what they’re interested in and support your sales team with extra insight into these warm leads.
It’s a popular practice: research shows more than 60% of companies set clear criteria for moving leads to SQLs, which also helps in implementing strategies to drive more SQLs.
Automate Lead Scoring For Efficiency
A marketing automation tool can help you move leads faster and more accurately, reducing human error and saving time.
Automation is also a cleaner, more efficient way of nurturing MQL leads into SQLs and alerting your sales team of changes in lead status.
Integrate Your Tech Stack for Better Insights
Whether you use multiple tools or one platform for marketing automation and customer relationship management, make sure each is in sync with the other. This way, you can get more insight into lead quality and traffic from each of your marketing campaigns and track the exact campaigns that are driving SQLs. Plus, all contact details will be available across your system, so sales teams are ready to pitch to an SQL at any time.
Unite Sales and Marketing Teams
Sales qualified leads don’t just appear out of thin air. Many lead are drawn in by a marketing effort, which is why it’s valuable for the marketing and sales teams to work together.
Sharing information about leads while strategizing together helps the process of turning a marketing qualified lead (MQL) into an SQL.
If you think about it as a partnership, where marketing begins the jobs and sales reps finish them, it makes it easier to understand why this alignment is so beneficial. And when both teams work together, you can unify and standardize things like brand messaging, content focus and objectives and data sharing.
Establish Buyer Personas to Boost SQLs
Knowing who your ideal buyer is makes it easy to target and sell to the right audience, whether you’re motivating or making a sale.
You might have this documented in a buyer personal or an ICP – but however you do it, make sure you revisit it and update it as customers provide more data and feedback.
Use Social Proof to Increase Conversions
Social proof builds trust with your prospects, so make sure your prospects can turn to reviews, testimonials and case studies to see what others say about your company.
This SQL-boosting tactic works even better if you can personalize the social proof to your prospect. Often, this is done with industry-specific landing pages – but personalization is also impactful.
Try Account-Based Marketing
An account-based marketing and sales program optimizes data such as what you already know about how an SQL behaves and what an SQL looks like for your business to target similar accounts for new SQLs.
You build a list of target accounts – as agreed by both sales and marketing teams – and then run targeted ads and offer personalized, one-to-one digital experiences that also prospect new accounts for new sales opportunities.
Segment your SQLs
Another way to increase SQLs is to segment your leads into groups based on similar attributes, focusing on details like firmographic, psychographic, and behavioral information.
Firmographics data describes company details (for example, the type sector or industry they operate in), psychographic data refers to the company’s values and attitudes, and behavioral information is about how the target company uses a product or service.
Using data on past leads or customers (and even non-customers), you can decide what information is most important to use to organize your lead.
Know Your Ideal Prospect
Once you have set standards for identifying and scoring leads, it’s time for even more research. In this case, you have to use the information you used to create an SQL to get more familiar with this buyer persona.
The pool of SQLs is relatively small, especially for B2B companies. To propel the sales cycles and nurture customers, get to know SQLs on a personal level. Investing time in lead scoring isn’t for nothing. It saves extra time and energy, opening up that productivity to truly focus on the SQLs that are already intrigued by your business and close to making a sale.
What do you need to know about your most pertinent leads? Study their interests, needs, and budget; use past data to estimate the sales timelines. Knowing as much as you can helps close the gap between company and customer and speed up the process and improve customer trust.
Focus SEO Strategy On Long-Tail Keywords
If you want to focus your search engine optimization efforts on attracting more sales-qualified leads, you need to target the long-tail keywords. Typically, these long-tail searches are more specific and although they have lower search volumes, ranking for this information will present you as a solid option for someone who’s looking for more detailed answers – and is probably much further along the buying journey.
Write Content for SQLs
The best way to get high-quality leads is by offering high-quality content. By curating informative, useful eBooks, webinars, email sign-ups, guides, case studies, and so on, you can really attract the right people who sign up because they are purely interested.
While social media followers can potentially be important leads, your lead magnet material shows a higher level of engagement and intrigue in your brand. Optimize the landing pages for these lead magnets with clear calls-to-actions and great user design to improve SEO and conversion rate.
Create Different Content for Funnel Stages
Creating content that’s relevant to a person’s current situation will resonate with them and entice them to want more. It enables more opportunities for leads to qualify as MQLs and move on to SQLs. Use the chance at every stage to start a relationship by offering relatable content of value in exchange for more information about the prospect.
Use marketing automation tools to track the buyer’s journey and send out content at the right time in their pattern of buying, whether it’s for awareness, consideration, or nurturing.
Focus your production of content on attracting more SQLs with specific solutions that address their pain points and their intent on buying the right solution. This is different from attracting a large number of leads.
You’re concentrating the messaging for people who are ready to buy. This means more comprehensive product or service videos, case studies, ebooks, online learning, and webinars, with data that backs up your claims.
Continue Driving Traffic to Your Website
While getting SQLs requires more focused work, it’s important to continue your top-of-funnel strategies. This means to maintain and continue investing in the goal of gaining more high-quality traffic. Increasing awareness of your B2B brand is the only way to attract more leads in general, increasing the number of sales-qualified leads.
One way to boost your traffic is continually ensuring your SEO is top-notch and increasing your social content. Encouraging more social posts and engagement on social media is a great way to get more organic leads since social media has proved to be a powerful lead-generating machine. Furthermore, it’s quick and relatively less costly than other paid ways.
Don’t Miss Your Hidden SQLs
The majority of your website visitors won’t convert – and that includes potential sales-qualified leads. With Lead Forensics, you can see which companies are browsing your website and identify the warm leads that are viewing high-intent pages like pricing and case studies. Armed with this insight, your sales team can reach out before your competitors and boost your chances of converting them to a customer.
Book a demo to see how Lead Forensics can help you find more SQLs.
