what the hell is an MQL? (and how it makes sales 10x easier)

Summary

an MQL is a marketing qualified lead. plain language: it’s a person who has consumed enough of your content that they’re warm enough to have a real sales conversation. that’s it.

most businesses skip the MQL step entirely. they generate leads, then drop them straight into sales. cold leads, cold conversations, ugly close rates. salespeople burning out trying to convince strangers.

the fix is to reverse-engineer the marketing pipeline so that by the time someone hits a sales call they’ve already opted into your worldview. they’ve read the article. they’ve listened to the podcast. they understand your method. the call isn’t a pitch, it’s a logistics conversation.

operations matters here too. sales and marketing get you financial freedom, but operations is what gets you time freedom. automating the lead-qualification step is operations work, not sales work.

three pieces to get this running:

1. flagship content that explains your method clearly.
2. an automated path that funnels people through that content before they ever talk to sales.
3. a clear signal (downloads, opens, replies) that promotes a lead from cold to MQL.

do the marketing job in front of the sale, not on top of it.

Transcript

introduction to today’s topic: what exactly is an MQL?

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right. Today we’re going to be talking about what the hell is an MQL. And it rhymes. So that’s nice. This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And I want to start talking a little bit more about business operations because it happens to be a skill set I have that I didn’t know I had.

I mean, I know I have it now, but it was something that I developed over years and years and I thought it was just how you were supposed to go about running a business. But then I realized a lot of people suck at operations and they don’t realize that’s what they actually need to scale their business.

And so I developed these things by constantly trying to report the metrics that matter automate as much as I can. And I also have really focused on leadership, you know, trying to develop myself as a leader and all of these things are more like on the operational backend side of the business. Now I love the front end side too.

I love sales, acquisition leads, all of these kinds of things. But operationally, that’s really where you get your biggest bang for your buck. But it’s not talked about that much. So I want to be talking about a lot more because here’s what people don’t realize. You learn to sell and market your product and it’s super important.

And I would say that’s what’s serving like 90% of, you know, what people are buying out there. It’s like, yeah, here’s how you can get more leads. Here’s how you can get more customers here. Here’s what you can do on Instagram to, to get more email addresses or more DMS or what? Like that’s, that’s predominantly what people are focused on selling out there.

why operations matter just as much as sales in scaling your business

And that’s also as business owners, what we want to consume because that’s sexy. The backend operational stuff is not sexy and I get it, but selling things gives you some financial freedom. Operations gives you time freedom. And once you realize that, once you realize, Hey, you don’t like, I can give you more and more money.

Let’s just say you skip scale up, but you have the best product. A lot of people want it, but ultimately you’re the only person who can sell it. You’re, you’re going to be unhappy eventually. You just, you’re not going to want to be stuck selling the thing, right? You’re going to have to learn how to back out of that.

And you’re going to do that through operational leadership. You’re going to do that through operations, through automation, through delegation, all of these things, all these skills that we’re not building as entrepreneurs a lot of time because we’re so focused on just trying to get more leads and get more customers.

operations give you time freedom, allowing for scaling beyond just selling

So today kind of kicks off me talking a little bit more about operations, but I don’t want to talk about the entire operations of a business in a podcast. So I’ll do this, you know, throughout this podcast, talking about different operations. And today I want to talk about what the hell is an MQL. So let’s dive into that a little bit more.

So an MQL is a marketing qualified lead and it is a, a beast of a thing to track, to know what it is in your business, you have to set your own parameters. So I can’t even say this is the specific thing that’s an MQL, but I can give you a lot of tips and tricks. So if we are looking at the front end of the business, you have leads coming in, right?

A lead is anybody who has given you their contact information. So this could be name, email address, name, phone number, all three name, email address, phone number. Basically, you have permission to contact this person. Congratulations. You have a lead. The only way you should be collecting leads in your business is through giving something of value in exchange for their contact information.

And I did not know that there was a disconnect here. But it’s a little bit easier these days to go scrape names and email addresses from people who don’t want to hear from you. Those aren’t actually leads. Those, those are just contacts that you procured somehow. And so I would never utilize that kind of a strategy in, in my marketing or, you know, in my communications.

So ultimately a lead is someone who’s giving you permission to contact them. Now there’s this gap where some sort of magic happens between them being a lead to them becoming a customer. What’s in between there? And there are two different stages that are two different stages that we don’t really focus on as entrepreneurs.

And that’s marketing qualification and sales qualification. I’ll talk about sales qualification at a different time. Marketing qualification is simply what have they done? What marketing materials have they consumed in order to become qualified, meaning they have consumed enough of your content. They understand enough of your process.

That is a marketing qualified lead. And so what you can do and you can utilize tools like HubSpot or ConvertKit or any of these, these things where you can kind of track someone’s customer journey. I always tell people to start with data. So you’re like, Hey, I have customers. How do I know what, you know, what led them there?

Well, if you can see what they have opted into, like if they opted into a specific download on your website or you, you were giving a, you did something in person and you collected it, like what happened, what needs to happen for them to become a marketing qualified lead? Meaning they’re ready because here’s the deal.

When you start to scale leads, initially you’ll have a lot of referrals. You’ll have people who are just interested in your product, but if you continue to scale, you’ll get more and more leads who are just like right on the cusp. They’re right on the fence. They’re in that discovery phase. They don’t really know who you are.

discussing the challenge of scaling leads and how to qualify them effectively

They don’t know what you do. And to be honest, they could probably care less, but they’ve shown enough interest to give you their contact information. And so when they do that, you need to start focusing on how do I qualify them from a marketing standpoint, as opposed to how do I turn this lead into a customer?

Because that’s not always what’s going to happen. So typically they have to consume a certain amount of material. This could be a certain amount of pages they need to visit on your website. If you have a lot of information on your website about your process, about what you do, maybe they need to download certain things.

Maybe it’s an ebook. And the level of marketing qualification is different for every business. Some people, if you sell something that’s very inexpensive, it’s not a big decision on their part. They might need one marketing email and then they’ll click link and they’ll buy. But a lot of people need more than that.

And so they might need to check out your YouTube channel, consumes like some content. They might need to open a certain amount of emails, click a certain amount of links. They need to do all of these things. And so it’s like going on a first date and then trying to get to marriage, right? It’s like, how do I reverse engineer this?

reverse engineering the marketing process to build know, like, and trust factors

It’s like, well, I don’t want this to take years. So how do I speed up that process? And now you can start to reverse engineer that in your nurture sequence and how you communicate with your customer. So if you’re like, okay, well, marketing qualified lead in my business is that they’ve downloaded one thing or this ebook, or you sent them something, some informational material.

They visited three pages on the website. Boom, that’s done. Let’s call that an MQL for your business. Now, you’re not just going to sit there and hope that happens. You’re going to reverse engineer an MQL to the best of your ability. So if someone gives you their contact information, however that is, and you’re like, well, I know these things typically work in producing a customer, you’re going to speed that up.

So you’re going to immediately email them the ebook, your process, whatever it is, your unique method. You send them your unique method, and now they consume that. Obviously you’ll have call to action all throughout this process, whether that’s in the emails, a soft call to action. You have it in the ebook that you send out your educational material.

You have all of those things. Now they’re starting to consume that. And then you have further nurture emails that are going to send them back to your website to get those three page views you said that they needed. Now they’ve done all the things. It doesn’t mean they’re going to immediately turn into a customer, but you’re starting to move them in the right direction.

They’re starting to understand who you are. They get to know you. They get to like you. They get to trust you when they’re doing all these things. They know, like, trust you. They understand your unique method. You are pushing them from just being a lead, a person who’s just simply given you permission to contact them to a marketing qualified lead, meaning they’ve consumed.

And typically it should be like a CMQL content marketing qualified lead because they are consuming content. That’s just the world. That’s the game these days. It doesn’t matter what type of business you run. So ultimately they are becoming qualified through your marketing materials, which is typically content.

They understand your unique method. They know, like, and trust you. Now they’re ready for that next stage, whether that’s being a sales qualified lead or whether that is ultimately becoming a customer. But that’s the process that you want to learn how to reverse engineer and speed up and stop thinking so much of this just, okay, I need more leads.

How to convert those leads. This is a dance. And when you scale, this is ultimately what you need to be doing. And a lot of these things you can automate. So when I’m sitting here talking about MQL, you might already kind of know your process. Maybe you’re like, Oh, maybe I should put together an ebook and understand, you know, to describe my unique method, 100% do that.

You need a unique, unique method. You also in the email nurture series need to show them how, how they can know, like, and trust you get the, how do they get to know you? How do they like you? How they trust you? All of these kinds of things. And we can talk a lot about the psychological triggers involved with that, but that’s what you’re trying to reverse engineer from an operational standpoint is not just leads to customers.

detailing the process of reverse engineering not just from leads to customers, but through a nurturing sequence to make sales conversations easier

It’s how do I get these people nurtured? How do I get them to understand my process? And that makes your selling process so much easier. And that’s what people don’t understand. Like just because you can get someone on a sales call or you can get them to come in, you know, for like an evaluation or like whatever it is, whatever your sales process is, you want those conversations to be easy.

Like we all do. Like we don’t want a tough sales conversation. Who wants a tough sales conversation? The sales conversations we want as business owners are the ones where people come in and they’re like, no, no, no, I’m good. I pretty much understand it. I just, I wanted to like make sure I knew everything and get signed up properly.

That’s the conversation you want to have. And if you want to have easy sales conversations, you do that through marketing qualification. You do that through content marketing. You send them all these information, you have the nurture process, and then you be, you be patient. In this process as they are nurtured and as they learn more and understand more.

So that’s something I want you to start thinking about in your business. Is it easy to set up? No, you have to go look at data. What did my previous customers do? But ultimately, if you want to have a better business operational operationally, you need to start focusing on one of these aspects in your throughput process.

And I say, start focusing on MQLs today and it will make your sales conversations a lot easier in the future. Try harder.