#1 MQA and MQL are very different.
An MQL is an obviously individual person while an MQA is full company, or collection of leads. One of the key rifts between sales and marketing teams is that marketers count their success in terms of number of leads whereas sales counts their success in the number of logos or accounts closed. It is almost like traveling to Europe and trying to pay for everything in dollars instead of Euros. No wonder sales and marketing feel like they are not in sync.
Marketers need to focus more on aligning their efforts to the accounts that actually matter to sales reps and to the business overall. I honestly would love to see marketers abandon MQL goals and focus only on sourcing and influencing pipeline and revenue as their KPI. Understanding your target account list is honestly basic marketing strategy that most CPG marketers already know. Demand generation marketers some how got away from the practice with the invention of marketing automation solutions and digital marketing that made it cheap and easy to message to everyone. Well, just because it is easy to email everyone in your database doesn’t mean you should :). Sales has been doing Account-Based Selling (ABS) all along, marketing is just now catching up. That was the whole message at FlipMyFunnel movement. If marketers are purely focused on a lead number, it creates a disconnect because sales reps are selling to accounts.
#2 Funnel marketers need to constantly analyze performance.
Funnel marketers spend a lot of time measuring the funnel by analyzing conversion rates and how many leads they have in each stage. At year-end, when the board decides, ‘Oh, we’re going to grow by 4x,’ most marketers then try to grow their lead volume by 4x.
If I created 1,000 MQLs a month last year, suddenly I need to create 4,000 MQLs a month. But my budget stays the same. And putting four times the number of leads into the top of the funnel doesn’t always yield four times as many sales.
Alignment Between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service
#3 All three departments are all coalescing towards revenue.
Those three entities should report to a CRO. There should be one department that’s responsible for the customer journey and responsible for bringing in new business and renewals.
Marketers should be able to focus more on the overall account and the overall health and wellness of their customers. It’s going to bring them closer to revenue and earn that seat at the table we’ve been talking about for so long.