Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sui.

Eric: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sui.

Neil: And I'm Neil Patel,

Eric: And today we're going to talk about how to turn market qualified leads into sales qualified leads. What does that mean exactly?
When you look at marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, these could be based on certain actions they've taken inside of your email service provider or your marketing automation tool. Right? Let's say you might be using Drip or you might be using Marketo, you might be scoring leads certain way. If they taken, they've visited five pages on your site, they might have a lead score of 70 out of 100, and that's when you decide it's a marketing qualified lead. But that's decided on the marketing side, right? But a sales qualified lead, this is when a sales person picks it up, they get on a call with the person, they decide if it's qualified based on the ideal client profile.
It goes through a couple different phases, right? The question is, how do you turn marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads. Well, a couple of things that you can do. I mean, I just talked about it. You have different triggers. You're tagging people a certain way. Maybe they've interacted with five or six emails when it comes to sales, for example, and they get moved into a sales sequence. They engage with a couple more. Maybe they watch a webinar, for example, then the sales team might decide, based on those criteria, based on the criteria that they set, that could become a sales qualified lead.

Neil: The easiest way to convert market qualifying leads to sales qualified leads is when you're collecting a lead, ask them for a lot of criteria such as your company size, your revenue, your budget, when you're looking to get started. Based on what a sales rep is looking for, you can ask them, find that information out from the leads in just form fields, and then just pass it over to sales once you know someone's hit all of those criteria. Then that way, they're much more likely to have a sales qualified lead.
In addition to that, if the sales reps aren't talking to the leads, they're not going to end up generating conversions. What you want to do, is with your marketing qualified leads, once they hit all of those form fields that qualify or that more so meet the needs of the sales person, you can then automatically schedule them into a call, using applications like ScheduleOnce. That way the sales rep doesn't have to email them, convince them to jump on the phone, you can just do it within the form fields. After someone gives you the five or 10 form fields you're asking, assuming they meet all your criteria, boom, right then and there what we do is, we let them schedule a call using ScheduleOnce. That plugs into our calendar. From there, the sales reps typically are able to get on the phone with 60 to 70% of them, because some of them don't show up. And ScheduleOnce will even text them reminders saying, "Hey, show up to the call. It starts tomorrow." "Hey, your call's going to start in an hour." "Hey, your call's going to start in 15 minutes." Then, that way, your sales reps aren't dealing with leads who just don't want to talk to them.

Eric: Yeah, and Neil talked about the importance of having a certain criteria. Form fields help you qualify people, but if you're looking at Neil's site, he gets a lot of traffic, or my site, we're collecting, I don't know, about 25 hundred to three thousand emails a month from organic, which is decent amount for our marketing agency. What happens is we, once a lead comes in, we'll use Clearbit to enrich the leads, but we will only automatically reach out to these people on our list if they fit certain criteria. Maybe their company has a certain revenue size, maybe they have certain technologies that they're using on their website, maybe it's an employee size and also the industry that they're in. Based on those criteria, it'll set an automatic trigger, and then our sales people can go reach out to them.
The final thing I'll add before I turn it back over to Neil is that if you want more sales qualified leads, think about using a tool like an online chat on your site. Drift actually does a good job of this, and Drift can ask people certain questions. It's like a Chat bot on your site, and it filters people in. It says tell me what your job title is, what kind of business are you in? How much revenue are you doing? Based on that, Drift will decide if the lead is not a qualified or should they funnel them to a person to set up a calendar, or a call, through their calendar. It syncs with their calendar, right? That's another way to go about doing it. Neil.

Neil: Yeah. Last thing I have for you guys is think about what type of leads your sales guys are closing region based. Even if they meet all your criteria, for example, we get a lot of leads from regions like South America, Africa, India, and they're amazing regions, and I love them to death, but we know our sales guys are over 10 times more likely to close a deal from the United States than any other region, just because we have offices all throughout the United States. For that reason, we make sure that we're passing over more US leads to the sales team than any other type of leads. And to schedule a call with us using those applications I mentioned like ScheduleOnce, that only works if you're coming from specific regions. That way we're not wasting the sales people's time with leads that may not be a good fit for them. Again, there's nothing wrong with the other regions. I love them to death, but you want your sales people to spend the majority of their time on the regions that they're closing the most deals from.

Eric: Alright. That's it for today, but before we go we have a 90 day free trial of Crazy Eight to give away to each and everyone of you. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more. Plus, you'll learn more about how you can also win a one year annual subscription to Crazy Eight. That's it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.

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