Death of MQLs or why Revenue Marketing is the 'new normal'
Leads are nice, but revenue is better.
For years, or maybe even decades, B2B marketers were working hard on generating more leads and MQLs for the sales teams. I do agree that approach was working maybe 5 or 10 years ago. But one day the smartest marketers in the world understood that it’s no longer the reality.
The reality was shitty leads generated from some ebook downloads, conference attendee lists, purchased lists from very questionable sources, and in the best case, a list of free signups with gmails and a bunch of email addresses that will eventually bounce.
We were counting leads, MQLs, and victoriously announcing that we had done our job: handed those shitty leads to the sales teams. So life is beautiful. Hmm, I’m sorry to tell you, but we did it all wrong! And if you are still doing it like that, then, unfortunately, you are also doing it wrong and need to take a step back and change your approach.
Here is how.
In the last couple of years, marketing has been moving towards the approach of revenue marketing, where marketing and sales work together, are more aligned, and work towards the same target. No, not leads or MQLs, but qualified pipeline and revenue.
This is the place where marketing and sales stop blaming each other and start working together to drive business results.
“Revenue marketing is marketing working with sales to attribute their campaigns directly to revenue and engaging with leads even after sales reps take them over.
A revenue marketing system involves a major shift in focus for the team and the prioritization of a lot more targeted and goal-oriented marketing tasks. And, it goes way beyond traditional lead generation and personalized marketing.”
Believe me, no one cares if your website traffic is growing 100% month over month, if your sales pipeline and revenue isn’t growing, or even worse, it’s declining. No one cares if you generated 2x more leads from an ebook some random people on the internet downloaded from your landing page.
All these make sense if you can grow the pipeline and opportunities for your sales team. If not, then stop putting those vanity metrics in your monthly reports and confusing people with an imitation of progress.
Yes, the reality is harsh and we all need to adapt. The days when social media post likes and page followers count were making or breaking things are long gone. Chasing the vanity metrics will take us nowhere.
So now when we know the problem, here are some fixes you can apply today or this week to get closer to revenue marketing.
Start measuring the amount of generated qualified pipeline and opportunities
Understand which acquisition channels, campaigns, and messaging drive the most pipeline, opportunities, and revenue
Double down on those, but don’t forget about experimenting with new channels, messaging, etc. (of course, by keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is the revenue, not just clicks, leads, and so on)
Be in constant communication with your sales team and set up a process together with them that will allow feedback and experience sharing. It’s not marketing vs. sales, it’s marketing + sales.
Stop going crazy about measuring the source of every lead, every signup, every email that enters your CRM. Attribution analysis is good, but it’s tricky. Your CRM will tell one source, your attribution software will tell another source, and if you ask the customer, they might tell a totally different source. So your job isn’t understanding the source of every single lead, but knowing which sources, in general, drive your pipeline and revenue, by how much, with what budget, and how it impacts the sales cycles. By the way, attribution is another topic I’d love to write about someday.
In most cases, you’ll start seeing early results after several weeks of implementing these steps (depends also on your sales cycle).
To get a deeper understanding of revenue marketing and the shift that’s happening in marketing, I’d highly recommend reading this article by Outfunnel.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, as much as I enjoyed writing this piece and sharing my experience with you.
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Cheers!