The more I build, the more I question the marketing systems that every large org seems to have in place. Systems can be useful. But sometimes we inherit the system and forget the reason it exists.
Take marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for example.
I'm not just asking "how do we define an MQL?"
I'm asking, why do we need MQLs in the first place?
What actually matters
At the end of the day, we care about revenue. Are the numbers going up at the pace we want them to?
A marketing metric should exist because it helps the business make better decisions, not simply because the software makes it easy to measure. (lookin' at you HubSpot!)
To me this means marketing should be serving the business, not the other way around. Before putting a bunch of standardized leading metrics in place just because our tools allow us to, maybe we should ask: how does this serve our sales pipeline?
I'm actually not anti-leading metrics (MQLs), but I am anti-copy/paste leading metrics from other businesses into yours. If you can get more specific about what actually drives revenue for your business, wouldn't you be able to scale that better/faster? Your business can be more nuanced than a copy/paste.
Questions to ask to get to the bottom of what leading metrics are actually useful:
Where did we find our best customers? For example: did we find them at a conference? Maybe a webinar? Maybe the useful thing to track is
lead source.What behaviors do we see from our best customers? For example, did they look at X page on our site X times before requesting a demo? If that behavior reliably predicts a good sales opportunity, maybe it's an MQL signal. Useful.
The goal isn't to have the right marketing metrics. The goal is to have the right metrics for your business.
Alignment from everywhere (reason in public!)
It helps a lot to have an engineer as a boss. Engineers are often asking why before how.
Helpful tip: when an engineer asks, “what is an MQL?” they're probably not looking for the universal definition. They want to know how you got to your definition. And more importantly, they want to know why it matters for your business.
So instead of saying: an MQL is a signal that someone is likely ready to talk to sales.
Say: an MQL for our company is someone who has visited X page X times in the last 30 days. Based on what we're seeing (the data), that kind of behavior leads us to believe they are a great fit for X product.
Now that data is serving the business (and revenue) 🤌
Important: if we solely have a high-level agreement that an MQL is someone who is ready to be passed off to sales, then we leave it to a marketing ops person to define exactly what criteria an MQL is themselves. That's a problem! Collaboration is king!
All to say, it's important we don't inherit a system just because everyone else uses it. Instead, understand the problem you're trying to solve, then build the system around your business.