MQM is the new marketing currency. Marketing Qualified Meetings (MQM) with prospects and customers drives the sales cycle faster and increases revenue pipeline better. If you are not digitizing the last mile of your marketing campaigns that leads to more customer wins, you are losing out on a lot of sales pipeline.
Anyone who has ever worked even remotely with Marketing or Sales has heard of the Marketing and Sales funnel. The funnel is a visual representation of your customer’s journey with your business. It succinctly illustrates the hypothetical journey that an unknown prospect takes from knowing nothing about a company to becoming one of its loyal customers. No matter how much we debate the accuracy and efficacy of the funnel, one thing is for sure – it is here to stay!
A typical B2B Sales Marketing funnel for an enterprise company in the pre-COVID era looks like the diagram below. For most B2B marketing and sales activities, a 1% quarterly return for wins from leads is common. Therefore, in this example, starting with about 5,000 leads, one would end up with about 50 wins. This is a simple way of looking at how you are driving the entire process to generate revenue and opportunity.
Pre-COVID Marketing and Sales funnel
If we look at the funnel during the crisis, all of these numbers are affected. The top of the funnel will be quite different, given that you don’t have hundreds of thousands of visitors at say in-person events, or roadshows and other activities. This retards the conversion from the number of visitors to leads a little bit, say a percent or two. In general, the conversions from one stage to the next are negatively impacted.
Marketing and Sales funnel during the crisis
How do you convert more leads into wins faster?
Many successful enterprises’ digital marketing teams are now stepping up in their game. They are focused on generating hundreds or even thousands of Marketing Qualified Meetings – MQMs. It is no longer sufficient to just deliver a Marketing qualified lead. MQLs are still important, there’s no denying that, but as a Marketing person, you can’t afford to stop your journey at generating MQLs from raw leads. Digital marketing campaigns need to drive customer engagement strategies with the right prospects in order to be able to enable the education and the consideration that they’re looking for and advance the buyer’s journey closer to win with the increased sales pipeline.
The whole idea of Marketing Qualified Meetings or MQMs is even more important now than just Marketing Qualified Leads. The types of meetings that can be done virtually as a CTA (Call to Action) for your digital marketing programs and virtual events are the types of customer meetings that sales teams in B2B companies frequently strive to advance the sales cycle.
At Jifflenow, we can help you convert your virtual interactions with prospects and customers to meaningful meetings that in turn can help advance the sales pipeline and shorten the sales cycle. Contact us to know more.
