Here’s one piece of good news for email marketers at B2B companies: The leads they are sending over are largely accepted by salespeople.
Yes, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are alive and well — despite claims to the contrary, according to Bad MQLs Were Always Dead: What Revenue Teams Really Want, a study by RollWorks.
Of the marketers polled, 56% believe leads aren’t dead (just bad ones are), versus 17% who say they are.
Sales teams are even more believing — 63% of sellers say leads are not dead, and 62% say they will never be obsolete.
But there are some qualifications to that. Here are some reasons for sales teams (along with their scores):
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Email ranks only fourth in terms of generating leads that make the sales team happy. The most valuable signals (and their scores) are:
Despite this, sales teams would accept these signals from marketing, assuming the lead was from a “high-fit” account:
There are limitations even at the top end of this list. For instance, 64% don’t expect C-suite leaders to fill out forms.
But 81% of salespeople would pass on a high-fit site visitor/ad clicker without a traditional form fill. And form fills also top the list of accepted signals from high-fit accounts:
“Look, at the end of the day, form fills represent only one signal,” says Danilo Nikolich, vice president of sales at RollWorks. “Leads come in a variety of ways, whether that is an account showing intent, someone poking around our website, a prospect opening a HubSpot nurture email, or clicking on a personalized ad.”
Nikolich adds: “It’s the aggregate of those leads/signals that will help my team view the account in a more holistic way and pave the way for us to drive an informed and multi-threaded sales cycle.”
RollWorks surveyed 850 revenue generators (marketers and sellers).