Introduction
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are among the most used qualification methods in B2B organizations for determining a prospect’s initial purchase intent and fit for their solutions.
However, despite being widely-adopted, MQL-based models often fail to route prospects that are truly in-market to sales teams.
Often, this can result in organizations targeting prospects that are actively engaging with their brand but are not viable buyers, based on them scoring as an MQL. This stems from definitions for what constitutes an MQL becoming largely arbitrary due to the reliance on pre-determined and unactionable criteria, rather than observable buyer behavior and data.
Although long a popular topic of debate, the inefficiency of MQLs has resurfaced as a key challenge, often holding back growth. This comes as marketers navigate the pressure to support sales teams and demonstrate marketing value in the face of diminished budgets and increasingly defensive buyers.
As such, this dilemma has prompted the need for a new, more flexible qualification system that is buyer-centric, adapting to reflect the true behavior of B2B buyers.
Here, we discuss how to replace MQL criteria with a more effective, in-market prospect qualification process designed to enable your teams to accurately assess where your buyers are in their journey.
“Buyers are more independent than ever. Forcing prospects into a one-size-fits-all MQL category is ineffective as the buyer’s journey becomes intricate and self-paced. We need to rethink prospect qualification, focusing on actionability and data that reflects buyers’ true in-market readiness.”
INFUSE
How to phase out MQLs for in-market buyer qualification: 4 steps
The following steps suggest a proven approach on how to replace MQLs with actionable criteria that can be leveraged to assess prospects as qualified and in-market.
The goal is to pinpoint the specific data points your organization requires to accurately determine sales readiness and enable your client-facing teams to deliver seamless, personalized buyer experiences.
Important note
The iterative approach explored in this guide is designed to provide granular insights that your revenue teams need to drive performance. However, to ensure your strategies accurately align with your specific buyer needs, the frameworks explored below must be regularly optimized in order to yield the best outcomes.
#1 Collect signals that identify a prospect as in-market
In this first step, the goal is to establish the key criteria your organization will use to identify prospective buyers as in-market.
Assessing this criteria requires a broad range of data insights, and will vary depending on your industry, as well as the key preferences and behavioral trends of your key buyers.
What does in-market mean?
In-market prospects:
Below is a process for organizing this data analysis that can be custom-tailored to your needs:
In-market prospect qualification framework
The goal of this process is to orchestrate and analyze your data insights. This will enable your teams to clearly define when prospects can be considered as qualified and in-market for your solutions.
While achieving this is a challenge, the framework above can be used to continually refine your criteria until it aligns with your organization’s goals and empowers your teams to interpret buyer behavior efficiently.
“In-market signals tell a story—a buyer’s journey and their knowledge, intent, and purchase readiness. Companies that successfully interpret these signals can accurately respond with precise demand activation of in-market buyers and accounts. This helps to establish their brand as a valuable partner and supports stronger, client relationships.”
INFUSE
#2 How to identify the best qualification criteria for your prospects
Accurate qualification is a challenge for many B2B organizations, particularly as buyer’s journeys have become increasingly non-linear.
As a result, qualification methods and sources of intelligence should be constantly tested to better understand which accounts within target audiences are qualified and in-market.
The process below simplifies the testing process to identify the best criteria for pinpointing the fit and in-market status of your prospects.
Important note
Continually evaluating the in-market status of target accounts is essential to adapt strategies to meet the needs of buying group members as they freely navigate between stages of their buying journeys. Adopting this approach also helps to ensure the link between the account’s true progress through the buying journey and the criteria that has been set, unlike the current MQL-based model.
For example, should an account that is categorized as “BOFU stage” demonstrate activity associated with earlier stages in the funnel (such as requesting a demo), this may suggest a regression to the MOFU stage. Such insights should be leveraged to activate the appropriate buyer enablement strategies to encourage progression.
Alternatively, if the same example is occurring across multiple instances, this may indicate that the qualification criteria by buying stage needs to be adjusted to account for this pattern for similar target accounts.
In the next step, you will learn how to launch a demand generation campaign with your recently established qualification criteria.
“The key to pinpointing the most effective prospect qualification criteria lies in a structured, iterative process. By defining initial benchmarks, testing them extensively, and adjusting based on insights, B2B organizations can identify prospects who are well-qualified and in-market, leading to more successful conversions.”
INFUSE
#3 Launch a demand generation campaign
Once you have tested your initial qualification criteria on existing prospect data, it is important to launch a demand generation campaign to engage new prospects and further evaluate its suitability. This should ideally run for at least a quarter in order to collect a rich base of data insights.
This demand campaign can be leveraged to evaluate:
Targeting
If the prospects match ICPs and buyer personas
Actionability
If the criteria successfully informs your strategies with insights to encourage conversions and the progression of prospects down the sales funnel
Quality
If the criteria effectively results in prospects that are qualified and in-market being advanced to sales teams
ROI
If the new criteria has generated more sales prospects that result in greater ROI compared to the prior qualification process
Conduct your pilot demand generation campaign in three steps:
Developing and launching iterative demand generation campaigns is invaluable for collecting data insights into the behavior and preferences of your buyers. This can be continually leveraged to refine your qualification criteria, targeting, channels, content, and touchpoints—allowing you to optimize the impact of your demand generation investments over time.
Performing this analysis and making necessary adjustments is essential before advancing to the final stage of this process.
“Testing and refining qualification criteria through demand generation is key to informing optimizations with actionable data. This approach allows you to assess targeting, messaging, and conversion rates simultaneously, providing insights that will bring you closer to achieving your revenue goals.”
INFUSE
“Demand generation is a strategic investment in understanding your buyers. Use data-driven campaigns to refine your approach, strengthen targeting, and increase ROI.”
INFUSE
#4 Create a single source of truth
The next step is to consolidate the data that you are collecting into a single source of truth for your organization.
This is critical for ensuring that data insights are available to all client-facing teams and strategists, enabling them to access up-to-date information on in-market prospects—and will, in turn, allow them to make timely and informed decisions on the strategies they action.
Below are recommended steps to ensure your single source of truth is actionable and easily accessible:
“Consolidating our prospect data into a custom-tailored, real-time platform (INFUSE Demand Accelerator) has empowered our client success team and clients to engage prospects in a timely manner, as well as make strategic decisions to maximize budget outcomes and growth.”
INFUSE
Key takeaways
When phasing out MQLs for an accurate, data-driven qualification approach, consider these key takeaways:
- Adopt and optimize buyer-led qualification models: Implementing in-market qualification methods that are informed by observable buyer behavior data, is essential for enabling revenue teams to deliver seamless, personalized buyer experiences
- Start with the fundamentals: Identify what is missing to assess a prospect’s fit and in-market status, and then test your initial qualification criteria to guide future optimizations
- Execute a demand generation campaign to test your approach: Generate new prospects to assess if newly engaged buyers align with the opportunities sales requires to fuel growth
- Make information readily available for client-facing teams: Seek to create a “single source of truth” to ensure that your teams analyze data effectively, compiling information to facilitate strategic thinking and decision making
LEVERAGE DEMAND INTELLIGENCE TO IDENTIFY AND ENGAGE KEY BUYERS
With access to a proprietary 252+ million B2B profile first-party database, INFUSE demand experts can evaluate your data and recommend tailored strategies—empowering you to qualify key buyers and achieve growth objectives
Contact the team to craft your data-driven demand strategy and drive qualified engagement
