S1 E2 - Why you must create a Brand New Lead scoring model in 2022 to talk to hidden SQLs

Are you wondering how the B2B process works? Or do you want to know the best practices for generating MQLs and SQLs? Or are you interested to know the recommendations & best strategies for marketers to enable sales with better-qualified leads? If yes, then tune in as we bring to you, Episode 2 of the B2B POD where our host Radwa Hassan with our guest Umesh Malhotra speaks about Why you must create a brand new lead scoring model in 2022 to talk to hidden SQLs? Get all insights from our guest Umesh Malhotra the B2B Expert with an experience of 20 years in the B2B Space as he addresses all the aspects of MQLs and SQLs. 

In this Episode,

●  We introduce you to our guest, Umesh Malhotra

●  Give you an overview of the challenges of lead conversion for MQLs and SQLs

●  Our guest gives recommendations & best strategies for conversions of MQLs, SQLs, and  SQOs  
 

In closing, we'd like to say thank you for tuning in to The B2B POD this week. We hope to see you for Episode 3.

Episode highlights - 

[00:48] Radwa Hassan introduces the guest Umesh Malhotra

[01:10] About Umesh 

[01:54] Radwa asks about why you must create a brand new lead scoring model in 2022 to talk to hidden SQL’s

[02:33] Umesh explains the challenges before and after the pandemic for qualifying leads 

[03:29] Umesh explains the pain points of the prospects after the pandemic

[04:45] Umesh explains the B2B industry going digital due to the pandemic 

[05:16] Radwa asks what are your recommendations for marketers to enable sales with better-qualified leads. 

[08:13] Radwa asks what type of qualifying questions and filters do you use with your targets to have a better grading

[10:38] Radwa asks how do you see buyer intent as a qualifying approach

[12:35] Radwa asks would you pay less for a larger number of MQLs or a much higher cost for an SQO?   

[16:04] Umesh explains the importance of SQL leads

[16:34] Umesh explains the Challenges of converting MQLs

[20:12] Radwa asks Umesh for recommendations for conversion of MQLs

[21:59] Umesh explains the best digital platforms for engagement 

[23:36] The end

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Thank You!

Podcast Description:

The B2B POD is the next big source of information about what’s happening in the B2B industry. The podcast is a one-stop shop for everyone interested in updating themselves with the latest news, trends, and technologies of the B2B industry. Tune in and listen to the intriguing conversations with our season host Radwa Hassan as she covers a profuse number of topics with a diverse set of guests.

Transcript

Transcript 

Episode 2 -  Umesh Malhotra 

Topic:  Why you must create a brand new lead scoring model in 2022 to talk to hidden SQLs.

00:02 (Radwa)

Hello and welcome everyone to season 1 of The B2B pod. Our topic of this episode is Why you must create a brand new lead scoring model in 2022 to talk to hidden SQLs. This is a very significant challenge in the B2B Space with a Demand Generation and the Funnel through the start to finish and really how you can progress the leads. I am your host Radwa Hassan and I have the absolute pleasure to be hosting Umesh Malhotra (Background music starts here) for this episode.

00:48 (Radwa)

Welcome to The Pulse of Dubai and The B2B Podcast Umesh. It is a pleasure to host you for this episode. Radwa Hassan and I have the absolute pleasure to be hosting Umesh Malhotra for this episode. Welcome to the Pulse of Dubai and the B2B podcast Umesh, it's a pleasure to host you for this episode.

00:55  (Umesh)

Thank you so much for welcoming me! Looking forward to it.

00:58  (Radwa)

Thank you! And would be great if you could now do a quick introduction to our audience so that they would get a very good view of your experience and your background. 

01:10  (Umesh)

Yes, absolutely! So I’ve been in the marketing space for about almost 20 years, working in a variety of different verticals, with B2B and B2C here in San Francisco, California. I have a strong vision of applying lead management as a single process. In other words, I have got a digital DNA in me and the planning, execution, and the whole analysis of demand generation or digital programs.

And currently, I am working for a PCB manufacturing company in the SAAS software space. That’s what I have been doing for a long time so I am happy to help here with any questions that could help the community in all facets of marketing.

01:47 (Radwa)

Perfect. Thank you so much, Umesh. And this falls into our topic of this episode - Why you must create a brand new lead scoring model in 2022 to talk to hidden SQLs. This is a very significant challenge in the B2B space with the demand generation and the funnel through the start to finish and really how you can progress the leads.

And I believe that during the pandemic, there has been a lot of change before and after. So how did you see that in America? If we are going to reflect on a different side of the world and also [2:33] what are the challenges before and the after pandemic for qualifying leads? And how do you see that?

02:38 (Umesh)

You know we always had a challenge of making sure the conversions are high from an MQL to SQL stage, ultimately converting into SQLs. But Covid has created a big problem in the lead generation world. We have a lot of spam coming in, we don’t want to spend a lot of time on MQLs that are not going to convert. Sales teams and business teams are struggling with creating a pipeline with solid opportunities. So there’s a lot of noise in other words that are interfering with our entire demand generation strategy and of course, if you remove the spam, then there are other areas that we need to touch and I guess we’ll talk about it today.

03:17 (Radwa)

Absolutely. Do you see that it was much easier to do that conversion before the pandemic?

03:22 (Umesh)

Because you know, before we knew that a person didn’t have any budget problems at first and now It's one of the pain points that a lot of the industries, depending on what industry you touched on are struggling with and the medical device space or the manufacturing space in the health care is doing Great! They have a lot of budgets and they know this market is not dying anytime soon. They need a lot of equipment that is being manufactured.

But if you look at other areas like retail for example during covid a lot of you know supermarkets were closed. There were a lot of online deliveries that were happening on your groceries, For example. So it just depends on the industry you talk about. But people are not going to the office a lot at least now I’m hearing a lot of companies are announcing that you can come back and work but during covid, the whole team was struggling because how do we get a hold of this person on a voice call? Yea sure we’re all on emails, but there are a lot of emails that have increased because the voice call percentage has dropped aggressively because no one is going to work at that time. And yes some people have forwarded their landline to their mobile but it’s still been a problem of connecting from a prospect to a customer and vice-versa.

04:28 (Radwa)

I mean, certainly, this is critical in conversion and the acceptance of even internally or externally of your audience. That being the sales internally and of course with the clients externally. Of course, covid has accelerated digital in a way that we were all aspiring to see. But again there is a lot of digital fatigue that I am seeing. People are becoming engaged again with the face-to-face and more on board with coming back to less digital. I would say they don’t engage as much as at the beginning of covid because they feel like there is now another option to come face to face, so I think that’s in favor also of creating a good balance between both. So  what are your recommendations for marketers to enable sales with better-qualified leads? What would be your strategy for better qualified leads and structure? If this is going to be like a plan that people can go and take up.

05:36 (Umesh)

Yes, you’re right. It's a big balance for better or for worse that time will tell because I know a lot of people who suffered as events are a big part of marketing for most industries and due to covid events were not happening and that was a big, big drawback for a lot of companies here in Silicon Valley as well. But the good news is it’s going virtual, so a lot of companies were ok with that, but some were not. Because of a lot of other reasons that fall under their events strategy, but to answer your question precisely, lead quality is a big issue which we always have had even pre covid even during covid we gonna have it in the future. But one thing that I did in my last couple of years is the structure of the whole MQLs, you know kind of dividing it into A, B & C. A being the 100 plus score, absolutely should be followed up first and timely with the number of follow-up points. B is 50 and C is under 25. And it could be any score, this is just an example for the sake of the conversation.  Let’s say an anonymous visitor comes on the site. We don't know who he or she is and they browse about 6 pages. But then they finally fill out a form and then we know who the person is. But every action they take on the site will decide if there is an A, B, or C, you know. A person on a webinar, just signed up and they never attended that is a C, but they attended that is a B. They not only attended and they also asked a couple of questions and they went to the site and downloaded a white paper and looked at the pricing page. Great! That’s an A.

So if we're figuring out how the lead scoring should be applied for different leads based on your job title based on are you a part of our industry filters or not? But if we’re going after five verticals and you’re in the top five great, that’s pretty awesome for us. But if you're in Tier 2 which is not a very good pipeline generator for us and not that bad as well, We don’t want the sales guys wasting time on that lead on day one, You could probably follow up on those once you're done with the A or B.

07:35 (Radwa)

Perfect. Yeah, I mean, that’s really, I believe an effective way to have the sales act on that as when you tell them there is grading they would say this, oh, ok, maybe I would need to act on the A’s and pay less attention to the B’s. Whereas if you give them just like a bucket of leads and you tell them just like you need to qualify that, then many of them will not be engaged and will look at them as just like yeah just the lead. But I think the grading system creates better engagement at least on the sales rep side.  So what type of qualifying questions and filters do you use with your targets to have a better grading or rather to move them through the grading system.

08:27 (Umesh)

Yeah, that’s a great question. You know when we are going after high tech, it depends on how many MQLs there are on the budget of course. But let’s say you are going after high tech as one of your verticals and you want at least 300 MQLs from that vertical in the next 45 days and you know based on the cost per lead you do the analysis and you see ok, this is the amount of money that I have, can I get that many leads at that much price? Let’s say you can, that’s an easy solution. But let's say if you want 250 leads and you have a decent-sized budget, the best way to go after this is not just get the cost per lead even if you have to pay a little extra. Let’s say the cost per lead is not 60 bucks, $60 a lead, let us say its a $100 lead, but what you can do to get a higher quality lead is you are not only making sure that you get their name, number, email, industry and all other fields that you want them filled out but also asking them a couple of extra questions which matter to your sales team. Because at the end of the day, the sales and business development teams are going to follow up on all these MQLs and they need to get excited. So what we do is we not only are launching campaigns whether it is a content syndication campaign or an email campaign, Whatever the campaign is we are also asking them to give us accounts that they want to go after. They might say, oh, great, we are going after energy, my conductors, and high tech, here are 4 to 5 companies that I want to go after, and there are three salespeople. We will take these 4 to 5 companies to do an analysis on our end using Zoominfo or Apollo, extract 4 to 5 prospects per account, and create a list of a couple of hundred people that are solid because they are trying to get to these accounts and we could squeeze in some a dozen or two more from our end as well for each vertical. Now we have a list to go after with qualifying questions. We have a budget, Scoring is great because we know that out of these three verticals we want high tech which is generating 70% of the revenue, and the remaining 10 or 15% is from the other two verticals. So we planned it that way. This is just a very quick strategy that I am sharing, but it depends on a lot of other things as well. 

10:29  (Radwa)

Certainly. I mean that also I believe my experience has helped when we tried similar techniques for the qualification. And  how do you see buyer intent as a qualifying approach which works for you or helps with the process?

10:47 (Umesh)

Yeah, buyer intent is a little more expensive depending on the marketing budget. It Is on a higher side a lot of companies adopt a buyer intent solution like TechTarget or demand-based, and what it does is, if you have the budget, I don’t, I know in some companies I have been at, I have used buyer intent as a part of my strategy and basically what it does is, you upload your company names and now the system is keeping a binocular view on which people are or companies under the umbrella that you're going after are looking for, it's kind of like an air cover, it is maintaining an air cover. And you are going to report every day or every week, depending on how you set up your daily digest or weekly digest.

They will tell you, hey, guess what, four companies come from the accounts that you have shared that you wanna keep an eye on, these people in these job titles have downloaded or searched for these keywords on those websites. You have a lot of detail. And if you pay the cost per lead which is on an average of about $200 per lead, it's called a QSO which is a qualified sales opportunity. Then what it does is that that account will also give you some extra information that's extremely useful and valuable for your teams. Is that, oh guess what? This John Smith at IBM who's looking for these software solutions that you're going after is now hunting and searching for these four competitors, excluding you or including you. You will know that kind of detail. And then you're like, oh, wow, this person is already out in the market looking for a solution. He's always hunting for my competitors. I want to talk with this person before they do. So these are some of the extra valuable information you get from using buyer intent, but it's pricey.

12:35 ( Radwa) 
 Would you rather pay less for a larger number of MQLs or a much higher cost for an SQO?

12:44 (Umesh)

Yeah, that is a fantastic question. It's a question that we are asked every quarter when we are figuring out our strategy moving forward. You know some quarters we are looking for a lot of volumes and for some quarters we are not and how we determine that is if we are going and experimenting  3D verticals for example, then we don't want to get a lot of MQLs on day one itself. We want to pace it out with a pulse moment so that we check it out and see how it's going. Oh, great, phase one is done, let's do phase two. But it's just a matter of what your ASP average selling price is because you have to have an ROI otherwise you don’t need marketing. So you’re making sure that whatever you’re doing to get the SQL has some kind of a booking amount in the future on closed ones. So you have to make sure your attribution for each channel or media that you’re going after, gives you a return. You have to have that, but it depends on a lot of things to determine. For example, in my current company, we have about 10 verticals, almost a dozen verticals that give us revenue, but there are only two that are giving us more than half of our revenue. And the rest are divided among many others. But we see a lot of potential growth because we never really went after those verticals. But now we see customers coming in. So we want to make sure that hey, this looks like a great vertical because two customers have come in without even pulling a muscle. Why don’t we go after those verticals? So it just depends, sometimes I think it’s better to do less volume and pay more, but that depends on your ASP as I said, and also what your sales cycle is.

If your sales cycle is going to be two years ‘cause you’re going after billion $ accounts to get $100 million or more than 10 million in revenue then you don’t have a lot of leads. You only go after 150 leads and close maybe 17% on average in terms of opportunities and maybe one or two percent become customers ‘cause that’s a big deal. But in our case, in SAAS software you can go after thousands of MQLs because you know you’re only getting about 30 to 40,000 or 60,000 in revenue. So you need to go after a lot of MQLs. So I gave a little more detailed explanation for your question because I know this is a big problem for a lot of marketers not only nationwide, but even globally. 

14:59  (Radwa)

Yes, I believe with marketing automation and a pandemic, with so many factors coming altogether, there’s going to be a lot of change that's going to come. It's evolving and it’s dynamic and the customer behavior changes by the day. I don't see it, it's not like over the last ten years people were reacting in this manner. Every day it is due to the flow of technology of course, and all the new content that's being pushed this is another issue but yeah, really great feedback. Thank you. And how do you see it? So if we look at the conversion of the SQOs because sometimes it is better that you have qualified leads or qualified opportunities as It makes the engagement, I think, higher from the sales reps than with the MQLs but from your experience,  how have you seen the conversion of the SQOs?

16:02 (Umesh)

[SQLs are the whole marketing strategy. A lot of salespeople, specially CROs or the VP of Sales are least interested in knowing how many MQLs come in they are like, how many SQLs did marketing create or Sales create, that is the main magic number they are after and I agree SQLs are the most important because MQLs you can get pretty easily. Sending out an email campaign, and making people download the White Paper or e-book it’s not difficult these days. You can buy those leads, give them to publication and they go after it.  But the problem with those MQLs is you have to do a lot of lead nurturing. Conversions are very, very tardy on an MQL from a content syndication campaign or an email campaign. But if you’re on an SQL, and of course in many different ways, we know we tried out doing BANT SQLs for budget, authority, need, and time to give solid SQLs and we had a higher lead scoring on that and obviously, we are making sure that we’re not only bringing MQLs to you but also SQLs. 

Now how do I do that? There are a couple of different ways to do that. But one just to pick one random is an appointment setter. We are working with that appointment setter in Texas. You know, they have a couple of callers. They are doing the first tries to create a pre-qualified MQL and if that MQL is solid, it’s passing all the qualification steps. They have answered all the qualifying questions perfectly, it matches our industry filters. So they’re doing all the work, we’re not paying even a dollar yet. And after it gets qualified for an MQL, if the person has agreed to speak to a salesperson and if that call goes well, and the person is on the call so we have already given them a pre SQL in other words.

Which is almost an opportunity because the person knows what we do, who we are, and what is our business like? And we’ve also answered some questions from a vendor. So those are higher SQLs, which are a couple of $100. This is an opponent over appointment, but that works for us a lot, very highly-priced. That's our number one campaign today where we are creating appointments for the sales team. So it’s a very high-quality MQL, we call it an MQL, but it’s an SQL, so that’s how we differentiate it. So you should always have your MQLs but at the same time fill the gap because what if the MQLs don't convert because you have a bad pipeline. Your KPIs are not helping you out and it embarrasses you in front of the audience, you want to make sure that you have a backup plan to create X number of SQLs just exactly for that purpose. But again, it depends on the budget as well. 

18:33  (Radwa)

Yeah, I am with you on that because it is better for me to put $10,000 for SQLs or for qualified opportunities than spending  20 on hundreds of MQLs that have poor conversion rates. So yes as you said, you pay a higher cost, but still, in the end, the conversion is higher, the engagement from the internal audience is higher, and the propensity to close this opportunity is much more worth the investment.

19:08  (Umesh)

Yes, one more thing to add here is you know when you are paying $20,000 to get a great SQL, that's for lucky companies that are only going after one or two verticals. But if you have like a dozen industries you are going after and that is 20 times a dozen, that is a pretty big budget for a quarter. Then you are struggling like oops, what do I do because I need SQLs from these 10 or 12 industries. But that is a lot of money and a marketing budget. So then you kind of have to prioritize. OK, I want to make sure that these three industries are already so good, we are getting the revenue already so we can live off MQLs because they know who we are, we know who they are and what their pain points are. And then you use SQLs for industries that are not closing that easily, like energy for example, or some other industries that are not very good for a company. But we want to make sure we get higher opportunities like an SQL because we don't want to waste the MQLs. After all, we know that this vertical is not our number one sweet spot.

20:02 (Radwa)

Yeah, absolutely. Umesh, this is a very interesting topic. If we want our listeners to take away  3-4 recommendations from you on how they can best do the conversion for the MQL journey, what would that be?

20:20 (Umesh)

I would have a 1 pager plan and would probably have highlighted it in crispy bullets you know whose audience you're going after? Mention that for sure. What are the qualifying questions? Run that by sales, make sure that sales have understood that, the third would be how you measure and prioritize. Prioritize your follow-ups in other words who do you want to talk to first and so on.

So have a pretty intelligent, sophisticated lead scoring behind that. And also another thing we didn't talk about today, but it is part of the plan to make sure the assets that you use as the marketing assets whether White Paper whether ebook, or a recording, use those assets to your advantage and map it with all the audiences that you are going after that would help and also always I say that a 70-30 or 80-20, 70% or 80% is MQL 20-30% is SQL and divide your budget into two buckets with the MQL and the SQL. You always want to make sure you are going after MQLs because you are going after a dozen industries but you also want to make sure you have an SQL plan if you are going after 1000 MQLs you want to have at least 30 or 50 SQLs minimum, but of course, it depends on what the size of the company is and all that. So this is just a hypothetical situation that I shared. But those are some of the major big rocks that you wanna go after.

21:42  (Radwa)

Thank you, Umesh, and if we are going to prioritize or mention the verticals that are most engaged with your campaigns or in general that you see the engagement with these industries or verticals is much higher. Which ones would that be?

21:59  (Umesh)

I would say paid search on Google in every company that I have gone to has performed very favorably. It is a little higher cost per lead, but it is one of the best campaigns always, now under the advertising channel. Of course, LinkedIn sometimes plays a good role but sometimes it does not. On a media buy channel, I would say if you have a good sales force of people that are there and have an Outbound strategy, then you could go after a lot of MQLs. But you have to nurture them and have many touch points and timely follow-ups. But if you don't have a confident dedicated team to do the outbound strategies, these are all inbound follow-up people, then I would say stay away from media buyers, always because if you cannot do 15 touchpoints, or at least 12 touchpoints on time then it is better to not go after the media buyers. And the last thing I said is appointment setters, which I use because we don't have a very large force of outbound marketers. So these are the three top ones. There are many more of course, as you know there is a long list, but we have focused on these three channels to create my pipeline and stand out.

23:06  (Radwa)

Thank you so much, Umesh. That was really an interesting discussion we could go forward, or rather for much longer, but thank you again for joining the episode and I look forward to hosting you again here. Thank you.

23:21 (Umesh)

Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me here. I had a great time and I hope that the community that is listening to this enjoys our discussion and gets some good points out of this to implement into their strategy. Thank you once again for calling me. Bye bye.

23:34  (Radwa)

Thanks, Umesh