How do you balance the internal emphasis on MQLs with your ABX efforts?

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Brandon McBride
Brandon McBride Posts: 293 ✭✭✭✭✭✭
edited October 2023 in All Discussions

I'm still fighting the good fight here.

How do you balance the requirement for 600+ MQLs/month with minimal impact on your ABX efforts while also fighting the good fight against the MQL?

As I was falling asleep, I had a thought - let's orchestrate the acquisition of strong profile fit accounts (or maybe moderate/strong) at the consideration stage, orchestrate key contact purchases, and then when they hit 6QA let's MQL them.

Thoughts on this? How do you handle it?

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  • Chris Dutton
    Chris Dutton Posts: 27 6senser

    Hi @Brandon McBride ,

    First off, love the question! 

    I think this is a really good step in the right direction of helping the broader company start to think about qualified accounts (6QA's) vs MQLs. 

    A couple of things that might help with getting broader adoption of ABM.

    When reporting on the number of MQL's include the number of accounts those MQL's represent. I am willing to bet the number of accounts is going to be far lower (more than one MQL can be with the same account), giving you a better representation of what's truly "in-market". We're seeing larger and larger buying teams on opportunities, and if you're having multiple contacts from an account MQL, the reality is it's still just one account that you're selling to.  

    Another thing to consider is conversation rates, MQL's typically have a really low conversation rate (<2%) where we see 6QA's converting at a much higher rate (15% at 6sense)

    At 6sense we leverage the custom 6QA (link to post) and our goal is to have as many opportunities as possible start as a 6QA. So, when an account is qualified "6QA's" our selling teams start outbound motions, and multithread to as many contacts as possible that are part of the buying teams. This helps with prioritization and focus on which accounts are "in -market" and have a much higher likelihood of converting to an opportunity.

  • Brandon McBride
    Brandon McBride Posts: 293 ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    Thanks @Chris Dutton!

    We're just starting to get our sellers using 6Sense, so I may need more time to compare 6QA conversion to MQL conversion since they aren't chasing down 6QAs at the moment.

    We use a field we call our "action-required timestamp". I'm going to have an internal discussion about separately identifying traditional MQLs and 6QA contacts so that we can easily pull conversion rates for the two groups once we start this process.

    Also, I should separate opps created from a 6QA vs non-6QA account. I know the model report already has this information, but I think a separate report could help reinforce that. I'm just ideating aloud at this point.

    Our 6QA is pretty standard but I think we should look at a custom 6QA to include hand raisers, too.

  • Chris Dutton
    Chris Dutton Posts: 27 6senser

    @Brandon McBride A great way to measure ops created when the account is a 6QA vs non-6QA is to stamp the 6QA value on the opportunity when the ops is created. This will let you know what % are coming from 6QA.

  • Brandon McBride
    Brandon McBride Posts: 293 ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    @Chris Dutton I'll have our operations guy get on that. It'll be helpful once our sales team starts working 6QAs.

  • Rachel Zerilla
    Rachel Zerilla Posts: 218 6senser

    @Brandon McBride You better be speaking at Breakthrough next year! I can't wait to see your team KILL IT with 6sense!!

  • Kimberly Conklin
    Kimberly Conklin Posts: 472 6senser

    @Rachel Zerilla @Brandon McBride retweet!! 🙌

  • Brandon McBride
    Brandon McBride Posts: 293 ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    @Rachel Zerilla @Kimberly Conklin I did just receive word that we're officially CE and SI customers as well, kicking off next week. Really hoping we can make a massive difference with all of these tools at our disposal.

    I have three goals to meet before then:

    1. We knock our revenue numbers out of the park.
    2. I can get my slipped disc in shape.
    3. Finish reading Hello, Fears (free copy from last Breakthrough), so I can learn how to pretend I'm not absolutely terrified in front of large groups of people.
  • Rachel Zerilla
    Rachel Zerilla Posts: 218 6senser

    You got this! @Brandon McBride

  • Kfir Pravda
    Kfir Pravda Posts: 15 ✭✭✭✭

    Hey @Brandon McBride,

    One shortcut you could take would be to compare pipeline behavior of accounts based on their fit. The reason I like this analysis is because it is relatively easy to do, and it is not temporal like the 6QA data.

    The idea is this - take your last 12 months pipeline data, and compare the performance of your strong fit accounts to the medium and weak fit performance. Assuming strong fit close at higher rate and higher value, you are already able to update your MQL definition to require strong fit.

    Then you could create MQLs in different priorities - feed them with the standard MQLs, but prioritize MQLs from 6QA accounts higher. They would still be called MQLs, but they are already considering the ABX aspect of it.

    This way, in essence, you don't have to kill the MQLs - you turned them to another lens on ABX motions.

    Hope it helps - happy to jump on a call and learn more if you are interested.

  • Kfir Pravda
    Kfir Pravda Posts: 15 ✭✭✭✭

    Another point - check out @Kerry 's article on buying committee size and how many of them are translating to the traditional inbound MQLs. You'll see that across the board you are getting one MQL out of a buying committee that could have more than 19 members. This means that traditional MQLs doesn't help you to sell into the buying committee and that you need to go the ABX route.

  • Jana_Marketing_Maven
    Jana_Marketing_Maven Posts: 81 ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    We had an MQL program based on both account-based information and contact-level engagement prior to adopting 6sense. After we rolled out Sales Intelligence we wanted to measure our 6QA impact and change up our MQL program by adding a layer of 6sense data to it.

    Here's the nuts and bolts:

    1. For the MQL: If a contact scores highly enough to be an MQL we look at the account, if it is designated to be in purchase/decision, an action is requested from sales (basically a lead is created, but on the contact in SFDC). All of which is attached to a campaign in SFDC.
    2. For the 6QA: We have an orchestration that runs once per day that looks at if the account is in 6QA for that quarter (newly achieved 6QA status) and is not already part of the campaign (per above), then find a good fit contact and add them to the campaign.

    Our attribution model is multi-touch so that if an opportunity occurs on an account with a contact associated to an active campaign, that campaign sees some attribution.

    We have separate campaigns for our webinars, web leads, chat, etc. in SFDC so this is specifically tracking 6sense attribution/data. It started out strong but we're seeing less attribution in current quarters (this could be a variety of factors), but it has been a great way to keep 6sense top of mind with reps as well as marry the data-driven approach we already had with our MQLs by adding more data to it.

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