Creating the Perfect Blend: The Ultimate Mix of MQAs to Serve Sales
In Account-Based Marketing (ABM), the ultimate goal of the marketing team is to curate the perfect mix of potential opportunities & MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) for sales. Just like a gourmet can of mixed nuts, the accounts delivered to sales should be irresistible—balanced, well-prepared, and seasoned. This involves taking MQAs (Marketing Qualified Accounts) through a thoughtful journey of nurture, intent, and in-market motion, ensuring only the ripest opportunities land in the sales pipeline.
- Sachin Singh
- December 2, 2024
In this article, we’ll explore how to create the ideal process for filtering, nurturing, and packaging MQAs, so sales teams receive accounts that are well-informed, engaged, and ready to buy.
The MQA Journey: From Nurture to In-Market Readiness
An MQA is not born ready—it’s crafted through a meticulous process of nurturing, intent tracking, and engagement scoring. Let’s break down the journey:
1. Nurture Motion: Building the Foundation
At the start of the journey, accounts enter the nurture phase, where marketing provides educational and value-driven content to warm them up. The goal is to increase engagement while subtly steering accounts toward your solution.
What happens here?
- Accounts consume tailored content (eBooks, webinars, case studies) that addresses their specific pain points.
- Marketing gathers engagement data to gauge the account’s level of interest and involvement.
- Leads within these accounts gain clarity on their challenges and how your solution addresses them.
Why it matters:
Just like seasoning nuts to enhance their flavor, nurturing prepares MQAs for the next stage by building trust and interest.
2. Intent Motion: Identifying the Ripest Opportunities
As MQAs progress, intent signals start to emerge. These signals indicate accounts actively researching solutions in your space, moving closer to the buying stage.
What happens here?
- Intent data tools like Bombora track behaviors like competitive research, product comparisons, and content engagement at an account level.
- Accounts are scored based on both fitment (alignment with your ICP) and intent signals.
- The marketing identifies which accounts are showing real interest versus those that are just browsing.
Why it matters:
Intent signals help marketing identify the “premium nuts” in the mix—the accounts most likely to convert.
3. In-Market Motion: Timing is Key
Not all accounts showing intent are ready for sales. The in-market motion ensures only accounts that are both high-fit and actively engaged make it to the next stage. This step is crucial because timing determines the success of your handoff to sales.
What happens here?
- Accounts are filtered based on engagement scores and the personas engaging.
- Marketing delivers targeted, relevant content to these accounts, ensuring they are fully informed about your product and company.
- The focus is on priming these accounts to be meeting-ready when they enter the sales pipeline.
Why it matters
A well-timed handoff ensures sales receives accounts that are not only interested but eager to take action, increasing close rates and reducing wasted time in manual qualification.
How to Balance the Blend: Filtering and Scoring MQAs
Curating the perfect blend of MQAs requires a robust filtering process to ensure only the best accounts move forward. Here’s how you can strike the right balance:
1. Engagement and Intent Scoring
- Combine engagement data (e.g., webinar attendance, email opens, whitepaper downloads) with intent signals (e.g., researching competitors, product pages visited, topics researched).
- Use scoring models to prioritize accounts.
2. Filtering the Pipeline
- Filter out accounts that may have high engagement but lack decision-making power or budget.
- Attend to the most relevant ICPs first.
3. Timing the Handoff
- Timing is everything. Pass MQAs to sales only when they are ready to move forward, ensuring sales can focus on accounts with the highest likelihood of conversion.
The result? You get a well-balanced mix of high-fit accounts that are eager to engage with sales, making the pipeline more efficient and effective.
Packaging the Mix: Preparing Accounts for Sales
Delivering MQAs is also about packaging the accounts well. The accounts passed on to sales should feel like a thoughtfully curated gift, complete with all the information needed for a productive conversation.
How to Package MQAs for Sales:
1. Equip Sales with Intelligence:
You can provide sales with detailed insights into each account, including:
- Engagement history (e.g., which webinars they attended, what content they downloaded).
- Key personas in the buying group and their roles.
2. Prepare Accounts for Action:
By the time an account reaches sales, they should be familiar with your offering, understand the buying process, have a feel for the value they are going to get and ready to have a deeper, solution-oriented discussion.
The outcome? Accounts enter the sales pipeline well-informed and enthusiastic, with a higher propensity to buy. They’re no longer prospects—they’re partners in a potential deal.
Making the Experience Wholesome for Sales
When marketing takes MQAs through this comprehensive journey, the experience for sales transforms. Instead of struggling with cold or misaligned leads, sales teams receive accounts that:
- Are well-informed: The MQLs and the buying committee understands your product, solution, and value proposition, allowing sales to focus on deeper discussions.
- Show strong buying intent: The buying committee engages with interest having done the necessary research to understand the category and solutions. This makes the job of sales easier. Sales can engage with confidence, knowing they are speaking to the right people at the right time.
This creates a seamless partnership between marketing and sales, where each side understands its role in the process. For sales, it feels like receiving a premium can of mixed nuts—every handful is valuable, satisfying, and worth the effort.
Conclusion: Automating the Perfect Mix
Crafting the perfect blend of MQAs is both an art and science that combines strategic nurturing, intent tracking, and in-market engagement. By taking accounts through a thoughtful journey and delivering them to sales at just the right moment, marketing can ensure the pipeline is filled with opportunities that are ready to convert.
BambooBox helps marketing create these right moments with the power of automation, analytics and AI. The native integration with MAPs and CRMs allows you to orchestrate journeys automatically using the signals.
With BambooBox you can curate your premium mix better and faster. The result? The sales team is not just satisfied but eagerly waiting to take a next bite of the mix nut of opportunities that you serve.
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