All too often, marketing leaders focus on generating MQLs through sophisticated intent scoring, but ask yourself, are you measuring the right things?
Candice Mueller, a marketing leader at ABC Fitness, Aforza, Salesforce, and Oracle, argues that MQLs often miss the goal, which should focus on buyer conversations and identifying your ‘hand raisers.’
“With complex sales, intent scoring has value,” Mueller says, “but with a targeted audience, focus on what matters—invite buyers to speak with an expert.”
This approach shifts interactions from basic marketing qualified lead generation (MQL) to buyer-centric conversations. “You want to engage in a digital conversation with your buyers and capture their goals, before transitioning them to sales.”
For example, offering a “Talk to an Expert” CTA on a tailored landing page engages a more conversational tone than “Book a Demo’ and better qualifies the buyer’s intention to learn more. Success with this approach requires close sales-marketing alignment and adherence to three core principles.
1. Use Leading Questions and Diagnostics
An effective hand-raiser strategy focuses in-market buyers in active consideration mode, which alleviates inbound requests by casual browsers or even existing customers requesting product updates.
It starts leading questions—or “gap questions”—that highlight specific buyer pain points and unmet needs. Thoughtfully placed questions on landing pages, emails, and early-funnel content can spark urgency and curiosity, prompting active buyers to explore solutions with a live expert.
The focus on leading questions can extend into self-solutioning and sales discovery content that allows a buyer to start to see themselves in your product or service. The key is continuity between your digital and sales efforts. You want your leading questions aligned with how sales prospects and facilitates discovery – so marketing and sales are in lockstep vs. operating separately.
2. Focus on Progression, Not Scoring
Traditional lead scoring can obscure the larger goal of buyer progression. It often highlights buyer activity but not meaningful, in-market engagement. Mueller suggests focusing first not on a point-based scoring but on those that will progress to value-driven conversations.
The goal is to get buyers to take steps towards a “Talk with an Expert.” Prospects who aren’t ready to convert can be scored and receive nurturing drip sequences with tailored content — specifically leading questions and self-solutioning content — that may pique their interest and prompt them to engage without being overwhelming.
3. Create Hallmark Moments
Your lead or intent scoring model is most useful in combination with hallmark events and content Quarterly webinars, eBook launches, and in-person events are all examples of events that can be to target and move those buyers that have engaged but not converted toward an “Talk with an Expert.”
Each of these “conversion events” is a community-building opportunity where prospects can learn from peers, gain insights, and hear from experts. They provide great opportunities for marketing to sync with their sales teams to use guided questions and self-solutioning content assets to raise the engagement of buyers in real time.
By centering the marketing to sales handoff on hand-raisers rather than lead scoring, marketers can track genuine interest to optimize investments in both inbound and outbound funnels