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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
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So this is lead identification. And the first thing that we wanna talk about here is lifecycle stages. If you're using HubSpot, you're gonna wanna make sure that you have your lifecycle stages set up. And I'll show you a little bit more about this in a second of how you do that with workflows, but life cycle stages are the the connotation of, of what people are inside of your lead, your CRM, your, your lead stages. So basically like customer is the easiest one, right? We have a customer and everybody knows a customer is a paying person. Then you might have a lead. And then there's all these other terms like SQL and sales accepted, lead, and marketing, qualified, lead, and opportunities and subscribers and evangelists. And we have all these different life cycle stages, but what do they all mean?
And so what I wanna do is help frame this in a way that makes really good sense is really, really clear so that there's no confusion moving forward. So we're gonna start with a lead and a lead is anybody that comes to your website and fills out a form, or maybe sales is interested in talking to somebody. So they've put them in the CRM as a lead. And so that lead is not qualified. They're not somebody we're gonna start, start calling more than likely, unless you're really, really aggressive, which I don't recommend. And they're, they're going to need to be nurtured. And so once they get to the point where they are being nurtured, they're showing signs of being highly engaged. Maybe they wanna book a call with you. They become an MQL and that term means marketing qualified lead that stands for marketing qualified lead.
And that means that marketing has successfully done their job of qualifying that lead to the point where they are ready to be passed to sales. We'll get into something about like goal setting. How many leads do we need? How many MQL do we need, but a really good idea. Guys, if you're working in a cross team where you have someone in charge of marketing, someone in charge of sales, and you're not just like one person doing everything is to understand that marketing should be responsible for delivering X number of MQL every month. Okay. And then sales needs to be responsible for doing X number of activities before they say that is not a good fit lead. We couldn't make that lead work. So what happens is you would be able to say, all right, marketing qualified lead. Let's define that. What are the criteria that makes up a marketed, qualified lead?
And then we're gonna make sure that we need 50 of those a month. And so now marketing has metrics. Now they can start being tracked and measured. And marketing has very clear goals. It's no longer, oh, I need to do a bunch of blogs. I need to be on social media. I need to write a post for this event. I need to do all this stuff. It's like, what's gonna have the biggest impact on getting M QLS. So then we have sales qualified, lead and QL at the size of companies that we're dealing with and that you guys are a sales qualified lead essentially is somebody that the sales team has accepted as a good fit. So you'll have people in the automated process, which will get to make it through to MQL, but they're not actually in MQL. Somehow they've, they've cheated the scoring model.
but, and they've slipped through the cracks. It's always gonna happen. Sqls are sales, qualified leads. Those are people that the sales team have vetted and say, yes, this is a good lead. Yes, we're accepting them. Yes, we're gonna work them. And so that stage is typically really short. Honestly, it's like most of the time you just need to pick up a, a the, the contact record in HubSpot and see if it's a good lead and see if they actually are a, a decent lead and not, you know, we get a lot of people that download our content and come back to our website. And they're students doing education for a course, which is great. Like, I love that you guys are doing that. But are they a sales qualified lead? No, cuz they're not gonna, they're not gonna pay for anything that we do.
They might wanna come work for us someday, but they're not gonna pay for anything that we do. And then we have an opportunity and opportunities are the people that we work in our deal stages. They are the exploratory calls, the advisory calls. Those are opportunities. Those are deals that we are tracking. We're actively having conversations with them. So opportunities are really, really good. Then lastly, we have customers and customers are clients that pay money. Okay. So that's the goal. That's where we put everything out at the end. I think I pressed my button twice cuz the next slide popped up. But we have up at the top. This is how the system works. This is how we move through these different different life cycle stages. Lead is the very first one. And then we want to get people to a marketing qualified lead.
And that is, it's gonna rely on the marketing team to nurture that lead. You need to give additional resources. You need to provide really great content. You need to be able to help them see that you're an educational authority in the space and not just someone who's blasting them with buy now, buy now book a call, buy. Now, come see this product here's features of our product. Like that's not nurturing at all. That's really, really bad sales, really bad marketing. Don't ever send messages to people about why your product is so great. Especially you can send those messages to SQLs and opportunities, but leads and MQL is not a good fit because you're just noise. You're just noise to them. You don't have their, their trust yet. Then we get into what's called sales and marketing alignment. And this is where we wanna make sure that the sales team and the marketing team are really clear marketing is to bring 50 MQL a month.
Let's say, and then it's the sales Jo sales team job to get them to opportunity. And they're gonna document their process and what's gonna happen is you're gonna document and say, we need 50 leads a month or 50 marketing qualified leads a month. And in turn, I'm gonna reach out to these people 15 times before we remove them from our CRM or put them back into, into marketing. And they, they should report on that. So sales team is held accountable too. And they can't just say, cuz oftentimes what happens is we'll have, we'd see clients they'd have just a awesome year, like awesome year in MQL, we delivered 200 MQL for this client and the client says, you know, they, they want to cancel a contract with us and we're like, what is going on? Like you are a standout client, like the marketing's super successful here.
And they're like, yeah, but the sales team said, those are all bad leads. None of 'em were good. And you know, we're sitting here scratching our head. Like what do you mean? They're all bad leads. We defined what marketing qualified lead meant. And they say, oh, well yeah. I mean sales team super busy with their own leads. And so when we give them a lead, you know, they'd shoot them an email and they'd call them. And if the lead didn't call back or respond, they would just say that's a bad lead. And it's like, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. That's a bad salesperson. So we're gonna talk through that here and in the upcoming slides. So some help here leads to M QLS. Those are a, a really, really prime fit for an automated process, marketing automation. Like we can automate that process a hundred percent.
Then we get into the sales process, one to one SQL to opportunity. This becomes a way for us to like have individualized outreach to our customers. This is a way for us to that like that sales process is no longer a hundred percent automated. We can automate some of the things in it, but marketing can be done all behind the scenes. Sales is not, sales is like, we're a face we're having phone calls and conversations and here's something really valuable to talk through. So a lot of you guys are using HubSpot and you need to start using different kind of workflows to build out automation. Now you can be super robust and create a ton of different things in your workflows, but you don't have to, this is where you're gonna start. So I would start with understanding the enrollment criteria for what makes someone an MQL or a marketing qualified lead, which we'll get to in a second.
We I'll explain that in a second of some ideas to get you started there. But what you wanna do is create a, a workflow inside of HubSpot that says when a contact meets this criteria, you're gonna enroll them. And then the next thing you're gonna do is set that contact lifecycle stage to marketing qualified lead, boom, you're done. Now you can start tracking your MQs and you now have metrics. You can do the same thing with SQLs, with opportunities and so on. You can build a really simple report and HubSpot about that. The other things that if you wanna be a little bit more advanced with this, you could set contact lifecycle stage to marketing, qualified lead, assign them to a sales rep, have that sales rep be assigned a task to call them right away. And you can do all that inside of the automation.
But start here. That's where you're gonna start. That alone guys is gonna be one of the most critical things of making your HubSpot automation work. And so we had said like, you're gonna have HubSpot running to end if you do all, all these things the right way, this right here is one of the, the bus, the biggest ways to have that impact right away. How do you define an MQL? How do we know who we should start talking to first? Now there's a couple different ways that we can get to that. Obviously you can jump to the front of the line and become an MQL by signing up for a consultation. Or we could go through what we call like a lead scoring process or just like qualifying based off of good fit and good engagement. And so that's where we're gonna start next.
So what I want you to imagine is that you have an X and a Y graph like this and on, on the Y axis, we're looking at fit, how good of a fit is a prospect and fit can be defined as any number of things where they're located, how big the company is, how many employees they have, the kind of industry they're in. Anything like there's so much more, are they venture capital funded? Are we talking to a VP of marketing or the CEO? Like there's any number of ways that we can qualify a fit? And what we'll see is that like people will rank up and down this Y axis, then we have the X axis. And in that we're looking at engagement, how engaged is your prospect in what you do? So are they opening lots of emails? Are they coming back to your website?
Are they reading the content? Are they doing the things that you're asking them to do? Did they watch your masterclass? Did they come to your webinar? How engaged are they? And so, as we can imagine, we have four quadrants here and they're very arbitrary. Like you can decide what those quadrants look like and where that they meet on the graph here. But on the bottom left quadrant, what we have are low fit, low engaged prospects. These people are not a good lead. They don't know who you are. And ultimately that means they're not interested in you. They're not a good fit, right? They are not someone that is gonna be your ideal customer because they don't fit that, that ideal client persona. And then they're not highly engaged. Then we have on the right on the bottom, right? We have low fit, but high engaged clients or prospects.
These are people that love your content. They're reading all your stuff. Likely not able to afford you is my guess. If they're not a good fit, maybe they're a student. Maybe they're a competitor researching you. But you do have the potential for future engagements. So like if it is a student, maybe two years from now, they are at a, at a job and they love what you've done. And so they're gonna come back to your company or maybe they're a future evangelist. So somebody that loves your content so much that they're gonna share it. So we wanna give them attention, but not all the attention. If you know what I mean, then we have the top left quadrant, which is where we spend a lot of our time. These are high fit, but low engaged clients or prospects. And so these, these people, they embody the perfect qualities of who it is.
We wanna work with. These are our perfect prospects because they fit everything that we want. So once you can identify people in this box, we know exactly who we need to go and nurture. They just don't know us yet. They just don't trust us yet. So if we can find those perfect fit and prospects, we're gonna target them as we move them into a better or highly engaged sequence. And then lastly, on the top, right, we have high fit, high engaged audience. These are our prospects that are our marketing qualified leads. This is what the MQL is. They're very active. They're very engaged, they're high fit. They know who you are. Those are the perfect kind of customers or prospects that we wanna work with. So those are the ones that we wanna spend pretty much all of our time focusing on. Now there's an advanced level of this.
And so depending on how deep you want to go down this rabbit hole, you can get into what's called lead scoring. And in HubSpot, there is a tool called or a property. That's a lead scoring property. And you, you go to your settings, you go to properties and then you find lead scoring or score. And at that point you can put in the different criteria in order for somebody to be a a good fit MQL. And so you can E you can grade and evaluate different things that they engage with. So for example, filling out a form is worth five points opening 10 emails as worth 20 points, anything like that, that you can see as an opportunity that would allow you to prioritize one activity over another. You could also do the same thing for fit. Ceos are with 10 VPs are with eight marketing directors are with four, so you can prioritize that as well. Guys. My name is John Aikin. Thank you so much. And we'll see you next time.