How Do I Generate MQLs at a New Startup?

One of the biggest challenges of a new startup is generating marketing qualified leads (MQLs). A startup is a race: you are burning through limited funding, and every day you need to go all-out before funding runs out. Along the way, you are demonstrating progress to leadership and investors, and there's no better way to keep their confidence than pointing to a pipeline of fresh daily leads.

So how do you get MQLs for your startup ASAP?

1. FIRST, GATHER INTEL

​Spend your first few days gathering as much intelligence as possible about the company you are working for, their target markets and target customers. For example:

• Why have leads have come in so far, and why? Be rigorous in tracking what works and what doesn't. 
• What customers do you have already? Can you upsell them? Can you get referrals? Existing customers are 10x more likely to buy and refer compared to a new prospect.
• Who are the competitors? What messaging and what lead generation tactics are working for competitors already? Of course you will eventually want to differentiate from them, but to start off, you can simply copy what is working. 
• What are your differentiators? Are they proven? (e.g. have customer paid money specifically because of those differentiators) 
• At your target customer accounts, who is the buyer, influencer, champion, etc.? For example, one company might know that the buyer of their product is the CFO, the champion is the Lead Scientist, and other influencers include supporting staff and the Project Manager.  You need to understand these personas to understand what motivates each of them, how they can be reached, and what messaging they need to hear. 
• What does the ecosystem look like? Who is partnering with who? What do motivated channel partners look like?​​​​
• What is your call to action? 

Are you trying to motivate the influencer or the champion with your call-to-action? What specifically are you asking them to do (have an introductory call with a sales person, or sign up for a free trial, or buy right away)? Your call-to-action will dictate the approach you take.

Read more: How To Generate MQLs: Define Your Target Personas.

2. DEFINE A HYPOTHESIS

From your research, you need to develop an initial hypothesis: 
​
Who is the target customer you are going to generate MQLs from? You will have much more success if you target 1 persona to start and focus all your attention on them, rather than diluting your efforts with more generic messaging to appeal to different types of prospects. ​

How will you reach this target customer? It really depends on where they hang out. CIOs for example are so busy that you probably won't reach them via a social media strategy. However you could target their right-hand person (an influencer) via social media, and indirectly reach the CIO with your message. Or you could take a more direct route and plan to meet CIOs at well-chosen conferences, or via cold calls. 

Try selecting 2-3 different tactics to reach the target customer, such as cold calls, conference meetings, and an investment in SEO.

What is the customer's pain point that you solve? You need to be able to articulate this well, in the language the customer himself would use to express it. If you can't articulate the problem well, you won't be able to come up with a salient message. DON'T SKIP THIS STEP!

What message will you bring to the target customer?  If you really understand the pain point, then this part writes itself. Demonstrate empathy in your message and creativity to stand out above the crowd.

What is your call to action? When you reach the target customer, what is it you want them to do? Attend your upcoming webinar? Agree to a live demo with a sales engineer? Sign up for a free trial? Usually you want to be very specific about this and usually go with a smaller step (e.g. free trial) rather than a bigger commitment.

​Read more: 10 Ways To Predict What Customers Want To Buy.

3. EXECUTE IN 2-WEEK AGILE SPRINTS

​2-week MQL generation sprints

Until we've established repeatable lead generation of MQLs we are in a "non-deterministic" state. I would follow a 2-week agile sprint approach to campaign planning and execution, similar to how software development teams run sprints. Each sprint we decide as a team what campaigns and other exploratory tactics we will employ, and then execute. This is not to say we couldn't also plan a long-term calendar of events but that calendar needs to be relatively light and flexible until we get a little more established. 

The First Few Sprints Are About Learning

When you are starting with a very greenfield territory, the first sprints should really be about learning and validating your hypothesis before you focus on generating MQLs full on. My own experience is that social media and e-mail promotion can be an economical way to get feedback quickly. Setting one-on-one meetings at small conferences is another. A webinar highlighting the product could be another. Other tactics like partner marketing, event roadshows, website PPC/SEO, PR, etc. are important to consider in the mix but they will have a longer-term yield, and are better invested in after a few sprints when you've validated your hypothesis. 

Once we get a sense of what's working, we can start to establish more repeatable structure and longer-range planning in a calendar.
​
Team Engagement is Critical 

As with software development sprints, internal communication is critical to effectively managing MQL generation 'sprints':

• sprint planning meeting at the start - this is where you confirm the tactics for the next 2 weeks and assign work to different team members
• daily 15min standup with anyone involved in the sprint
• weekly e-mail update to stakeholders
• end of sprint retrospective to evaluate results and think about what needs to change next sprint​​

At a new startup, everyone has a role to play in lead generation. And everyone has an opinion! As a small group we will absolutely need staff's insight, as well as their hands-on help on execution. A sprint framework provides a structured format to make sure everyone feels up-to-date, has a means for providing input, and is organized to take part in the execution! 

Read more: Do This One Thing For Product-Market Fit.

4. RIGOROUSLY EVALUATE RESULTS AND TRY AGAIN

As with any software development sprint, at the end of the 2 weeks you need to rigorously evaluate the results. Did we generate MQLs, or at least have customer conversations? What worked and what didn't? What did we learn? Be ruthlessly objective in your evaluation and make sure to incorporate lessons into the next sprint.

5. USE LEAD GENERATION TACTICS THAT WORK BEST FOR STARTUPS

Startups have no brand recognition, limited marketing budgets, and time pressure. As a result, some MQL generation tactics work better than others. Here are some tactics that work best in a B2B context:

• Visit existing customers and prospects in person. The goal is always to get to the next meeting and learn more.
• Obvious: check public RFPs, look at where competitors are going and be there too.
• Follow the regulatory compliance trail. Nothing motivates a sale like an urgent need to demonstrate compliance, so understanding what regulations are top of mind and start a conversation with a list of prospects you know need to be compliant.
• Very targeted email marketing. The trick is to be honest, provide value (ie. link to true thought leadership or useful content) and focus on relationship building, not on making a sale.
• Useful, practical blog content such as "how to" articles in your space. Use conversations with customers to feed into thought leadership, every time a problem or pattern is detected write a piece on it.
• Engage your company staff – how can we leverage as many staff as possible helping to make referrals, generate thought leadership, help in selling? Use the principle of leverage! For example, perhaps everyone at the company posts the same campaign on social media at the same time on a Monday morning. You’ll move much faster if you can get an army contributing to the cause rather than just 1 person. 
• Go speak at local forums where you know your target customer will be. Big conferences are good for appointment setting but my favorite are the intimate influencer forums with a smaller number of C-levels. ​​
• Select a motivated channel partner as a short cut to MQLs (you have to be very picky about this though because you can waste a lot of time if you choose the wrong partner)

Read more: Every Lead That Didn't Convert Is A Learning Opportunity.

6. ...AND AVOID TACTICS THAT WASTE TIME AND DISTRACT

​Remember, a startup is a race. Not only do you want to select MQL generation tactics that work, you absolutely need to avoid tactics that will waste time and distract your team. Some of the biggest time killers:

• DO NOT spend time on partners that aren't immediately going to generate leads. They will always say positive things but if you're not seeing a path to real leads and sales within a few weeks, it's too long. Save them for later, maybe.
• DO NOT spend time holding an event. Event planning takes so much time, much more than you anticipate at the start. Go to others' events, network like crazy, but avoid your own. Even webinars can be a major distraction, so only do a webinar if it is really lightweight and you are sure you will generate a lot of leads and learnings from it.
• DO NOT spend time brand building. A basic logo, a basic website, as a new startup that's all you need at first. The rest is all about validating customer pain points and getting to a repeatable set of marketing tactics and messaging that connect with that type of customer. 
• DO NOT spend time trying to "go viral". It could always happen organically, but don't force anyone to spend time on this. Like investing in a long-short stock and crossing your fingers it will make you rich, it's a moonshot. Why spend time and distract staff with this? 
• DO NOT spend time on social media unless you have a really specific strategy to optimize a particular social media channel and generate leads from it. Social media is misleading: it seems like only a minute or two here and there to post updates to Facebook and LinkedIn. But when you start to think of all the time preparing each post, gathering graphics for the posts, following metrics on each post, discussing social media with internal stakeholders, it starts to become a distraction fast.  
• DO NOT spend time on any tactic that isn't going after the target persona in your hypothesis. If you want to change target persona next sprint fine, but going after lots of different targets within the same sprint is a distraction and dilutes your focus.
• DO NOT spend time on lead gen tactics that aren't generating MQLs. Spend 1 or 2 sprints, if it's not working, change it or kill it. 

Read more: How To Generate Leads That Actually Convert To Qualified Opportunities.

7. DON'T JUST MEASURE, EXECUTE TO TARGETS

A lot of teams in the early going will just try stuff and then at the end of the sprint report how many MQLs, clickthroughs, etc. they obtained. Not good enough. From day 1 set a target. ​

How many conversations are you going to have? How many MQLs are you going to generate? Then at the end of the sprint you report results in relation to those targets.

For leaders: this forces more focus on the right activities (and less time on distractions), and builds discipline within your MQL generation team. For marketing/growth staff, setting targets builds your stakeholders' confidence that you know what you are doing! 

The targets you set in the first few sprints can be modest, as you are just building the discipline. So maybe sprint 1 is simply targeting "1 MQL", or targeting "5 live conversations with prospects that match the target persona". As you get further into your sprints, you should start to have real MQL targets and opportunity $ targets that line up to the company's revenue goals. For example: "next month we need 50 MQLs because we know that this will convert into 10 qualified opportunities. An opportunity on average is $50k, so that should be 50 * 10 = $500k opportunity pipeline. We estimate that sales will win 1 in every 4 deals within a month of qualification, so that will yield 500 / 4 = $125k revenue in 2 months."

Read more: The Complete Guide To Customer Interviews That Drive Product-Market Fit.

8. MORE FOCUS ON THE PAIN POINT

Your company's product will no doubt have a lot of power and extensive capabilities, and of course you need these to be well articulated on the website and in promotions. But almost always, there is not enough focus on the customer and their pain that you solve. A slight shift in positioning to speak a bit less to the capability and a bit more to the really painful problem that your company solves on the front page is always warranted. I've been in a number of C-level meetings where the C-level has complained:

 Please just tell me what problem I have that you are solving upfront.

9. GET HONEST FEEDBACK FROM EXTERNAL SOURCES

Your in-house staff will have great ideas, but they are full of bias. Even external sources will hesitate to tell you the truth, or they don't know the space and will lead you astray with uninformed opinions. 

Find a couple of trusted external sources that know the space well and will give you real honest feedback. You need this more than you realize. Consider:

• talking directly to customers and prospects
• sitting in with sales on some prospect and partner calls and listen to what they say
• talking to a market analyst
• talking to an advisor who knows the space and is objective.

Read more: ​ How A Startup Founder Generates Leads

10. SEO TAKES TIME AND REQUIRES EXPERTISE

To show up in Google search results and other channels, you need 1) great content 2) focus on the right keywords 3) expertise to craft the content in a way that gets the algorithm's attention. This can take time. It's a worthwhile investment, but perhaps not in the first few sprints. 

However, you can start to write content right away and use guerilla tactics like sharing content directly with prospects over e-mail or at conferences, and later optimize the content that works best for SEO. 

Google is increasingly shaping their search algorithm to prioritize certain things:

1. Loading time (largest contentful paint)
2. Interactivity (time until a visitor interacts/clicks within your site)
3. Visual Stability (especially on mobile)

Engaging a consultant to at least ensure you have the baseline on these 3 fronts. 

In addition, Google is also prioritizing rich snippets (content with specific structured metadata in JSON-LD that Google will show to help your post stand out) as well as answer boxes. To show up in an answer box, you need to:

• Find a question you can answer better than other companies (use a tool like SEMRush to pinpoint these opportunities)
• Make sure you answer the question really well in the first paragraph of your content
• Use the structured metadata in the JSON-LD format that Google requires, so that Google prioritizes your post

Don't expect too much in the first year. Like investing, SEO is like a bond that you contribute a little to every month and will grow steadily over time. Avoid consultants who promise that they can help you rank #1 on Google overnight. ​

11. USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO TEST MESSAGING AND EXPLORE MARKETS

Apart from a very small number of startups that get lucky with a viral social media campaign, for the vast majority of startups social media is typically not a lead generator in the early days. Especially not compared to direct outreach and your website. But it is useful to test different marketing messages and see which ones seem to garner responses and clicks, to set up meetings with prospective customers not in your immediate network, and to explore secondary markets. 

Social media marketing can also be a huge drain on time so be sure to set a very fixed cap on what you will and won't do in the early startup days. For example, try focusing on just one social media platform (e.g. LinkedIn for B2B, Facebook for B2C). ​Plan specific content, frequency, audiences, etc. Also, business owners tend to think of "social media" as posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, but consider other forms of social media such as answering questions on Reddit, Discord or Quora where you might actually be adding more value.

12. FOCUS ON MQLs THAT ACTUALLY CONVERT TO QUALIFIED OPPORTUNITIES

It can be tempting to generate leads, any leads, even poor leads, just to show progress. But obviously this will catch up to you quickly as you lose the confidence of your stakeholders. Better is to analyze reasons why seemingly good MQLs aren't converting to qualified opportunities:

• timing is not right - perhaps the product is very innovative and the market is just learning about it and preparing budget for it
• too competitive - inbound leads that very directly ask for quotes are actually not always great prospects, especially in a mature competitive market, because they are often just getting as many quotes as possible. They may even have a preferred solution already and they're just contacting you to help validate their preferred option.
• no budget or authority - the person is very interested but just not close enough to the decision maker, or even close enough to influencing the decision maker
• lead doesn't want to talk - some people simply won't engage until they are absolutely ready to buy
• the "pitch" doesn't connect - whereas all the above may not be within your control, this one definitely is. Sales is an all-hands-on-deck effort and all teams need to pitch in to prepare the right materials to support conversion from lead to revenue
• pricing - depending on the type of business, particularly in high-volume SaaS businesses, pricing can make a difference. It's less about lowering your price and making sure you segment customers correctly to apply the right pricing model to the right segment.
• the product isn't right - your marketing has tapped into a real problem and urgency, but somehow after they evaluate your product, there is a blocker. This is where qualitative data can really help to understand the gaps, whether through win/loss interviews or more informal feedback and conversation.

There are many reasons why a lead may not convert into actual revenue, even if they are in your target market. This can be very frustrating, but there are also a wealth of intelligence in here about how to adapt your product-market fit. This intel is pure gold for growth, and it is critical to have a person or team on the front lines responsible for directly experiencing it and sharing it with the organization so that we can adapt quickly. If the team is not continually recording and sharing all of this rich intel, change that today. This is what will allow you to nimbly adapt your pitch, timing, product features and overall value prop accordingly.