It starts with qualified accounts, not MQLs Marketing and sales haven’t historically had the easiest time deciding which accounts to target or how to measure engagement. MQLs aren’t necessarily a waste of time, but you’d have to spend a lot of resources (e.g., time, ad spend, sales calls) trying to find a truly high-quality, well-timed, relevant MQL when you could instead begin with a pool of truly qualified accounts. The first action to take is to reframe your thinking from individual leads to accounts, focus on the entire buying team within accounts, and move to a surround strategy. Much like you’d be enveloped by music from all sides if you had a surround sound system, the same is true of a surround strategy when it comes to ABX — you want to envelop buying teams from qualified accounts with orchestrated programs throughout every stage of the buying journey. This new focus on entire buying teams and a surround strategy often results in revenue marketers seeing fewer (but more qualified) accounts, which can raise alarm bells for those accustomed to chasing ever larger lead tallies. However, this approach has been proven to generate more (and bigger) deals that close more quickly. A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is an individual (i.e., single lead) that is deemed more likely to become a customer because they have attained a certain score as a result of actions taken on your website, like downloading a case study or registering for and attending a webinar. However, these scores are arbitrarily defined by marketing, so a high score doesn’t necessarily indicate that a buyer is ready to make a decision — and a low score doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not. But regardless of the accuracy of scoring models, leads are passed to sales as soon as they reach the MQL qualification threshold. A qualified account is what we call a 6sense Qualified Account, or 6QA. A 6QA represents an account that meets your ideal customer profile and has just moved to the decision or purchase buying stages as predicted by 6sense’s patented AI models. Your historical sales and marketing data, combined with real-time intent and engagement data, is what powers 6sense’s four predictive models: account fit, contact fit, contact engagement, and current buying stage. These models find patterns in the behavior of both anonymous and known buyers and compare that activity of past successful opportunities to determine where sellers and marketers should focus their time and effort. Together, these four models provide a deeper level of insight that enables revenue teams to predictably grow pipeline and revenue. 6sense.com | (415) 212-9225