How to Report on MQLs in the HubSpot Salesforce Integration

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect who meets a set of criteria that qualifies them as potential customers (vs. general social media followers, for example) based on their actions related to your company, such as visiting specific pages, downloading materials, or attending events. 

Your marketing team identifies MQLs and passes them to your sales team when they’re ready to be engaged (aka, when they become a Sales Qualified Lead). This gives your sales team the chance to prepare adequately ahead of time.

For this model to work for your company, there must be strong alignment between your sales and marketing teams and shared definitions of an MQL. Otherwise, you risk creating a poor experience where leads receive conflicting messages or aren’t engaged at the right times, potentially costing your business revenue and reputation.

Depending on your company, qualifying criteria may include a combination of the following:

• Specific content a prospect must engage with.
• Demographics like age, marital status, or location.
• Firmographics like company size or industry.
• The challenge they’re facing.
• The actions they take on your website, like visiting a pricing page vs. a blog.

A good rule of thumb is to observe past customers’ behavior as a guide for setting these qualifiers. Performance metrics like email engagement and filled forms are good indicators. An attribution report is also a good place to start. Setting these criteria is a collaborative effort between your sales and marketing teams, and it’s part of a larger lead management strategy. Plus, chances are this criteria will evolve depending on quarterly or yearly goals and performance.

The Difference Between MQLs and SQLs

These terms often need clarification. But as we mentioned earlier, an MQL is someone who meets a set of qualifying criteria to be handed off to the sales team for research and prospecting. On the other hand, a Sales Qualified Lead is someone who your sales team has connected with and qualified as a good fit for your product. Aka, someone who’s on the verge of becoming a customer.

The million dollar question — why identify MQLs? Wouldn’t you prefer your sales team to cast a wide net? The answer is no. Of course, you want as many people as possible to convert, but your chances of success increase - and your business grows - when your sales team can spend their time speaking to people ready to make a decision.

This is where lead scoring and MQL qualification come in.

How to Manage MQLs in the HubSpot Salesforce Integration

Most CRMs use a form of the Lead object to mark new opportunities, even for existing customers, including Salesforce. The Contact object stores individual people associated to an Account. In contrast, the Lead object represents a new interest by a new or existing Contact and can have the same email address as the previous record. Salesforce Leads and Contacts both sync to HubSpot Contacts, but you have to choose one or the other for record creation from HubSpot when integrating both platforms. 

A common issue people have with the HubSpot Salesforce integration is that they’re used to creating a new Lead in Salesforce when a Contact initiates an engagement, whereas HubSpot keeps all relevant information about a contact within their Contact record.

Instead of creating new records every time a user engages with with you, HubSpot uses the Lifecycle Stage property, which tracks a Contact’s journey with your company. This is helpful because as your customer progresses, your team has full visibility of their entire history, including post-purchase engagements and requests for support. This allows you to deliver timely, relevant messages at all times.

You may be wondering what to do without Salesforce’s Lead object. To track your Contact’s origin and most recent interactions, you can use HubSpot’s Original and Latest Source properties, which record a Contact’s first and most recent interaction with your business.

Reporting on MQLs with the HubSpot Salesforce Integration

To qualify someone as an MQL, you can either manually update the Lifecycle Stage property in HubSpot or use a Contact-based Workflow to automate this update. MQL Workflows are often triggered by meeting the Lead Score threshold, a Contact property update, form submissions, or a combination of the three. 

Your MQL data gives you valuable insights into the common characteristics of your most successful customers, who your marketing should and shouldn’t attract, and who your sales team should focus on to maximize your results. You’ll be able to identify opportunities and close the gaps you didn’t even know you had.

To create a report in HubSpot, go to the Reports Menu and click on Reports > Create Report > Customer Journey Reports. Next, select Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, and Sales Qualified Lead from the Lifecycle Stage list. Finally, run or refresh your report, and click Save Report in the top right. Once you’ve created your lifecycle stage report, you can add it to an existing dashboard or create a new one as needed.

Reporting on MQLs when You Use Leads and Contacts in Salesforce

First off, it’s time to consider getting rid of the Lead object in Salesforce, unless your organization has a data team that properly leverages this object.

Some background context: The Lead object is meant to be an initial point of contact between a prospect and your business. In Salesforce, this object is intended to be temporary until your team has enough information for the prospect to become a Contact. The issues come when hand-off is unclear, or Leads accumulate without an action plan.

As a reminder, while multiple Leads representing the same person can be stored with the same email address in Salesforce, HubSpot doesn’t allow multiple Contacts to have the same email address. One of the main challenges in reporting MQLs when using Leads and Contacts in Salesforce is that MQL data is overwritten every time a Lead is converted to an existing Contact. This means there is no way to know how many times that Lead has converted. This can cause major headaches in every aspect, from assigning the Contact to the proper workflows to ensuring timely communications and more.

We recommend moving from the Lead object and exploring Opportunity-based Inquiry Management. This blog provides an in-depth view of the reasons behind this recommendation and how to implement it in your HubSpot Salesforce integration.

Unsure about this shift? Book a consultation, and let’s discuss how you can navigate it.

The Tides Are Changing

The HubSpot Salesforce integration is a powerful level-up for your company… when implemented and managed correctly. The Navigators Community is a one-stop shop where you’ll find other HubSpot Salesforce Integration power users, exclusive content, regular live training sessions, and all of our existing resources to master the integration and boost your confidence.