How To Generate MQLs That Want to Speak with Sales

Tom Brokaw once said, “What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day. And on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.” This statement is powerful because it underscores a key component of effective communication: context. It’s something we’ve been hearing about in content marketing for years, yet it’s often overlooked.

Context is what makes content resonate, and without it, we fail to address the real needs of our audience.

Jump to a section:

Five Steps | Content Marketing’s Challenge | Building Effective Assessments | A Case Study With Results

The steps

Here’s your short version, but much more information further on, including a client story showing results:

1) Marketers must incorporate interactive assessments into lead generation campaigns

You are probably asking – what exactly is an interactive assessment and how’s it differ from a quiz?

An interactive assessment is a form of interactive content that is designed to collect detailed information on a prospects business challenges and give them instant insights & recommendations at the same time. An assessment can have 10-20 questions centered on a specific topic that is relevant to your buyer.

For example, a security software company could create an assessment called “Cyber Risk Capability”. When the prospect completes the assessment, they instantly receive a personalized scorecard that includes analysis, recommendations, and other security data points like comparisons to others in their industry.

Here’s the key: This needs to get specific – and you need to clearly and concisely tell prospects what they’ll gain from your assessment.

Say upfront how long the assessment takes (ideally 10 minutes or less) and get “into the weeds” where appropriate with your questions to demonstrate your expertise, as well.

2) Leads who complete the assessment must be passed to Sales for immediate follow up. No nurturing required!

Prospects that take assessments are naturally curious and are very interested in learning how their business is performing. These are grade A-quality leads.

Sales is now in a position to add more value to this prospect by sharing insights based on their assessment results – which leads to a tailored outreach vs. a generic “hi, can I have 30 minutes to ask a ton of questions?”

3) Sales reps view the prospect’s automated scorecard to see what they are doing well, what they are struggling with, and what opportunities exist to help.

The assessment results provide the sales rep with the critical CONTEXT and INSIGHT into the prospect’s business. This is the missing information identified in the prior post.

The rep is now in position to add tremendous value by sharing additional insights, analysis, and recommendations that are PERSONALIZED to for the prospect.

4) With this context and extra information, Sales engage in a more personalized follow-up offering to share additional insights & recommendations.

Unlike the email shared in the prior post, a follow up email can now provide a tremendous amount of value to the prospect. The email can be personalized even further highlighting some of the assessment results, and the rep is viewed as a subject matter expert with information the prospect WANTS.

The prospect will take this meeting to keep learning, because they see it as a value add and they view what the salesperson is bringing in a trusted advisor role!

5) Sales reps must tailor the conversation with the prospect.

Better sales conversations produce better results! The rep is able to focus the conversation on the top need areas identified in the assessment. This allows the conversation to advance quickly and uncover the best sales opportunities. The trust built during this process has shown to accelerate the sales cycle & increase win rates.

A Content Marketing Challenge

At this point, I’ll turn this to colleage Brian Shaner from The Pedowitz Group to speak a typical consulting firm challenge (click here if you want to see results they achieved – it’ll jump you down to that section!):

“While content marketing helps them gain visibility and engage with potential customers, it often falls short when it comes to providing the context that drives deeper engagement. Content marketing does a great job of attracting attention, but it doesn’t always give us insight into why someone engages with our material.

For example, you might see that Bob downloaded a white paper or Jill watched a webinar, but you don’t know why they did so. What question were they trying to answer? What problem were they hoping to solve? Without this crucial information, we’re left to guess, which makes it difficult to pass qualified leads to the sales team.

When we hand over leads to sales—saying that Bob downloaded the white paper, watched the webinar, and visited the website—sales teams often struggle to determine what those prospects are actually interested in. And the question always comes up: What should we do when we follow up with them? Without understanding the motivations behind their actions, it’s hard to provide specific guidance on how to engage.

This situation creates a dilemma for marketers: How can we deliver quality leads to sales while ensuring we provide enough context for meaningful follow-up? The challenge is to answer two key questions:

What drove this individual to engage with our content?
How do we equip sales with enough context to initiate a productive conversation?

The Search for a Solution

In response, we started exploring solutions that would help us collect more meaningful data from prospects. The key idea was to give prospects an incentive to provide the information we needed—something that added value to them and encouraged deeper engagement.

Could assessments provide this value? Could they give us enough context to answer the two questions above? We believed they could.

Why Assessments Are Key

Assessments can provide tremendous value to prospects because they offer personalized insights based on their input. But in today’s content-saturated world, where professionals are bombarded with countless pieces of content, what makes a particular piece stand out? Why would someone choose to engage with a specific piece of content over the hundreds of thousands of other options available?

Professionals are often looking for ways to benchmark themselves against their peers. They want to know how they’re performing compared to others in the same industry. They want to see if they’re on track or falling behind.

Additionally, professionals are looking for simple ways to improve their performance. If there’s an easy tweak they can make to boost their results, they’ll want to know about it.

Finally, they want answers tailored to their unique environment. A generic recommendation—like “make your email banners 20-point font with real images”—may not apply to every industry. A recommendation for someone in the manufacturing sector might be very different from one for an insurance provider.

By offering assessments that provide tailored results, we believed we could create more meaningful interactions. When prospects completed an assessment, they would be more likely to engage with sales because the results would give the sales team personalized insights into their needs and challenges.

The MQL-Sales Handoff Challenge

As we moved forward with this idea, we realized that the issue didn’t just lie in the content itself—it also stemmed from the way we were passing Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to sales.”

Thanks, Brian! So, let’s look at the traditional process for enterprise or complex sales:

On the marketing side, a lot of time and effort is spent attracting visitors, engaging them with valuable content, and nurturing them to take action—whether that’s downloading a white paper, watching a video, or visiting the website.
Once this engagement happens, the leads are handed off to sales.

There’s often a significant gap between this handoff:

Why MQLs Hesitate to Engage with Sales

The challenges marketers face are clear:

Prospects want immediate value: If they don’t find the value they’re looking for, they’ll leave your site and look elsewhere.
Prospects want personalized content: They want content that speaks directly to their specific challenges and business needs.

When prospects download a white paper, research report, or any other piece of content, the question they’re constantly asking is, “How does this impact my business, and how can it solve my problems?”

As marketers, we’re asking prospects to translate what they’ve learned into their own business context. But because we can’t read their minds, we have no way of knowing what they found most relevant or valuable.

This is where the handoff process becomes a challenge. When prospects move from self-educating to wanting to engage with a sales rep, it represents a significant jump in engagement. And, as we know, this is often where the process breaks down.

As marketers, we invest a great deal of time and resources to bring visitors to our websites and generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). These leads are typically passed to the sales team with a brief note: “This person downloaded this gated content; here’s their name, email, and company.”

However, this handoff lacks crucial context. The sales rep doesn’t know if the prospect actually read the content. They don’t know which specific sections of the white paper captured their attention or what challenges they were hoping to address.

At best, the follow-up email from the sales rep might look like this: “Hi, I saw you visited our website and downloaded our white paper. Hope you found it helpful. Would love to follow up and tell you more.”

But this approach provides little value to the prospect. They’ve already consumed the content—why would they want to engage with a sales rep at this point? There’s no immediate incentive for the prospect to reply, and as a result, responses are minimal. The lack of perceived value from the sales rep is a major reason why MQLs aren’t eager to engage with sales.

As marketers, we’ve all sent similar emails, and it’s easy to see why this method doesn’t generate the responses we need. So, how do we move beyond this? How do we create a situation where MQLs want to speak with sales?

Engaging MQLs with Interactive Assessments

One effective strategy to address this challenge is the use of interactive assessments. But what does this look like in practice?

An interactive assessment is typically a 10-20 question survey that prospects complete on their own. The key to its effectiveness lies in the value it provides. After completing the assessment, the prospect receives a personalized scorecard that outlines insights into their business challenges and provides recommendations for how to address them.

These assessments are quick to complete, usually taking no more than five to ten minutes, and the value far exceeds the time investment. Once the assessment is finished, the prospect receives their scorecard via email in real-time, providing instant value and encouraging further engagement.

Building Effective Assessments

You might be wondering: How do I build such an assessment? If you’ve never created one before, don’t worry—you’re not alone. Fortunately, we’ve developed a process and program that helps our clients create highly effective assessments that drive engagement with prospects.

We provide a detailed guidebook and a structured process that walks clients through each step of the assessment creation journey. This includes:

Knowing Your Buyer. Surprisingly, many organizations don’t start here. Understanding the personas you’re targeting is crucial. What are their pain points? What keeps them up at night? Truly putting yourself in the shoes of your buyer is the first step toward creating an engaging assessment.
Connecting Interest to Your Solution. Once you understand the buyer’s interests, the next step is to connect those interests to your solution. It’s essential to ensure that the assessment’s outcomes align with the solutions your company provides.
Building the Assessment. Start by identifying the recommendations you often give to your clients around the topic at hand. What do you typically advise? This insight can serve as the foundation for your questions. Work backward from these recommendations to create questions that will uncover the most important aspects of your prospects’ challenges.Then, add scoring logic, benchmarks, and comparisons to industry standards to provide deeper context. This structure allows you to generate meaningful results that are directly relevant to your prospects’ business needs.

Once the assessment is built, we guide you through implementing it across all of your campaigns—whether on your website, in email campaigns, or as part of your social media and event strategies.

The Psychology Behind Interactive Assessments

So why do interactive assessments work so well?

When a prospect visits your website, learns about your offerings, and shows interest in a topic, they’re presented with a few options: download a gated asset (white paper, research report, etc.), schedule a sales discovery call, or take an assessment.

Given the choice, many prospects opt for the assessment.

Why? Because as long as you do a great job communicating the value they’ll receive and if your ask is low (think eight minutes or less), your prospect knows they’ll receive personalized insights into their own business challenges and actionable recommendations.

By answering the questions in the assessment, the prospect begins framing the problem in their mind. They are, in essence, educating themselves just by engaging with the assessment – and without a sales rep, which many don’t want. When they receive their scorecard, they gain valuable insights tailored to their specific situation, helping them better understand their challenges.

The Power of Personalization

Typically, the scorecard includes an overall score that shows how well the prospect is performing in relation to the benchmarks. For example, the Pedowitz Group often uses assessments that provide insights like: “Here’s how you’re doing overall—good or bad?”

From there, prospects can dive deeper into specific areas where they’re excelling or where there’s room for improvement. They’ll also see how their performance compares to industry benchmarks.

Finally, the scorecard provides recommendations: “Based on your results, here’s what you should do next.” These recommendations are tailored to the individual’s specific situation, making them highly valuable.

This approach works because you’re talking to a prospect who is highly engaged and curious. They want to know how well they’re performing and how they can improve. The insight they gain from the assessment is exactly what they need to make informed decisions about their next steps.

For the sales team, this approach offers valuable insights into the prospect’s business challenges. Is the prospect a good fit for your product or service? What specific issues are they facing? This information arms your sales team with the context they need to engage effectively.

Incorporating Assessments into Your Marketing Campaigns

Once the assessment is built, it’s crucial to promote it across all of your marketing channels. These assessments should be integrated into everything you’re already doing:

Place it on your homepage.
Add it to landing pages.
Associate it with white papers, blogs, and email campaigns.
Promote it on social media, at events, and in conferences.

By promoting the assessment in these various ways, you create more opportunities to generate MQLs at the top of the funnel.

The Overall Experience

Once a prospect comes through one of the campaigns we’ve discussed and takes the assessment, they typically answer ten to twenty questions and provide essential demographic details, such as their industry, company size, and other relevant information. This data is used to generate an automated scorecard, which is then sent to the prospect via email.

The sales and/or marketing team can be instantly notified of the completion through marketing automation or directly via the Nine Lenses platform. The inside sales rep, demand generation rep, or sales rep can then log in, view the scorecard, and have a meaningful, informed conversation with the prospect. They now have valuable insights into the prospect’s results—where they’re performing well and where they may need improvement—and can provide tailored recommendations that add real value.

This shift is where the magic happens. Rather than sending a generic email, the sales rep can follow up with a highly personalized message, referencing the assessment results. For example, they could say, “I see you completed the assessment and received two or three recommendations. I’d love to share a few more based on your score. Can we schedule some time for me to walk you through them?”

This completely transforms the dynamic of the conversation. The sales rep is positioned as a subject matter expert (SME), and because the prospect has already engaged with the assessment and received personalized recommendations, they are more likely to value the conversation and be interested in learning more. This leads to a higher quality of sales interaction and better outcomes overall.

TPG’s Experience and Results

Here’s a real-life example of The Pedowitz Group (TPG) leveraging the 9Lenses platform for a marketing use case that drove pipeline and revenue – back to you, Brian:

“We had previously been using a manual Excel-based survey, and while it provided valuable data, we knew there was a better way to share this insight with the world. Last year, we launched our first Revenue Marketing Report and created a landing page. I encourage you to check it out and even take the assessment yourself.

Since launching the report and assessment, we saw seen over 8,000 unique visitors to the page, with more than 200 downloads of our Revenue Marketing Index Report. Interestingly, the assessment is outperforming the report in terms of engagement. People are more interested in being evaluated than just reading a report. They want to know how they’re doing, which is a powerful insight.

Additionally, we’ve seen positive results with our marketing certification course. Out of the 212 people who started the assessment, 123 have completed it. We’ve set up a nurture stream encouraging people to finish the assessment, which is helping increase the completion rate.

But what’s most exciting is the results we’ve seen in terms of lead generation and sales performance. We’ve gained 100 new qualified leads (and the number continues to grow), and we’ve seen a 22% higher conversion rate to opportunity. This improvement is largely due to the self-education the prospect undergoes by taking the assessment.”

The Key to Higher Conversion Rates

The key takeaway here is that when the sales rep receives a lead, they have much more insight into the prospect’s needs. Instead of starting the conversation with generic questions like, “What are your challenges?” the sales rep can jump straight into more meaningful discussions based on the prospect’s assessment responses.

This allows us to move past the traditional MQL-to-SQL stage, where the lead is only at stage zero (interest) or stage one (sales acceptance). With the information provided by the assessment, the prospect is often already at stage three, or even problem resolution, because they’ve self-identified their issues and solutions through the assessment.

Impact on Deal Size and Win Rates

The assessment doesn’t just help close deals faster—it also contributes to larger average deal sizes. When prospects take the assessment, they give sales reps the insights they need to uncover hidden needs. For example, a prospect might come in seeking a lead management workshop, but the assessment might reveal additional opportunities, like organizational improvement or marketing automation optimization. This allows us to provide a broader, more valuable offering to the prospect.

Additionally, by proving value early in the sales process (through the assessment and personalized recommendations), we are positioned as experts. This has led to an increased win rate. Prospects are more likely to continue the relationship because they’ve already seen value from the assessment.

Enhancing Sales Interactions

The quality of our first sales interactions has drastically improved. Sales reps now actively seek out assessments because they know these leads are more engaged and better informed. The excitement they feel when they receive an assessment is similar to how I might feel about getting a chocolate bar—they can’t wait to dive into these leads.

As a result, the sales cycle has accelerated. Since the prospect has already gone through an assessment and received personalized insights, the conversation moves faster, and there’s less time spent on basic qualification.

Differentiation in the Market

One of the biggest benefits of using assessments is differentiation. Not many competitors offer this type of personalized feedback. By sharing insights through the assessment, we set ourselves apart. Prospects value this kind of transparency, and it helps establish us as experts in the field.

While not every prospect who completes the assessment is ready to buy immediately, we don’t let that data go to waste. We upload the assessment data into our Marketo account, allowing us to continue nurturing the lead and tailor follow-up content based on their responses.

Now, I have valuable insights that I can continue to leverage in my nurture programs and for all my targeting. For instance, if we’re running a campaign on lead management, and a prospect scores a 9 on that area, I wouldn’t want to target them because they’re already performing well. However, if they score a 4, I’d focus my efforts on targeting them for improvement in that area. Integrating the assessment results into your marketing automation platform or CRM allows you to send tailored messages to prospects, going beyond just the initial sales follow-up.”

How to onboard sales to use marketing assessments

There are two types of implementations. One is for marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) that feed into sales, and the other is for sales reps engaging directly with their customers and clients.

For marketing-qualified leads, every time an assessment is completed, the sales team is notified, and they can see when someone views their scorecard. This provides insights into activity for immediate follow-up. But beyond just the notifications, we also train sales reps on how to interpret the results. This training goes deeper than what we covered here, but the key point is that we want to arm sales reps with more meaningful, data-driven conversations with prospects. The sales version of the scorecard often includes more sales enablement content, like case studies or additional data, to help reps engage effectively.

One of the common challenges I’ve seen across multiple companies is that marketing will launch a campaign, and then they’ll train sales on how to use it. But once the training is over, sales reps often forget the details a month or two later because they’re busy with other tasks. To address this, we’ve automated the process of providing just-in-time direction to sales reps. This helps them follow up more effectively and accelerates the conversion of MQLs to opportunities

The automation is a game-changer in ensuring that the sales team has the right information at the right time.