Ungated MQL Integration

Running an ungated journey to generate high quality Demos can be a very anxiety ridden strategy to transition to if a team member or organization has never done it before. Luckily, we have successfully helped brands transition to this strategy and can help make this an easy, stress free landing.

Theory Behind the Ungated Journey:

Traditionally, the most coveted conversion to send to sales is Demo. Unfortunately, it can be incredibly difficult to get. Hence the pivot to providing the SDR team with leads that have MQL’d. The SDR team is then charged with getting the MQL over the finish line to turn into a SQL. Leads will be sent back, points adjusted, and the process starts all over again. If too many leads are sent back, marketers lose their credibility. Less MQLs are called. Finger pointing begins.

The ungated journey seeks to go around all of that and just provide demos to the sales team. We want the prospect to consume a carefully choreographed, ungated, string of content that will signal to use when to provide the form to them at the right time versus all the time. The mental pivot is to shift from a high volume, low quality lead gen program to a low volume, high quality pipeline generation machine.

Here is how we do it.

Audience Audit:

Before we can transition to an ungated journey, we will have to run an audit within LinkedIn, Paid Search, Display platform (6sense, Demandbase, Rollworks, Terminus, etc), as well as Salesforce to see what type of potential audiences we can build with your current data of the previous engagements from your Ideal Customer Profile.

Tiered approach to Previous Engagements:

Cold Layer: No asset downloads but maybe website engagements or no website engagements at all
- We will want to place content syndication leads and/or 3rd party webinar leads in this category since they traditionally receive low scores in any traditional MQL system.
Warm Layer: 1-2 Asset Downloads and website engagements
Demo Ready: 3 Asset Downloads and multiple website engagements

Luckily we can create lists from the data above that we will upload into LinkedIn. From there, we will have a good idea of what types of remarkable audiences we can create to then progress to the following Ungated Journey roll out.

Ungated Journey Roll Out:

There are 2 ways we can roll out this strategy:

#1 Slow and Gradual Transition

We traditionally recommend this approach. We want to prove point of concept before we transition the whole strategy over to ungated. What this looks like is creating a list of accounts that we will segment out from all forms, SDR outreach, and Email blasts.

An easy way to do this is to work with your SDR team to have them segment a list out of your most untouchable accounts. The accounts that, no matter what they try, they just can’t penetrate. In our experience, these accounts usually will fall out of call and email cadences anyway and may be “occasionally” touched. From there, we run them through our audience audit above, upload lists, and begin crafting the campaign that will progress leads from all 3 tiers above. Of course, we can use any list the team provides us. We really want to make sure that, if possible, they are no longer gated our outreach to.

#2 Ungated from the Start

This is a great strategy for small start ups (Think Series A-C) who have never really done digital and don’t have the lofty expectation of supplying a large sum of MQLs to their SDR team. This is a great opportunity to start out building great audiences to grow your company’s brand to get demo.

Timeline to success:

The success timeline greatly depends on the previous engagements of your ICP and how they fit within our tiered system of engagement. If you already have a lot of ICPs at the Demo Ready stage then it could take 1-2 months. If you have no audience size to speak of it could take 6-9 months. If we are making adjustments to the titles we are targeting consistently, and you have a small audience, it can take longer than 9 months. Every situation is different but we do have a general timeline we recommend.

We traditionally recommend a timeline of 3-6 months.

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