Having healthy traffic hit your website or landing page is great. This means your SEO and ads are running just fine. Likewise, your sales pipeline is also looking great with a healthy number of leads. But despite all this, if you are still struggling to hit your revenue goals, your lead quality may be to blame!
Read on to discover what makes a lead good and how to attract great quality leads while avoiding the bad ones using a solid, proven framework.
What is Lead Quality?
Quality over Quantity—Remember this adage?
Not surprisingly, this concept applies to leads and lead generation as well. By definition, a lead is said to be a quality lead if they are interested in your product or service, and there’s also a reasonable probability that they will convert into paying customers sometime in the future.
Simply put, higher-quality leads are more likely to convert into sales.
On the other hand, lower quality leads are either not interested in your offering, or worse, not likely to pay and use your product any time.
For example, if you are selling high ticket enterprise SaaS software with high ticket monthly subscriptions, those looking for FREE or lifetime deals may never be a good fit as your audience, even though their requirement might be for a product similar to yours.
Is Lead Quality Really that Important?
Only 8% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were very high quality – Hubspot.
Lower quality means more time spent with the wrong people and fewer opportunities to spend already limited sales time with the right prospects. This results in lower conversions and revenue. All in all, wasted time, effort, and dollars!
Check out Hubspot research below:
As indicated above, “74% of companies say converting leads into customers is their top priority” (HubSpot).
How to Measure Lead Quality
Data is king. Keeping track of your traffic and what it does on your website will tell you everything you need to know about lead quality.
Lead Scoring
Before you begin anything, your lead scoring system needs to be in place. A lead score is a method of ranking prospects based on their sales readiness and the perceived value each represents to an organization.
Not all leads are created equal. You will assign a numerical value to each lead based on pre-determined criteria. The total score of a lead will guide you on how ready they are to go ahead with the purchase. Therefore, how much time you need to be spending with them.
For example, in the case of email marketing, you would assign a higher lead score for someone who has opened most of your emails and even clicked on the links inside, as compared to someone who does not even open your emails.
Once your lead scoring is in place, tracking the different types of lead quality KPI (Key Performance Indicator) parameters starts assuming a deeper meaning.
Lead Quality Metrics
- Visitors to Leads
What percentage of visitors to your website become leads? This will tell you how your marketing efforts drive traffic to your site.
- Leads to Opportunities
Your website now generates leads. How many of them proceed to lead qualification and become sales-ready leads? Knowing this helps you evaluate how qualified your initial leads were.
- Time to Conversion
The probability of someone becoming a customer is one thing. However, what’s also important is how much time has to be expended by a sales rep to convert this qualified lead into a paying customer.
Effects of Improving The Lead Quality
What could be the possible benefits of improving the quality of your leads?
- The overall lead volume decreases.
- High-quality lead volume increases.
- The cost per lead usually shoots up.
- The cost per high-quality lead goes down.
- The Click-through rate typically goes down.
With higher quality leads, your business simply wins more often than not. Conversely, you’d be hard-pressed to find an example where low-quality leads are all right unless, of course, you are running campaigns for your very own competitors!
The 7-Step Framework to Improve Lead Quality
Instead of relying on some random Youtube content promising you the latest hacks and tips for quality leads, follow the below proven step-by-step framework to improve the quality of leads you feed your sales team for conversions.
Define Your Target Audience Well
It all starts with the right input. First, you should have an excellent idea of who needs your product or service most and is likely to buy it now and those that never will. This information should be a part of your official “Buyer Persona” document.
Whether you are a B2B business or offering B2C services, the parameters you zero in on could be different.
Also, more often than not, you will have multiple buyer personas, i.e., different customer profiles who are likely to buy your product for different reasons or at different stages.
Use Relevant Channels to Attract Them
Your “Buyer Persona” research will tell you a lot about your target customer, including where to find them. Choosing the proper channels to find them will lower your advertising costs and ensure lesser wastage of marketing dollars, e.g., Facebook ads vs. LinkedIn organic posts vs. Google ads.
Optimize Your Messaging Over the Chosen Channels
For example, if attracting leads through your blog and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), ensure that you are not just gunning for the top keywords in terms of volume but also ones that indicate the maximum percentage of the correct intent.
If using emails, ensure that your popups are signup forms set the right expectations and promises.
Ensure Relevant Nurturing Once They Enter Your Marketing Funnel
Once the visitor has shared their email address, the game has well and truly begun. Ensure that they are taken through a journey that gets them deeper inside the funnel and into an increasingly closer relationship with your brand that ultimately ends with a purchase.
Use Emails & SMS as an Integral Part of Your Nurturing
One of the best ways to use email marketing is setting up an automated sequence of emails to fire based upon user behavior and action triggers. This can be extremely valuable when done right.
Sender provides you with a great way to nurture your prospects using emails that is easy to set up and automate. And all of this at highly affordable pricing. Email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent, so if you haven’t been making money from emails, the time to start is now.
Identify and Let Go of The Bad Leads
List hygiene is essential. So while this may seem like contrarian advice, it will benefit your email marketing in the longer run.
Provide terrific value through emails. But at the same time, don’t flinch them cleaning inactive subscribers who do not open your emails at all. Be open to asking subscribers to unsubscribe if their interests are not being served.
At least, it’s better than a small bunch of disinterested users marking your email as spam repeatedly and affecting the inbox deliverability for other subscribers who do want to hear from you.
Test. And Then Test Some More
All marketing is being tested. So feel free to test your traffic sources, messaging, nurturing sequences, and everything one at a time to build a high-quality lead generation funnel that provides you excellent quality leads all the time.
Improve Lead Quality in a Snap
Leads and prospects are the lifeblood of any business. Therefore it’s clear that lead generation is essential and worth your marketing budget spend to get traffic hitting your digital assets regularly.
But lead quality control from a highly optimized lead generation funnel is even more critical. Instead of directing all efforts to increase leads, the quality of what’s coming through should also be closely measured and monitored.
Also, remember that optimizing your lead generation funnel for better quality leads is a continuous process with the overarching goal of supplying a constant source of high-quality leads to your sales pipeline.
Also read:
Content Contributor – Santosh Balakrishnan
