How Do You Generate High-Quality Leads?

What Makes a Lead High Quality?

A high-quality lead is a buyer who matches your written description of your most profitable kind of customer and has a reason to buy soon. Quality is measured by what that customer would be worth to you over the relationship, and a form fill only tells you someone was interested.

That means the definition has to come before any tactic, and it has to be written with the people who close the deals. The IMPACT Prospect step covers this in depth; the short version is a working session with your best salesperson and last quarter’s numbers:

1. Rank your existing customers by lifetime gross profit, after what it cost to win them, and look at who sits at the top.
2. Name the kind of company, the person who signs and the situation that made those customers ready to buy.
3. Write down the poor fits, meaning the buyers who look promising and rarely close, or close and rarely pay back.
4. Agree on one paragraph that sales would recognize in the first five minutes of a call, with the poor-fit signs included.
5. Mark every new lead against that paragraph in the CRM, as a fit, a poor fit or unclear.

How Do You Identify and Qualify a Lead When It Arrives?

You identify a quality lead by checking it against the four parts of that description: the kind of company, the person, the situation and the poor-fit signs. The best setups collect those answers before anyone picks up the phone, through what the offer is and what the form asks.

The offer itself can do much of the qualifying. The contractor’s Prospect Magnet (the useful thing that draws its best buyer in) is a free five-year HVAC replacement forecast for one building, and the request form asks for the firm and the building address, so a homeowner or a tenant shows up as one before a service manager spends any time on them.

Why Does Sales Say the Leads Are Junk?

Sales usually says the leads are junk because marketing and sales are aiming at different targets. Marketing is measured on how many leads it produces, sales on how many deals it closes, and when nobody has written down who a good lead is, each side judges the same leads against a different picture in its head.

Both sides are usually partly right, because some leads are poor fits from a campaign, keyword or list aimed too wide (in client accounts we’ve seen lead volume look healthy until someone checked which segments the leads came from), and others are good fits that went cold because they didn’t look like the deals the team was used to closing, or because nobody called them back quickly. The same working session that writes the description settles both, since it gives marketing a target it can be measured on (fit leads, not all leads) and gives sales a shared way to mark what arrives.

The ad platforms can widen the gap, because they learn from whatever you count as a conversion, and in our own campaigns counting low-value actions taught the platform to find people who looked and didn’t buy.

Why Do More Leads So Often Mean Worse Leads?

Lead volume and lead quality pull against each other because the cheapest leads to get are usually the broadest, and the buyer worth the most to you is a small, specific slice of the market. Every filter that removes poor fits also removes some leads, so a team judged on volume will keep loosening the filters, which is why how to scale a lead generation strategy judges each step on the cost of each added customer rather than each lead.

The contractor’s public-bid customers were the easiest to find and the least profitable, which is why its written description names any buyer who requires a public bid as a poor fit.

There are limits to how hard you should filter:

• When every buyer is worth about the same, for example a low-priced product with little difference in margin or repeat purchases between customer types, volume matters more and heavy filtering costs more than it saves.
• When sales has time on its hands, a few extra poor fits cost little, and a looser filter can show whether a new segment belongs in the description.
• When the filter is built on habit rather than numbers, it can screen out good buyers who don’t look like the usual deal, which is why the description should be checked against lifetime profit at least once a year.

How Do You Improve Lead Quality?

You improve lead quality by tying every tactic to the written description, so each one either draws in the buyer you described or turns away the ones you named as poor fits. A tactic that does neither only changes how many leads you get.

• Make a specific offer that your best buyer would want and a poor fit wouldn’t bother with. In our own campaigns, a specific, low-risk offer outperformed a generic one, which buyers tend to read as a sales trap.
• Say on the page who it’s for and who it isn’t, because one plain line lowers the number of leads and raises the number worth calling.
• Put price signals in your ads when your price rules buyers out. Putting the starting price in our own ads cut clicks from buyers who could never afford it, which saved money and improved the leads that came through.
• Tell the ad platforms what a qualified lead is. In client accounts, optimizing on a qualified-lead event instead of every form fill changes who the platform finds, and can raise quality at the same cost.
• Follow up the same day, because a good lead that waits goes cold, and how to follow up with sales leads covers the process.

The Prospect-to-Lead Conversion step covers the page and the follow-up in detail, and here’s what those changes did for the contractor’s paid search.