It’s an age-old question among brands and companies: is quality or quantity more valuable for generating leads? If you want to develop a long-term business, you probably already know that getting traffic to your store or website should be your top focus. However, to run a successful business, you’ll need a consistent supply of customers.
The only way to do so is to ensure that your business generates enough traffic on a regular basis. But, the question is, should you focus on the numbers or on the quality ones? Well, it’s justified to say if that traffic has no chance of growing your business or influencing your decisions, there’s no point wasting your time there. Isn’t it?
According to a survey, more than 70% of B2B business owners said they would prefer quality leads over leads supplied in quantity. Recently, marketers have started valuing quality leads more than driving as many leads as possible. The reason behind this preference is that the chances of making conversions with quality leads are always higher than with any other leads that enter your funnel.
Yet, the top marketers understand that the secret to getting better results lies in balancing these two ideas and achieving the right marketing mix. How to do that? We’ll get to it in a bit. But before that, let’s take a look at what quality leads are exactly and how they are different from driving leads in bulk.
What Does It Mean by “Quality Lead”?
So, what makes a lead “high quality”? Leads that have a high likelihood of becoming clients are referred to as high-quality leads. Your leads will be more inclined to purchase your goods or services if they are of high quality. High-quality leads usually have a good product fit, which boosts brand loyalty and customer retention. They are simpler to nurture for your sales and customer acquisition teams, but they are typically more costly to obtain for your marketing team.
Still, how do you know which leads are highly likely to convert into customers? And how can you make your campaigns more effective in terms of generating leads? Well, there’s a concept of lead scoring.
Lead scoring is a method for rating a lead’s sales potential. You choose which criteria or relevant data suggest a sales-qualified lead, and then give scores to each of those criteria, resulting in a final score for each lead. It’s more than just a marketing approach when it comes to lead scoring. It has the potential to improve the efficiency of your entire firm as well as the coordination of your multiple teams.
Most companies rate leads by allocating points, using A, B, C, or D rankings, or by using phrases like ‘hot, warm, or cold.’ The main idea is that by focusing on the clarity of a sales-ready lead, marketing and sales may boost their performance and productivity.
Also, every business has its own method for assigning points to score leads, but one of the most popular is to use data from previous leads to develop the value system. You will need a lot of user data to determine high-quality leads for your business. For example, they might include:
- Considering the pages they have visited on your website
- From what source they have landed on your website
- Whether or not a sign-up form on your landing page got them to join
- How long did they spend time on each page
So, getting more B2B data is the key to creating a more unique customer profile for your business. You can customize and eventually approach them with personalized content based on how well you have understood your prospective customer’s profile. It’s no secret why marketers are focusing more and more on lead quality in their existing marketing strategy.
Lead Quality vs. Quantity & ROI
Today’s B2B marketers must improve lead generation and lead nurturing tactics in order to maximize marketing ROI. We all know that ROI is the backbone of any marketing campaign, and quite obviously, the higher the ROI, the more effective the campaign is.
Your lead generation priority, whether it’s on lead quality or quantity, will surely have an influence on your ROI, which is why it’s so essential to monitor. According to a survey, greater ROI assessment of lead and demand generation activities is the top objective for 44 percent of marketers.
Now that we are in the middle of the subject of “is the quality better for lead generation or quantity?” Let’s look at it from the standpoint of ROI.
ROI and Lead Quality
Businesses attempt to increase ROI by optimizing a specific activity, such as blogging. However, your chance of converting a lead into a paying customer drastically increases when you focus on the quality of your leads. This is quite self-explanatory.
Since quality leads are all about targeting the prospects that are more likely to be your customers, focusing on them increases the chances of getting a higher ROI. When you focus on high-quality leads, it also helps in nurturing the relationships and improves customer loyalty. This in turn helps in enhancing the customer’s lifetime value.
Also, when you concentrate on lead quality instead of lead quantity, it shifts your overall marketing expenses to only certain specific leads. In this process, you will be compromising on the number of leads you are getting and you will be targeting much more targeted and highly defined prospects. Targeting specific leads will result in smaller pools of leads.
However, despite being smaller in quantity, they will be highly targeted, which means your resources will be spent more efficiently; hence, a higher ROI.
ROI and Lead Quantity
We have talked about what quality leads are and how they help in increasing the ROI. But how can we get quality leads if we don’t even get enough leads in the first place? This is where it gets interesting. As simple as a numbers game, the more opportunities you will get to play will increase the chances of you winning. This applies to your B2B lead generation approach as well.
In the early stages of a business, when the marketing team needs to prioritize more on brand awareness more, it is important to focus on lead quantity instead of lead quality. It is challenging for a business to gain enough brand awareness and online presence at this stage, especially when it comes to low-cost products or businesses with limited marketing and sales budgets.
If you have a limited budget or are in the initial stage of your business growth, focusing on lead quantity will be a more viable option for you. In short, if you are struggling with getting enough leads in the first place, it is better to focus on the quantity rather than the quality of the leads.
How Do You Find the Perfect Balance Between Them?
Should you cast a broad audience for a large number of leads or a narrow net for highly qualified leads when organizing your marketing initiatives? The answers vary depending on the stage of your business, the size and complexity of your target market, your pricing point, and the nature of your product.
There is no simple fix or magic wand for achieving both quality and quantity, as there is with all balancing acts. However, there are certain tactics that can help marketers attain agreeable quality at scale by bridging quantity and quality. So, let’s take a look at how you will have to balance these two,
- Hand Over the Responsibility to an Expert
To achieve the correct proportion of lead quantity and quality, sales and marketing teams must work together as a team. The ability to integrate both departments can help or hinder your approach. To tackle this situation, having an expert who can handle both the responsibilities well is crucial for striking a proper balance.
This managerial position involves someone with a thorough grasp of how to manage the objectives of both teams. They should be able to come up with solutions and bring the two teams together in harmony. This way, any lead generation efforts will be more data-driven and benefit the company as a whole.
- Set Your Goals & Objectives
Setting goals and objectives is one of the foremost initiatives you can take to understand both teams clearly. Make sure you focus on a fact-based outcome rather than theoretical constructs when setting expectations. Marketing departments are accountable for supplying a particular number of “qualified” leads, while sales teams are in charge of following up with these leads within a specified deadline. And this can be effectively done with the help of an SLA.
In order for marketing prospects to become buyers, they must be closed by a sales representative. Unfortunately, there is sometimes a lack of coordination across those teams regarding who is responsible for what. A cross-team commitment, a marketing-sales service-level agreement (SLA), provides a shared set of objectives around each team’s obligations.
SLAs are measurable targets that reflect marketing and sales objectives. A more simplified marketing-and-sales funnel will follow from the clarity provided by an SLA. SLAs, on the other hand, must be created collaboratively by both teams and maintained by both teams throughout time in order to be effective.
- Target the Right People
When finding a balance, make sure you focus on lead definitions that both teams agree on. Determining your ideal client persona, or in simpler terms, targeting the right people is important to do effective lead scoring for your lead generation. An Ideal Customer Profile is a representation of a prospective customer with characteristics that indicate that the value you’re delivering to them through various services will benefit their business significantly.
Simply put, this customer is likely to purchase from you. Offering services to such a clientele is mutually beneficial because they may make the most of your offerings, increasing your bottom line. This supports your company’s steady growth while reducing resource waste for all involved parties.
- Maintain a Straightforward Reporting Structure
A straightforward reporting structure allows businesses and organizations to quickly and easily monitor how many leads were received over a specific time period and how long it has taken to follow up on them. This helps both sales and marketing teams to improve the lead quality as well as limit the risks of lost profits due to insufficient leads.
However, the reporting structure can be vastly different depending on the industry in which your business operates. Make sure to evaluate and determine which type of structure works best for your organization to streamline the overall process. We all know how visibility and sharing of data promote better alignment throughout the organization. So, ensure providing transparency in your reports so that all the teams can be on the same page to balance quality leads with adequate quantity.
- You Must Come Up With a Solid Plan
When it comes to lead generation, undoubtedly, you must have a plan in mind that your company can stick to. Every lead generation plan starts with identifying the company’s best possible, quickest, and most dependable sources of leads. This guarantees that you are all on the same level when it comes to carrying out your following steps. It also eliminates any questions or rationalizing regarding your lead creation approach. However, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Different businesses have different potential lead sources, which is why you need to consider different strategies to generate leads.
Try out one or two lead generation tactics and measure their effectiveness. If one succeeds, try improving your efforts to generate more leads. If something does not work, try a different method or tweak the strategy you are following.
- Scale Up As You Proceed
Even if you have an excellent lead generation process in place, your work is far from done. You must constantly attract a growing amount of right-fit traffic and convert more of them into potential leads.
By scaling lead generation across your target market groups, you can reach clients who are interested in purchasing before your competitors. It also allows you to build relationships and engage potential clients who are not yet ready to make a purchase choice. Therefore, examine your existing reporting and working practices to do so.
Here’s a quick example of how to effectively scale your lead generation game. Assume you rank first for a term with 4,000 monthly searches. With those numbers, you may easily expect 1,000 visitors each month. You should be able to convert at least 1-3 percent of these 1,000 users into leads. That gives you 10–40 leads per month.
To scale things up, you can simply rank for more of these keywords. Make sure you consider process improvements as such and evaluate each team’s performance to improve your existing processes.
Final Thoughts
There is a good chance that your business will fail if the amount or quality of leads you generate is inadequate. There should be strong coexistence between the two. You must strike a balance that works uniquely for your own business. There is always an opportunity for growth, so don’t stop experimenting, executing, assessing, and updating your lead-generation strategies to enhance the effectiveness and ROI of your efforts. Moreover, to effectively drive your business, you must always prioritize both quality and quantity in your lead generation strategy.