5 Ways to Increase Lead Quality

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Sales and business development professionals know the importance of receiving quality inbound leads. It’s not enough to simply increase volume by pushing out massive marketing campaigns. Organizations need to ensure that the leads coming in have both the ability and intention to eventually make a purchase. However, with invalid email addresses frequently filling out forms, duplicate contacts entering CRMs, and even bots and fake users interacting with digital content, it can be hard to continue managing a high-quality lead generation machine. In this article, we will cover tips for creating and maintaining top-notch lead generation. 

1. Data Hygiene 

Sometimes it can be hard to tell if a lead is actually a bad lead or if the information is just outdated. One of the first ways companies can clean up their databases to help get a clearer picture of this is through inspecting – and removing – duplicates. Sometimes when a customer moves to a new company, changes their name, or updates their email address, an organization could end up with that same person in their database under multiple contacts. It can be a daunting task to sift through all that data, but it’s a good place to start. Additionally, it can be beneficial to come up with universal naming conventions so that your entire organization is identifying contact information in the same way. For example, are you listing countries as 2 letter codes, fully written out names, or some other format? Coming to a consensus across organizations can be challenging but once everyone is on the same page, data management becomes much easier moving forward. 

2. Internal Communication

When a new lead enters your database, how soon is your team responding to them? Since many deals are lost due to delays in communication, ensuring timely replies can become mission critical. If someone requests a demo of your product, there are tools you can use to set up automated alerts to your team. This can take the form of messaging apps, email notifications, and plug-ins to existing apps that your team already uses. By ensuring timely replies to demo requests or product questions, you can more confidently know that response delays are not the primary reason for deals being lost. This can help determine whether leads are not converting because they are not good quality, or if they were not converting because they were not addressed in a timely manner. 

3. Persona Creation

By this point, we’ve cleaned up our existing data and are responding to leads quickly, so we have a more accurate picture of what is currently going on throughout the funnel. A wise next step is to work with your marketing department to create buyer personas. Creating a few different personas for the types of people who typically purchase your products or services can help bucket large databases into more manageable groups that have key traits in common. For example, one persona could be 30-40 year-old women who live in the South Eastern United States, are teachers by profession, and frequently visit their local gyms. You can then begin targeting each group separately through advertising, creating specific messaging for each, and ultimately providing them with value that meets their specific interests and needs.  By targeting the right personas, you can more easily determine which leads fit into these groups and which ones don’t. This can help you prioritize leads that are more relevant to your products and services. 

4. Nurture Flow Testing 

Many teams set up drip campaigns, or nurture flows, to automate the process of checking in on leads and providing them with relevant information. However, if you don’t carefully cater these messages to each persona or each company you are targeting, your emails could become lost in someone’s inbox or worse – marked as spam. This can cause you to miss out on some of your highest quality leads simply because they are not seeing your messages. With drip campaigns, sometimes it’s easy to “set it and forget it” but frequently checking in on how these are performing, and updating your messaging accordingly to better target your most high-quality prospects can pay off in additional pipeline and revenue. 

5. Go-to-Market Security 

Keeping data clean, communicating with your team, prioritizing leads that fit into your personas, and frequently updating follow-ups to optimize your messaging are all great ways to start identifying and connecting with the best leads. However, even after all of these efforts are fully functioning, the presence of the Fake Web can impact the quality of leads that are coming to your site and entering your funnel. Studies find that 27% of organic and direct web traffic comes from bots and fake users.

This means that nearly a third of your entire funnel could be completely unusable. As bad actors become more advanced, they sometimes imitate legitimate prospect behavior, but they don’t have the intention or ability of ever converting and can cost businesses considerable revenue. This impacts everything from advertising budget, to inflated CRM bills that become flooded with invalid leads, to retargeting, to salesperson time wasted chasing after bogus leads, and everything in between. For this reason, many sales and business development leaders are implementing cybersecurity tools known as Go-to-Market Security. This can help contribute to all lead generation quality efforts and present a more accurate picture to the whole Go-to-Market team.