Leads: Quality Wins Over Quantity Every Time

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Monday 9 am. The Sales VP is drumming his fingers on your desk demanding more leads for his team.

You have two choices:
1. Fire off an email offer to your entire database.
2. Calmly explain the advantages of quality over quantity.

I’d take #2.

If you’ve been in Marketing for awhile, you likely were schooled in “the more leads, the better” theory.

Wherever the names came from was fine. Whatever likelihood they had of buying your product was irrelevant. Let the Sales team weed through them – just give them the leads.

Early in my marketing career, I remember my boss chewing out the Sales Director because his team wasn’t following up on the leads we were giving him. This was a high-performance sales team – they were darn good at closing deals. But they had enough in their pipelines, and they were only following up on new leads that looked promising.

Which meant 70% of the leads we generated were languishing.

Later I realized the lack of follow-up wasn’t really Sales’ fault. It was ours. We confused quantity with quality.

When clients ask me about generating leads, we discuss how content marketing is one of the best lead generation and nurturing tools at your disposal. If you do it right, you’ll get higher quality leads. Not necessarily an overwhelming quantity of leads, but they’ll be prospects who are intrigued by your solution and interested in doing business with you.

How do you do this?

1. Build Content Paths. Understand what content your prospects want at each stage of the sales cycle. Then build that content and “drip” it out to them. Make every call-to-action another piece of valuable content that helps “pull” them through the sales cycle stages. Build a content path of high-value stuff.

2. Start Small and Do it Very Well.  If you have limited resources to build content, start small and do it very, very well. The worst thing you can do it kick-off a huge content project and do it poorly.

3. Set Expectations with Sales and Sr. Management. Ardath Albee coined the term “incremental buyer movement” to describe letting buyers move at their own pace. Explain to your Sales VP why it’s so important they let content marketing do its magic. And why bothering buyers with sales calls or sales-riddled emails will likely cause them to disconnect with you. Perhaps permanently.

4. Think Relationship-Building. By giving buyers high-value content, you’ll help move them through the sales cycle. The more you offer this type of content, the more they begin to trust you. Edelman Digital says only 1 in 3 people trust marketing messages. By building a relationship with your buyers through content, you’ll gain trust.

Next Steps
Are you generating high quality leads? Request my free report to learn how to setup a content marketing process that will give your sales team great leads:“How to Engage Technology Buyers with Remarkable Content: 7 Steps to Developing a Content Marketing Process.”

Comments
How does your organization approach lead generation - with a quality or quantity mindset?