It can difficult to know which leads from your website are worth your time, and which maybe aren’t (for the time being at least). It may seem counter-productive to prioritise some leads over others, but in order to convert leads into customers, it’s better to focus on quality leads where you’re more likely to be able to continue building strong relationships and generate business.

Some leads are more sales ready than others - this is what you need to focus on in terms of quality and whether or not you, your colleagues or your sales team should start to reach out to these leads. Leads which are less sales ready, should be nurtured until they’re in the decision stage and are looking to make a purchase; naturally you’ll be more able to convert these leads into customers compared with those who are not ready to make a purchase decision yet.

In order to generate more leads, consider inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a powerful marketing method and helps to ensure leads you generate are of a high quality. By utilising and creating high quality, relevant content for potential customers as part of an inbound strategy, your website is in a stronger position to generate high quality leads.

By creating helpful content that’s well optimised and distributed you’re able to attract new people to your website - you can then work to convert these visitors into leads using intelligent offers and data capture. After you’ve done all this though, how can you tell identify which leads are ‘quality’ and which aren’t?

What is lead quality?

Lead quality generally depends on the amount of data you hold about a lead. A quality lead should never consist of only one single piece of data such as just having an email address, as this doesn’t allow you to understand how interested someone is in your products or services, or how likely they are to become a customer.

Lead quality should be based on a host of information about a potential customer - name, email, telephone number, job title, company name and so much more. Often, you can acquire this information through your website, using optimised forms, strong call-to-actions, plus interesting content. For example, try offering a relevant yet helpful guide or ebook to website visitors, in return for additional information about them. After all, you can’t expect people to give you something for nothing.

As well as this explicit data that someone has submitted via forms or data capture opportunities on your website, you should also aim to collect implicit data. This detail signals whether or not they could be considered a quality lead, and whether they might be open to being contacted by a member of your sales team. Consider what website pages they visited. Have they engaged with your business on social media? Which content types did they download from your website?

All of this information can help you understand more about your leads and whether or not they offer a quality opportunity for your business - and therefore impacting on the quality of the lead.

How to identify a quality lead?

Data collected from forms or behaviour and activity combined, allows you to judge whether or not someone is interested in your products and is likely to make a purchase decision soon. Ideally, you should hold this data within an intelligent CRM system to allow you to keep track of the information your website is collecting from visitors.

The information collated here may make a lead more or less significant to your business. For instance, if your business is more likely to convert a B2C sale over a B2B sale, you should identify this within the data you collect and act on it accordingly. This is why you should consider scoring your leads - the higher a lead, the higher their ‘quality’ or significance to your business. Of course in this situation you would score a B2C lead higher than a B2B lead, making those more likely to convert a higher priority.

Once you’ve identified which leads have enough data to understand their level of quality, you can start making decisions about who you should and shouldn’t reach out to. Sending only the B2C leads over to your sales team ensures they have conversations with relevant leads who are ready to make a purchase decision - as well as focussing on leads which will offer your business a higher level of return. 

Remember, when it comes to leads - there actually isn’t such a thing as a bad one. Admittedly, some visitors to your website may enter incorrect information meaning leads can’t be encouraging them to become a customer - unless they return and submit more. However, some leads may not be ready to make a purchase decision but are likely to in the future so don’t discount anyone.

If you’re having difficulty identifying which of your website visitors are quality leads, get in touch with our team. Through inbound marketing, we’ll be able to help you attract new visitors to your website, increase leads and encourage these leads through the buyer journey to become a customer. Or, download our free ebook all about lead generation - just click the button below.