How to Improve B2B Lead Quality: 6 Hidden Conversion Killers

LOUIS:
Today’s episode is all about lead quality. 

So a better fit and a higher close rate rather than a full CRM – which can be a false positive.

So we thought it was time to really dig in and talk about common issues when it comes to lead quality and how to fix them.

MAELIEN:
Yeah, it’s a classic – things look good on the surface, plenty of leads coming through.
But then when you look at the CRM or speak to the sales team, leads are a bad fit or just aren’t closing.

This isn’t always caused by one big thing — it’s often a mix of small things that compound into a bigger problem.

MAELIEN:
So to start, let’s talk through a few of the main culprits.

The first one is attracting the wrong kinds of businesses. 

Businesses that are too small, don’t have the right infrastructure in place, are out of your service-area, or won’t get value out of your product or service.

Then there’s getting the right businesses to enquire, but it’s the wrong person in the business. 

I’ve seen plenty of campaigns that are trying to pull in decision makers, but actually they are getting decision influencers that look great in the ads data, but wastes the sales teams time.

LOUIS:
There’s also buyer-journey mismatch. So enquiries from businesses that are too early on in the process. They might be the right business and the right person in the business, but they’re just not ready to buy yet.

And finally, there’s unresponsiveness – when you get ghosted. So people who enquire but you can never get hold of them. 

And actually this can go both ways. 

Sometimes its bad leads, but it can also be that it took too long for sales to follow up – or that the process was too intense or too high-friction at the start.

MAELIEN:
Those are the most common issues we see and I’m sure there’s at least one you can relate to.

But the big question is what can you do about it?

Let’s start with traffic.

One of the hardest questions in marketing is: is this the right traffic? Because you can’t tell just by looking at the enquiry count.

It’s really difficult to know if you’re sending the right kind of traffic from your ads but only generating poor fit enquiries.

There’s a few things you can do to get a steer on this.

First, observation audiences in Google Ads. Not for targeting, just for insight. You can see which audience segments are actually showing up, without limiting delivery.

You can also use web analytics tools like GA4, 

And click mapping, scroll mapping and session recording tools to look beyond conversions. 

Now, microsoft actually offers a free piece of kit to do this called Clarity – and it always surprises me that more people don’t know about it.

Another way to get a gauge on traffic quality, is to import the engagement rate from GA4 into your google ads. 

You can also look at things like scroll depth, time on page, video completion rates and button clicks. 

As a quick aside, you don’t want to track these as primary conversions but you definitely want to track them as secondary ones or just keep tabs on them in google analytics.

If these numbers are healthy, your traffic could well be fine and your landing page is the problem.

LOUIS:
It’s also worth saying that your advertising channels matter too. 

We almost always see the best quality leads come from Google Search. Then LinkedIn. 

Meta & Performance Max are great for lead volume, but quality can definitely fluctuate a lot.

The key thing here is that you have to integrate your ads and your web forms with your CRM so that you know which channel leads are coming from. 

Once you can see the data, you can scale up the channels that are generating your best leads. On the flip side, you can scale down the ones that aren’t – or at least try new things in them to try and get the lead quality up.

MAELIEN:
As marketers one of the biggest threats to lead quality is that we’re too close to the business. So we often assume a level of knowledge that our potential customers don’t actually have.

We know the business inside out, but our visitors don’t. 

So we have to ask ourselves, would a stranger understand exactly what we do, how it works, and why it’s worth their time. In the first five seconds?

If not, it’s something we have to work on, urgently. 

And don’t underestimate visuals. We’ve talked before about how there’s this thing in sports coaching called “show don’t tell”. 

So you really need to give visual examples, rather than just relying on copy.

LOUIS:
Following on from that is alignment. 

This is about making sure what you say in your ads and landing pages actually connects with your ideal customer persona’s (ICP’s) world. 

A lot of the time when we’re creating content we actually slip into speaking to ourselves rather than the customer. This is a classic mistake because we focus on what we think are the best bits.

Whereas if your ICP is price-sensitive, we should be talking about things like efficiency and predictable spend.
If they’re quality-centric, we need to be showing how we maintain standards, or giving testimonials.
If they’re results-driven, we should be covering outcomes and processes and giving proof.

We really want the nodding-dog effect, where people are readi ng and thinking “yep… yep… yep, this is exactly what I need”.

To do that – It’s really important that we’re always speaking to one person. If we try and say everything to everyone – we end up saying nothing to no-one. So it’s really important to define your ICP and speak directly to them.

We covered how to do this in episode 10 and also linked our breakthrough blueprint for you to download and work through.

This is particularly relevant if you’re attracting the right kinds of business, but the wrong people in the business. 

It’s really worth checking who your ads and landing pages are speaking too.

If you’re attracting the wrong kind of role, you’ll need to adjust and speak to the challenges, goals and situations that the right role will relate to.

MAELIEN:
It’s also important that we talk tothe customer, not about our company. This is about flipping the positioning from “we” to “you”. 

Because your ICP doesn’t care about your business – they care about theirs and what you help them achieve.

What value do they get by engaging with you?

And this means that the conversion mechanism has to match that too. “Contact us” and “get in touch” are usually too weak because they’re too vague, and add little to no value.

We’ve talked before about cost estimators, product or service customisers, free consultations – things that have a built in-value and things that your ICP will want to take action on.

There’s also asking too much of your visitors. With  things like big blocks of text to read, long sentences, complicated language, and confusing concepts.

All of these are asking for too much effort when they really don’t care enough to do it for you.

In the book StoryBrand, Donald Miller talks about this idea that when you’re reading a web page, you have a set number of calories available for you to burn. 

And the number of calories are always a lot lower than you’d think. If the reader has to do too much work, they’ll burn through those calories early and then just abandon the whole thing.

So what this means is if you are attracting the right kind of people to your page, you don’t want to turn them off before they enquire.

LOUIS:
Okay so we’ve covered the birds eye view. Let’s get a bit more tactical. Here’s three things that we’ve seen our clients do that really helped bump up their lead quality:

1. Call setting. A quick 5-minute triage call. Just to confirm client-fit before setting up a proper meeting.
   
2. Lead scoring. So tracking signals like webinars attended, assets downloaded, deal age, the amount of information they provided – things that signal the highest priority opportunities to jump on.
   
3.  . If a lead sits untouched for 48 hours, it’s basically dead. We worked with a client that got their response time down to less than 10 minutes – phoning every genuine opportunity as it came through, and immediately saw the benefit in their sales.
   1. Even steps as small as setting up auto-responders for web form submissions with next steps, links to book a call, time expectation management, helps up the response time.
      

MAELIEN:
Let’s also talk about a couple of things that we’ve put in place.

One of our favourite tips for improving lead quality is a little bit counter-intuitive. And I think that’s why we like it.

We probably all know by now that if you have fewer fields in your form, and make it easier to submit, you get more leads. But if you add more fields, or make them a bit harder to answer – lead volume drops but the quality improves. 

The counter intuitive bit is that sometimes you have to reduce conversion rates in favour of better quality leads.

And if you’re going for quality over volume (which you should be if it works out more valuable overall), this is often a great option to take.

LOUIS:

The last thing is not to sleep on your thank you page. It can be huge opportunity to get an enquiry to take themselves to the next deal stage.

So one thing we really like to do is to put a calendar booking widget on thank you pages. So that if people make an enquiry, fill in a cost calculator, or customise what kind of product or service they want – right after they’ve submitted that form, they’ve got the opportunity to book a call and discuss it further.

MAELIEN:
So as always let’s do a quick recap of what we’ve talked about today

• Identify the problem so you know what you need to fix. 
• Is it the wrong business, wrong person, wrong phase, slow follow-up, or high intensity?
  
  Is it something you can fix with marketing or is it a sales thing?
  
• Make sure you’re getting the right traffic with observation audiences, GA4 engagement, and heatmaps.
  
• Fix your ads & landing page content – both text and visuals – so they’re crystal clear.
  
• Test adding friction to your web forms, it’s often worth the drop in conversion rate for better quality leads.
  
• Keep the momentum up offering next steps and giving time expectations.

LOUIS:
Next episode we’ll be covering Lead Ads — why they’re infamous for poor quality, why they get a b ad rep and what you can do to make them work.

If you found this useful, please share it with someone who’s struggling with lead quality – and sales are breathing down their neck.

Thanks for listening – we’ll catch you on the next one.