Elliott Botterill explains the lead quality paradox: actions that boost volume kill quality, and vice versa. Most businesses should prioritize quality by adding qualifying questions, even if it cuts total leads. Higher-quality leads lower Customer Acquisition Cost and let sales teams actually follow up.
You have the lead quality paradox where in order to get more volume of leads, the actions that we take to do that typically reduce the quality. And when we want to improve the quality of our leads, well, those actions typically lower the volume. So it's a paradoxical relationship that we have to manage. Now, in the vast majority of businesses, prioritizing the quality is something I greatly encourage because reducing form fields— so we literally just have, you know, email address, and nothing else. Kind of not that helpful. We want to add in qualifying fields that tell us useful stuff about the prospect and enable us to determine are they good quality or not. Because where most people fuck up here is they don't even have a clue around what quality lead is. They have no definition, okay? It's based on did that person buy immediately or not? And that is rubbish. We need to know, we need to quantify what is the very definition of a quality lead and what questions can we ask in order to figure this out, because in nearly every case, adding in 1 or 2 qualifying questions that are multiple choice that enable them to signal if they're qualified or not is going to, yes, give us slightly fewer leads, but is going to give us tremendously higher quality leads that ultimately are going to lead to more sales and ultimately lower our CAC, our customer acquisition cost. And that is the thing we truly care about. Every other metric comes secondary to customer acquisition cost. That is the holy North Star that we want to make all of our decisions based on. And typically, in most cases, slightly fewer leads that are of higher quality will net you a lower customer acquisition cost for all sorts of reasons. None more so than most people's follow-up absolutely sucks, and they don't have the capacity to respond to leads very quickly and actually call them all up. And so therefore, actually reducing the throughput coming in helps them do a better job. So that's a key belief and something to think about there.
