Why Your Leads Are Terrible (And How to Fix Lead Quality for Good)

Ladies and gentlemen, if you are spending 10, 20, 50,000 pounds a month on paid advertising and you're getting a bunch of leads that are not responding, are not converting, or heaven forbid, your sales team are getting a bunch of calls and appointments in their calendar and people aren't showing up, and when they do show up, only a very few teeny tiny percentage of them are actually the right caliber of prospect that is ready to buy your thing, then this video is for you. Because I am going to be dissecting the lead quality problem, the problem that plagues the vast majority of businesses and prevents them from scaling and reaching new heights, but ultimately from reaching levels of great profitability as well. Because we all want better quality leads. It's the one thing marketers love and salespeople love to moan about. So we're gonna dive deep. So whether you're spending five grand a month, ten grand a month, or fifty grand a month, you'll know if lead quality is actually an issue. If you are having some of these symptoms, you see if your customer acquisition cost is going up, that can be a sign of bad lead quality. If your actual return on your ad spend has been going down over the last few months or years, that can be a sign of lead quality as well. If you're noticing an increase in your sales cycle so when people come into your system, they're taking longer to buy than ever. Or if your show rate, when people have appointments and calls scheduled with you or your team, if that is low, then that is a symptom of bad lead quality. And so we are going to fix that in this video. But ultimately you'll all have heard this, my trusty business owners, when people complain. And this will either be you, if you are the one taking the sales calls, or your sales team. Ah, the leads are shit. Terrible. Bad quality. Tire kickers, dossers, time wasters, whatever expletive you want to throw here for the leads that, you know, hopped on a call and weren't ready to pull out their credit card and, and buy their. And them. This is the constant battle in the world of marketing where we want to get these high quality leads and we want to fight against people that are wasting our time. Right? Of course, that would be the absolute dream world when every lead that got on the phone was ready to buy. But we're going to address that and we're going to show you the tactical ways in which we have fixed this in our business and before we dive in. Hello, my name is Elliot. Welcome back to the YouTube channel. A little bit of background. I've been generating leads for over 10 years. Isn't that insane? I know I look incredibly young, but don't let that fool you. I've spent well over £20 million on advertising. I started working off in an advertising agency and I was running Facebook and Google Ads for some of the biggest names on the planet. Then I spent five years building my own agency up to seven figures, had a beautiful little team of 12 and we had a great fun generating leads as a done for you service for businesses. And then earlier this year I exited my agency, joined Entrepreneurs Circle where we are right now out of our studio in our hq. We currently do about million pounds a month and that's split across our three core businesses. You see we have a low ticket community, we have a SaaS, a software and we have a high ticket coaching program. And so my job here is to generate a metric button of high quality leads for all three of these. So I have experience generating leads across a ton of different industries and are actively doing this across these three core business models. And so with that in mind, now you understand a little bit about where all the information I'm going to share with you today comes from. My big bold promise to you is that I'm going to show you how to how we have solved the lead quality issue in our business. Because this was something that I've struggled with with clients struggled with in our own business here at Entrepreneur Circle and we have well and truly cracked it this year like never before. So everything I'm about to share with you is not theory, it's not ideas, it's the stuff that we have actually done to increase our lead quality and ultimately get us to that fabled million pound a month mark very consistently now. And so what this will do today, if you take action from what I share with you, you will make more sales, you will actually lower your churn and less people will leave, you will increase your ltv. And all of these things in combination together are beautiful and will make a bigger business for you and importantly a more profitable business as well. So let's dive into it. You see the two main aspects I'm going to focus on today and where this learning came from was firstly with our software company. So we have a software, it's called GENIE AI. It's a sales and marketing system. It's absolutely epic. And our funnel is very simple. We run a bunch of Facebook ads to a landing page that talks about genie and then we offer people the opportunity to book a demo with one of our sales team. Sales team then jump on a call and run them through the software. It's only £199amonth, so not very expensive in my opinion. And so we would be blasting these ads, okay, we'd film hundreds of ads, blast them to this page and we would book loads of demos. So we have three people on the sales team. We might book 200 demos in a given month, but from 200 demos we would make only like 30 sales, which is pretty crazy. You know, that's so many people. And that is, it's not bad, but it's not that many sales. And so this was the first indicator to me that yes, we're booking a lot of demos, but are we booking them with the right people? And that was what started this learning. At the same time, in our high ticket coaching business, which is called master plan, which again is epic, but obviously I'm biased, we would run a, a simple funnel where we'd run meta ads to a landing page where people could basically apply. Now when they applied, it would be about a 10 question survey where we'd ask them a few questions and at the end they would get to book a call with our sales team. Now, we recently moved into a big new building here in Solihull that is super epic. And we filmed a bunch of new ads outside with the building because, because we thought, you know, what if people see us with this massive building? Then you know, you can't bake a massive building. So therefore implicit trust is applied and we thought they would work really well and they did. And so we ran this ad and I shit you not, over the course of about five days, we booked literally 200 calls for this high ticking coaching program. The cost for book call was like 50 quid. I couldn't believe it. It was amazing. The challenge though was from those 200 calls, we flipping made one sale. So whilst we were absolutely going mental over, ah, cost me but cool and thinking we'd absolutely cracked advertising on the sales team side, it was a different story. They were terrible quality and we literally got one sell, which is all the evidence you need. So that was a big flipping issue. So I thought, damn, we're getting traction with some of these ads, but the quality is not there because when it comes to having a conversation, these people are not converting. So how do we dive deep? How do we fix this? And so this is what we began to do. To start off with, I want to address something that most business owners I meet fall victim to and it is that you have to define lead quality. You have to have a clear definition of what lead quality is in your business. Because it's no good whining and complaining that your leads aren't very good or that they're crap or that the time I saw their tie kickers. If when I ask you, okay, so what is a good quality lead to you? What is your answer? Because you should have a very specific set of criteria that articulates clearly what whether someone is good or bad. It should not be this amorphous thing. It should not be totally subjective. It should be an objective truth as to whether or not someone fits the criteria. And so, again, what most people measure it as is, oh, this person bought, therefore they're great quality. That is a terrible definition. You must go a step deeper if you want to address the problem. We must first define the problem and actually get specific. So the way to think about lead quality, how I think about it, is it is a spectrum. Okay? There is no. It's not just yes or no. It's a spectrum. And so we have good leads on one end, and we have bad or unqualified leads on the other end. And obviously, our job is we want to try and get as many people on the upper end of the spectrum as possible, because the higher up you are, the higher the probability of you actually purchasing a thing. And so when we think about the spectrum, how do we define where someone is on the spectrum? Again, we must create specific criteria of people that are likely to buy. We must define the specific criteria of the people that are likely to buy as it relates to your business. Because in every business, this will be slightly different. So you have to go through and do this work on your own business. So how do we actually do that? How do we actually define what lead quality is in your business? The answer to this is actually very simple. And I came across this. I remember I was on a flight. I think we were off to Las Vegas for a business trip. And on the flight, I was thinking about this. It was actually for my agency. This is a few years ago, because we've reached a point with an agency, like in many businesses, where we'd kind of scaled through referrals. And because we had now grown, we wanted to continue to grow, but we couldn't rely on referrals. So we wanted to launch our own paid advertising and go after and get a lot of good customers. Now, for us, when we started our business, we took on any customer that came our way, because that's what you do when you don't have many options, right? But we had learned that some customers were much better than others. And when we thought about what customers were better, we thought about it in a few ways, because, yes, there's like, how much does this customer pay us? And what's our margin on that customer? And therefore, what is the total lifetime net profit of that customer to us? But also there's other factors, because we had some clients that were amazing to work with that we actually became really tremendous friends with, and we went on holiday with some of our clients and all sorts of stuff outside of work because our relationship with them got so good. And we had other clients who, frankly, were fucking dickheads, ones that we either had to fire or who, to be honest, we maybe dragged on and worked with a little bit too long and should have fired them sooner, but that was just a pain. That complained, were negative, didn't really align with us, were very difficult to actually get results for. When you did get results for them, they didn't even appreciate it that much, and, oh, they were just not very fun. So when you want to think about what is good and bad, you want to factor in both those things. Yes, lifetime value, profitability, a key measure, but also, you know, quality of life. Okay, do we enjoy working with these people or not? That's a very overrated measure of lead quality, in my opinion. And so what I did on this plane is I sat down and I began to list out all of my favorite customers based on those two things. And what I did was I profiled them. And so what you want to do is you want to profile your best customers. So take your customer base. Think about the top 20% in terms of the ones that are the most valuable to your business, the ones that you get the best results for, and the ones that you enjoy working with the most. That's how we profile and define the best. And then what I did was made a little spreadsheet, and I defined a bunch of metrics because I wanted to think, okay, what is it that all of these businesses had in common? Because it's going to be the commonalities of them that become my criteria for how I define a good quality lead moving forward. And so we have to look and start off with quite a lot of criteria, and then plot for each client which ones they tick. And then we'll start to see where the commonalities lay between them. And then where the commonalities are, we can begin to identify that pattern and weave that into our ideal customer profile. And it becomes a way for Us to measure when a lead comes along, to what extent do they match this profile? So for me, it was things like, what was their annual revenue, what industry were they in? How many years have they been in business, what was their team size, what was their, their average customer lifetime value, what funnels did they run, what was their main problem they had when they started reaching out to us, and all sorts of other things. And so you want to think about in your business, what are going to be the most relevant ones, and just make a big spreadsheet with all of them, Then you're going to have your clients in the columns. And so I had about 10 clients that I had listed out and I would go through and I would plot. You know, this was 100k a month, this one was 500k a month, this one was. This one was in Home improvements, this one was in info. This one had been in business for like 10 years, this one had been in business for eight years. This one had like 15 staff, this one had 30 staff. And you complete the exercise. Once you've done that, you have this table of all of your best clients and where they sit for all of these individual metrics and then you begin to identify the patterns. And so my agency, it was home Improvements or education companies that were over a million pounds in annual revenue. They had a team of over 15, they'd been in business for over seven years and were quite established. And their main problem when they came to join us was they were stuck spending around ten grand a month and were trying to spend more but couldn't. And so that became our kind of clear avatar that we went to. And we can now profile any lead that came along with versus this set criteria, which we haven't just made up, but is actually rooted in reality and facts based on our experiences with our customers. And it would enable us to gauge whether or not we think they would fall into the bucket of being a great prospect and a great customer or not. So that's the first aspect you need to do. The second aspect is how we now rate these leads once they fit our initial profile in terms of their readiness to actually buy from us. Because this is the other kind of spectrum that exists. And so Bant is the best little framework that I've heard for this. Very popular, you probably heard of it. And so Bant is a set of four additional criteria that we want a high quality lead to hopefully meet. And so B stands for budget. Can this person actually afford what we are hopefully going to sell them? Do they have the Money or not, we've all heard that, you know, I don't have the money right now. It's that number one most common objection. So we want to get very clear, what does that mean? What level of income, what level of revenue needs to be there in order for them to feasibly have the budget authority? Is this person a decision maker or not? Am I talking to the junior or am I talking to the actual person that's going to make the decision? Again, you don't want to waste too much time chatting to people that actually don't have the power to make a decision. So that's an easy one for us to qualify for. Then you get into need. Okay, does this person actually need what I'm going to try and sell them? Because yes, they might perfectly fit the profile that we have here. But if they're not in pain, if they do not actually feel they need this right now, if they are okay, if their focus is elsewhere, then whilst they fit the profile, they're going to be a little bit harder to sell because again, they just like kind of don't need it right now. It's a nice to have versus a. I must get this problem solved. And the final one is time or timelines. How quickly do you need this problem solved? Because again, people that are in an urgent need are going to be, we want to prioritize them as extra high lead quality. They're ready to take action. Now. These will be the people that are going to get ready, boom, get the credit card out and buy the thing. On the flip side, if actually their timelines, yeah, we're going to, you know, look to solve this over the next 12 months. Then again, you have to do a lot of work there. Okay, That's a signal it's not a priority for them and therefore their impetus to take action and buy is going to be a little bit less. And we can easily measure that. And we're going to work simple questions into our funnel and sales process that solve this. So in an ideal world, especially if you are rocking sales teams and doing calls, we want to try and gather all of that information before the person ever has a conversation with the sales team. That is the nirvana, if you will. That is the good position we want to be in. Because if we have all that information, do they fit our profile, do they tick all the boxes in terms of they have the budget, they have the authority, they have a need and they are working on our similar timelines, then these calls are going to be juicy and they are going to close pretty damn high because again, where bank comes in, it's a spectrum of is this person ready to buy versus not ready and is my sales cycle going to be really short or is it going to be really long? And so naturally there's always fewer people on this end of the spectrum and there's more people on this end of the spectrum. And so whilst we're not going to ignore these people, we are going to prioritize these people. So now we understand how to define lead quality in your business. We understand how to profile our customers to get an accurate, logical based view of what good is. And we know how to use the BAM framework. Now we get to tactically deploy this in our funnels and in our marketing to drive up the lead quality. And the way we do that is through cdt. So we are going to capture, we are going to disqualify and we are going to train the algorithms. So these are all the very specific steps that we implemented that took our lead quality from very average to very, very good. And it's totally changed our business. So step number one, capturing this is pretty straightforward. But in order to assess those things, we must be able to capture data from the lead so we can tell whether they fit our profile, whether they meet our Bant timelines. So we do this at the lead form. This is my shoddy little drawing here. But whenever we have an opt in, if it's for a lead magnet and people opt in to get it, if it's for they want to book a call, they have this opt in first. If we're doing a webinar, they'll do this form before they opt in for the webinar. And so where we would normally capture the name and email and phone number and maybe the company name or website, what we want to do is add in qualifying questions. So additional qualifying questions that yield us specific answers that tell us again, do they fit the profile? And so depending on the funnel and depending on your industry and your cost per lead, you will kind of choose how many qualifying questions you have, because the more qualifying questions you have, the higher your cost per lead, but also the higher your lead quality and the less qualifying questions you have. Well, the lower your cost per lead and the lower your lead quality. And this is why lead quality gets, you know, pretty crazy for some people. It's because they have no qualifying questions. And so they end up getting a bunch of leads in and they feel great because the cost per lead so low, but the lead quality is just terrible and they have no way of accurately measuring it because you've not asked any questions to get any data as to whether they're good or not. So that is what we want to do. Now I recommend starting with one key question, maybe two and then running it. See the answers that you get, see whether you're getting good quality leads and then either add more or take away. Because that is one way in which we now are able to continually either increase or decrease our cost per lead and increase, decrease the lead quality based on the number of questions. As if you want some help writing the questions. This is where using AI is great. I've got a little prompt that I'll even drop down below for you for free as well. So you are most welcome. Other sneaky little pro tip. So in good softwares now like Genie AI, Shameless Plug. But when we create forms in Genie AI we are able to enable email and phone verification which is such an easy quick win to increase your lead quality. Because what this does is when someone enters their email and phone, it then prompts them and a button appears and it sends a one time password to their email or it text it to them that they have to enter before they are allowed to to actually go through the form. Because one element of lead equality is that people just put in fake emails and fake phone numbers and that is a pain. So by having email and phone verification you automatically filter those people out because the form will now not let people through unless they have verified the phone and the email. And so that we did that, I thought that would absolutely torch our opt in conversion rate. But actually it was really not that bad. We went from like 25% opt in conversion rate to like 20%. So a 5% drop. But the net gain in lead quality was through the roof. So in our software company we had fucking at one point all these spammy emails that were booked, calls with our sales team, all from IBM.com and I was like what? Like literally like 12 a day. Luckily we implemented this, they all went away and lead quality came back. We also used to have a lot of people putting in like personal emails which when we're trying to sell them as software to businesses, that was a bit of a red flag. We implemented the email and phone verification and the number, the percentage of people that booked in with a business email shot up to like 75%. So that's a quick win that if you have the right software is super easy. So now we're capturing the information and we know whether or not they're actually good quality or Not. Step two is we have to actually disqualify them. We have to actually disqualify them. We have to not let them book or even opt in in some cases. Now this one is hard because again, if you're investing in marketing and especially if you're growing, you know, we get very precious over leads and every interaction. And even though, okay, they might not be the right fit, let's just, let's just try anyway because maybe, maybe they will just be able and willing to buy, but you have to bite the bullet and you have to disqualify them. And what I mean is, if someone answers a question and that clearly categorizes or defines them as not eligible for our thing, they do not fit the profile. They don't have the budget, the authority, the need or the timeline. We have to say no. And we have to say no problem, that's fine. Probably not the right fit for you right now. So here's something else instead. And we redirect them to something else that's useful. I always put a little message that says, if you think this is a mistake, just reach out to us here at this email. But otherwise, thank you for your time and go here. We give them something else for free or direct them to the next best place. And we don't let them get on that calendar, we don't let them book in. See if we can filter people out. Let's do it. So you have to do this, you have to be strong because this is short term pain, but long term gain. Because again, if you rinse and repeat the cycle of running ads and getting all these calls and stuff booked in and all these leads and throwing them to your sales team, you're having to do it yourself. And it's just painful because they're the wrong people. They turn up confused, they're in the wrong industry, they just literally genuinely have no money. Then it just creates a bad vibe now. So enough on that. So now we're disqualifying people. This becomes a key component because one of the greatest ways to influence your lead quality is by training the algorithms within the advertising platforms. You see, advertising, when I started at the agency I first worked at, there was so much nuance and skill to be had for media buyers who were in the Facebook and Google accounts pressing buttons and doing all these advanced crazy setups. It was a massive thing. Nowadays it's the polar opposite. All advertising is very creative driven and really the quality of data that the algorithm is tracking greatly determines your level of results because everything is just so AI powered. And we've seen this year Meta rolled out their Andromeda update, all these new AI features within the platform and they basically just want you to like select a country, but in some ad creative. And it will do everything else. It will find the people, it will choose when to show them the ad, and it will do that based on all the data that it has around the people it thinks are most probable to convert for you. And your business challenge is it makes all of those decisions based on the data that it receives from our pixel, the meta pixel. And so if we run ads to any kind of funnel and get a bunch of unqualified people book calls, Facebook doesn't know that they're unqualified and it thinks it's doing a great job by getting you those booked calls. So when the algorithm is analyzing everyone and analyzing all of their behaviors to try and find more of them, it's looking at all of your unqualified people and going, yes, these people converted, therefore they are good, therefore I'll find some more of them. And you enter the vicious, vicious cycle of doom and despair where all of a sudden you start to get more unqualified leads and more and more and more and it perpetuates because now the algorithm is trying to find more unqualified people for you. So the secret here is called pixel conditioning. And so what this is when we run ads to our landing page, we are going to use the qualifying questions that we added into our form to direct people to one of two thank you pages. We have thank you, page A where our qualified people will go to, and that is the page that we track. That is the page where we have our pixel on and we send that data back into the algorithm. We then have page B which is unqualified people. And so if you do not meet the criteria, then you go to this page and we don't track you. There's no pixel. We don't send any events back to Facebook. What this does is it means we filter out all the bad data and we only feed good data to the algorithm. So when the algorithm is now analyzing the results, it's working purely off qualified people and it's going to find you more qualified people. It's as simple as that. It's a relatively small additional setup step, but is absolutely game changing. So this is no longer a nice to have. This used to be an advanced strategy, now is a fucking. You must be doing this if you are actually serious about running ads. Otherwise you, you are quite literally just Pissing money down the drain. Couple of other ways if you want to get a bit more advanced custom CRM events so you can go a step further and you can actually set up a custom event within your sales marketing system. So we do this again within Geniai. So if our sales team has a really good quality call, then they can mark that person as tremendous quality. And when they mark that person as tremendous quality, that pings back a signal to our metapixel and says, boom, this person was amazing. And we have that as an even separate event. So we train them on that data as well. Simultaneously offline events. So we had a very big client in my agency, did about 30 million plus a year in the conservatory roof space, so kind of home improvements. And they would sell these conservatory roofs for 12 grand a pop. And so we would book people would inquire to get a free quote and then they would book an appointment and then they'd get measured up and then they would eventually buy. So from the point of inquiring to actual sale, it was normally a couple of weeks maybe. And so what we started to do was when someone did buy again, pump that into Meta as an offline event. So we'd pump the sales data and the revenue back in a couple of weeks later as this new event. And therefore the pixel would optimize not just towards the free quotes that were coming through, but towards the ones that actually converted. And because we had the value, it would optimize towards the higher value ones as well. And so that drove a great increase in lead quality as well. Boom. So now we know the tactical ways in which we can improve our lead quality. That has changed the game for us. In our software company, where now we book demos, we get a 65% plus show rate. But importantly, one of the metrics that we track the reg is this is offer rate. So offer rate is when a salesperson has a call with someone, do they offer them the chance to buy or not? Because we're very big in our business, so if you're not the right fit for us, then we won't sell you. Because we only want to work with people who can get the results that we promise. And this should be a general rule for all businesses, I feel. So we, if you're not the right fit, as our salespeople will identify when they speak with you, then we will just say, look, that's absolutely fine. This is probably not the thing that you need right now. So actually, why don't you go and do these things instead and we'll recommend some other next steps that are actually more suited to that person and what they need. Because our ethos is we need to help people with the problems they actually have. And we only want people on our software, on our coaching, in our community that actually need it. Because if they don't, then guess what, they're not going to consume it, they're not going to get the results, they'll probably complain and they'll definitely churn. So it's kind of pointless. So we measure that with offer rate and so on our sales team's daily trackers, we track the offer rate and so we have a target of 80%, which means 8 out of 10 times we should be offering them, but that is only if they are qualified. And so whilst the salespeople track this, they are not held to account for this metric. This metric is a signal for us in the marketing team because if whatever reason our sales team, one week, we have hundreds of calls and we don't close many. But the offer rate was low at like 30%. That's not a sales issue, that is a marketing issue because it means all of the calls we booked for them, 70% were unqualified. So we didn't even offer them. So that is, we look at that, I look at that every single day. What our offer rate is to make sure that we are bringing the right leads in. And we optimize around that because we know if we have a high offer rate, therefore you're going to have much more sales, way more so than our cost per booked call. Because typically if our cost per book call comes down, we see our offer rate go down. It normally means we tap into a pool of customers that are slightly less qualified. And so we normally then make some changes. Our cost per book call goes up, but so does our offering. And so our customer acquisition cost, the only thing we actually care about comes down. But that's how you measure and monitor this on an ongoing basis. And so my final little piece today which is worthy of a whole other video, is messaging. Because one of the biggest factors that will affect your lead quality, aside from all of the other tactical things we've talked about today, is your messaging, how you are positioning your brand, your offer, your funnel. And so your messaging really comes in to how you are packaging and speaking to your customer across your ads on your landing pages and even in all of your follow up. But particularly the ads on your landing page are going to be the two places where people are going to fucking either get the wrong end of the stick or not. And so big mistake number one is never specifically talking about who your actual ideal customer is in your ads and landing pages. And if you haven't done the work at the start to actually profile them, you'll find that really difficult. We find and we get very specific all of our best campaigns and even some of the private clients I work with, the best ads that drive the best results are the ones that have the most specific labels and call outs to the ideal customers. So we literally say attention service based business owners stuck at 50k a month as an example. And so you want to get really specific with that call out. But then you got to think about the problems and challenges that your ideal customers have because you want to make sure you are appealing to specific problems that your good customers have, not every other bad customer under the sun. And so you have to go a step deeper and think about this. One of our big mistakes with our high ticket program when we launched this ad and got just a trillion appointments and made one sale was that our hook was a massive guarantee about how this is the only coaching program that basically guarantees to like double your profits. Which is true, but we led with the guarantee. And so what this did was the guarantee was so good, it appealed to the everyone with the business and everyone with an idea to start a business which was absolutely not our target market. And so as a result we got all these calls booked in, but it was just all people that just didn't have businesses that wanted to start a business and they'd heard our guarantee and oh my God, it was just so appealing to them. So we then had to go the opposite way and completely change our messaging, completely change our angles, lean away from the attractive guarantee and lead with more specific problems like business owners who are stuck working 60 hours a week and they can't get out of their day to day operations. And we ran it that way. Boom. So if you do all of those things, your lead quality is going to go through the roof. I hope you enjoyed this video. Plenty more coming. We're posting once every single week and God bless. Say less. Drop a comment. Peace and love.