VP of Customer Acquisition at Lendio and Workfront explains why relying on one lead source fails. Growing from 500 to 10,000 monthly leads required mixing paid and organic channels. Early-stage leads convert at under 10% in 21 days; late-stage leads hit over 20% in under 10 days. Match your content and offers to where prospects sit in the funnel.
Okay, so we talked about kind of an outbound motion on the sales side. We also want to talk about how do you create demand in a broader way, right? So yes, you can kind of push your way in through like sheer will and effort. But there's also a lot of strategies that can create demand through, through marketing efforts, right? So I used to be the VP of Customer Acquisition, a company called Lendio. Lendio does small business loans, right? So when I started working there, I kind of walked in and we were doing paid search. And basically every lead that we had was from our paid search campaign. And we were getting about 500 leads a month. 2 years later, I left and we were getting 10,000 leads a month and we shut off paid search because it wasn't as effective as other channels, right? And what I did there is I created a diversified lead gen portfolio. Right? And so we said, hey, there's a lot of demand in a lot of places. Let's go build programs and launch campaigns in all these different areas so we get demand from a lot more places, right? And so we looked at, hey, how was live chat helping us? What about our social organic? How are we— what are we doing on the content side? How are we doing an SEO and paid search and paid social and these other advertising sites and these cost-per-lead programs? What are we doing on the Display Network? Can we build out an affiliate partner program? What about referrals? What about events and direct mail and offline advertising and partners and outbound calling and outbound email? And how do we do better with our inbound email stuff? And maybe we can sponsor some associations and increase our brand. And, you know, all of these things brought in leads in more of a diversified way. So we weren't solely reliant on one lead source, because it's a scary place to be when you're reliant just on one lead source. We also learned at Lendio and in other places— this is when I was at, um, AtTask, which later became Workfront, was bought by Adobe— we learned that not all leads are created equal. You guys, you guys know this too, right? Just because you get a lead from one place, it doesn't mean it has the same value as a lead from another place. What we learned is that there's kind of a cycle, and you can call this a funnel, top of funnel, bottom of funnel. In this example, I'm using kind of an early stage versus a late stage idea. So they're early in the buying cycle, and then they become late in the buying cycle. What we learned is that early stage leads took longer to convert. Surprise, right? They weren't actively searching. They didn't have a problem. So they weren't actively searching for a solution. And sometimes interruption marketing can fall into this category, right? I'm not looking for a solution, and so I'm earlier. And so what we found at Workfront is that actually our lead-to-appointment ratio was less than 10% on leads that came from these channels, and it often took 21 days to convert them to an appointment. So what we had to do is we had to create strategies and nurturing programs that would better prepare them from an early stage to— we had to educate them. Hey, here's the problem you're having. Here's the, here's the, this, you know, here, pains that you're not aware of that you might have. Guess what? There's a solution for that, right? Mid-stage leads performed a lot better. So we were getting 10 to 19% lead appointment ratios. It was taking 11 to 20 days to convert into an appointment. And what we were looking at is, you know, some of the more paid search referring sites SEO, social media sites, or social media ads, they tended to be in this mid category. People in the later category were further down the buying cycle. They were coming directly to our site. They had heard about us. They knew who we were. They were coming from organic social referrals. They're also like any referrals. We also found that software directories were really good because they were further down the buying cycle to a point where they were actually comparing us. Against other solutions. And so we are seeing a 20% plus ratio, and they were doing it in less than 10 days. The idea is that we need to— wherever the lead comes in, if we can understand where they're at, is to drive them up this support cycle, right, of unaware to aware to understanding to buy-in to commitment, right? We need to take them along the journey of, hey, this is kind of nice to have, to, hey, I've got to have it, right? And so the tactics we use, we need a variety of those tactics And we need tactics that bring them down the funnel as well. One of the tactics you can use as we talk about kind of diversifying lead portfolio and, and generating leads are paid social media ads. In my experience, paid social ads perform best when there is a strong offer tied to it. If we look at where these sit, they typically sit somewhere in the early to mid stage. Right now, the advantage of some social ads is that you can get hyper-targeted on your audience. And so maybe they're not totally in the, like, early stage because we know who they are, we know, might know who their pains are. So what we did, uh, client success is, was a client of ours for many years, and we would run boot camps and ebooks and toolkits and things like that. Whenever we tried to run like a straight, like, request for info or a demo request, or like those bottom of funnel activities, our conversion rate was significantly lower and our cost per lead was significantly higher, right? But when we would run things that the person cared about, there was ideas and things that of value. In fact, the ones that worked the best were like Hey, here's a series of videos, you know, a bootcamp. Here's 6 things you're gonna— or here's a toolkit with it that includes an ebook and a white paper and things like, you know, whatever. It's like a bundle. Or you could have really good offers, you know. So, um, you know, the client that does, uh, solar and also, you know, they do handyman services. You know, in this case, the, the offer was really compelling. So if you don't have maybe a, a bait in like a content bait, you can have a bait in, in an offer. In this case, saying, hey, if you go solo, we're going to give you a whole new set of free appliances. Well, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, I want some new appliances, right? So maybe that will overcome it. In this case, with handyman and remodeling, there was actually a high enough demand for the service that you could just run like a video ad, or, or maybe you could lower some of that funnel, or, you know, get some of the bottom of funnel stuff. And this one actually did do well on just get a quote. But, but a lot of it depends on your audience and kind of where you're going. On LinkedIn, overwhelmingly, content-based stuff does better. It changes when you go into the consumer market, right? Um, but webinars still do really well, events do well, um, but having a strong call to action is really important.
