Quantity vs. Quality

The age old question – is it better to provide more leads to sales or less leads that are better quality? Well it really depends – is your company meeting and/or exceeding its revenue numbers? Are your sales reps hitting and/or exceeding quota?  If you are like the majority of companies out there, the answers to these questions are “no.” If they are not, then something needs to change.  How many of the leads that you send to sales are closing?  If that’s a good percentage of the leads, then it sounds like the issue is to just pump up the volume and more revenue will close (of course we are assuming you are measuring ROI on your campaigns so it’s profitable revenue).  However, if you are like the majority of companies out there, sales is closing somewhere between 2 – 10% of the leads that marketing is generating. That’s not a particularly great stat. So what’s got to change?  Well, if you could provide better quality leads to sales, would the close percentage get better? It certainly should.  Better quality not only leads to better close rates but can reduce the cost of sales (sales reps spending time calling people that aren’t qualified) and increase your marketing ROI.  So, based on the questions above, it seems like a pretty easy question to answer – quantity versus quality – if you are like most of us, we’ll take quality any day.


Lisa Cramer is president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of on-demand lead management software that generates, scores, and nurtures leads for B2B marketers. In 2009, Lisa was recognized as one of the top 5 “Most Influential People” in sales lead management. For more information on lead management or best practices call 1-800-680-6292 or email [email protected].