How to Stop Collecting Low-Quality Leads

Marketers need to stop collecting low-quality emails in exchange for an ebook or webinar, just so that Sales can then spam them, hoping to get them into some kind of sales conversation.

It doesn’t work because most of the time, these ”leads”...
- don’t have the right budget, company size, or job title
- don’t actually face the problem or pain point you’re solving
- are not in active buying mode right now

Which means they close at < 1%.

People aren’t stupid. They know the difference between a button that says “Download Ebook” and a button that says “Request Demo”. It’s not the same thing, so why treat them the same? (thanks for this great phrase Sam Kuehnle)

The only thing that will happen is your sales people wasting their time on low-intent, low-quality prospects.

How to stop it?

If you create content that focuses on educating people rather than capturing leads, and then wait for people to come to you, you will have fewer but higher-quality leads... from people who *actually have* buying intent (and also close at 20-50%).

You can then spend your time talking to and following up with people who have explicitly told you that they’re interested in your product (and not just in some ebook that you put out).

Few, high-quality leads > a lot of low-quality leads

PS. Check out Chris Walker and Sam Kuehnle who talk about this stuff all the time and much more eloquently than I ever could.