How to Maximize Lead Quality

How to Increase MQLs: Turning Interest into Intent In the world of growth marketing, traffic is just noise unless it leads to a qualified pipeline. If your funnel is full but your sales team is starved for viable leads, it’s time to shift your focus from quantity to quality—specifically, Marketing. So how do you increase MQLs without wasting budget or time? Here’s my forward-thinking plan: 1. Define What "Qualified" Really Means Start with alignment. If marketing and sales aren’t speaking the same language, your MQLs will always miss the mark. Build a lead scoring model based on firmographics (e.g. company size, industry), behaviors (e.g. demo request, content downloads), and engagement. Use historical data to reverse-engineer what a high-converting lead looks like. Tip: A shared MQL definition ensures smoother handoffs, higher close rates, and better attribution. 2. Create Content That Drives Action Top-funnel content builds awareness—but MQLs come from value-driven, mid-funnel assets: Case studies that show proof, Webinars that educate ROI calculators that engage, Product comparisons that signal intent. Each piece should guide the prospect to the next logical step—form fills, demo requests, or free trials. 3. Optimize Conversion Paths Look at your landing pages, forms, and CTAs. Are they aligned with your ICP? Are they frictionless? Shorten forms for cold leads; go deeper with warm ones. A/B test headlines, layouts, and calls to action. Use intent pop-ups, progressive profiling, and retargeting to re-engage visitors who didn’t convert. Remember: Small UX tweaks can lead to big MQL gains. 4. Leverage Marketing Automation & Lead Nurture Most leads aren’t ready to buy right away. But they can become MQLs with thoughtful nurturing: Drip campaigns tailored to behavior, Lead scoring updates based on engagement, and Dynamic content personalization. Done right, this doesn’t just keep your brand top-of-mind—it creates buying momentum. 5. Amplify What Works—Kill What Doesn’t Use your martech stack to track which channels and campaigns drive the most MQLs—not just clicks. Shift spend to high-converting audiences. Double down on SEO pages that capture intent. Eliminate vanity metrics from your dashboard. Data-driven iteration is the heartbeat of sustained MQL growth. Growing MQLs isn’t about casting a wider net—it’s about casting a smarter one. By aligning teams, refining your funnel, and focusing on real buyer intent, you don’t just generate more leads—you generate better leads. And that’s what fuels predictable, scalable growth. Need help building a strategy that delivers high-quality MQLs? As a Fractional CMO, I can bring the vision, team alignment, and executional rigor to make it happen—without the full-time overhead. Let's connect! #marketing #fractionalcmo #marketingmatters #cmo #growth #mql #pipeline #strategy #alignment #execution

Is Your Pipeline Full of Low-Quality Leads? Here’s how to align marketing and sales to drive better results. (Hint: It’s about quality, not just quantity) In the rush to hit targets, marketing teams often focus on filling the pipeline with as many leads as possible. But here’s the catch: if those leads aren’t of high quality, the sales team will struggle to convert them into customers, impacting revenue and wasting resources. Marketing can hit targets by driving quantity, but without alignment on what a quality lead is, the entire sales process can falter. So, how can teams optimize for quality over sheer volume? And how can AI assist in this process? 1. Align on Key Metrics Across Departments Start by defining what a quality lead looks like with the sales team. Agreeing on these metrics ensures everyone is aligned on what success looks like. 2. Track Lead Quality at the Source Not all keywords or ad campaigns are created equal. Use data analytics to focus on those that drive high-quality leads. 3. Implement AI-Driven Lead Scoring AI tools like Salesforce Einstein can automate lead scoring, allowing sales teams to focus on high-value prospects. 4. Leverage AI for Predictive Analytics AI can predict which marketing efforts will yield high-quality leads, optimizing ad spend and improving ROI. 5. Implement Closed-Loop Reporting Track a lead from the first touchpoint to conversion and share insights between departments to adjust strategies in real-time. 6. Regular Cross-Departmental Meetings Ensure marketing and sales teams regularly review lead quality and adjust strategies to stay aligned on goals. Conclusion Focusing on quality leads over quantity ensures that every lead is worth pursuing, setting both teams up for success. Found this helpful? Consider resharing ♻️ and let’s connect for more insights!

Eleanor Dorfman, xHead of Sales @ Retool has overseen $1B+ in B2B Sales & trained hundreds of top reps. If you listen to her full episode on the recent 30 Minutes to President's Club, sales leaders will drop what they’re doing & immediately put in place these 3 key bans: 1/ Ban reps from saying your own company name on Discovery Calls ---- To win deals you need to train your reps to do excellent discovery. But excellent discovery is more about listening than talking. 95% of reps make the same mistake: bragging about the product they sell instead of listening. One tactical way to force reps into asking questions and minimizing “I” statements and “My company” statements is to forbid your own company name. Eleanor has her rep’s call recordings surface ANY mention of their own company and coaches reps to stop this. 2/ Ban reps from saying feature names on Deep Dive Calls ---- To win deals you need to train your reps to value-sell, not feature-sell. Bragging about features is cool, and champions might like it, but real decision makers want to have their top level problems solved with value-based business cases, not a laundry list of neat features. Words to ban: - Role-based access controls - SSO - front-end UI - anything big on your marketing site - etc Remember: buyers are trying to launch in a new market, they’re trying to drive efficiency in their engineering department, they are revamping their old SEO practices. They are NOT: waking up in the morning hoping to that their new tool has SSO. Feature selling might work for 4 or 5 figure deals, but it won’t work for 6 or 7 figure deals 3/ Ban buyers from starting POCs / Trials without answering business value questions. ---- POCs are an AMAZING place to discover business value. Prospects are eager to try out your tool and are willing to put in work to get it going. Use this to your advantage by making the prospect do work in the POC to help you pre-figure out your negotiation / closing tactics through your business case. As part of your POC onboarding ask: - What is the value you’re hoping to see? - What is the value the budget holder if hoping to see? - Which business problem will our product solve for you? - Which budget will the final payment come from? Squeeze these into the normal POC questions like “who needs access?” and “which CRM are you going to integrate with?” These are the bans that Eleanor uses to win 7 figure deals at Retool. Which bans have you implemented in your sales process? #sales

Partnerships have a honeymoon period. But you can't build a successful partnership strategy that way. A successful partnership strategy can't survive on starry-eyed excitement. It needs consistent tracking, review, and adjustment. Setting up a routine for regular partnership reviews helps ensure that every partner continues to contribute value and align with your goals. Here’s a straightforward guide to establishing an effective review cadence: DURING MONTHLY CHECK-INS: Monitor Engagement and Pipeline Health: - Partner Engagement: Are partners actively promoting your solutions? Monitor how frequently partners engage, share leads, or collaborate on content. - Pipeline Health: Review the current status of partner-sourced leads. Are they progressing through the pipeline or stalling? This provides a pulse on lead quality and pipeline velocity. (Pro Tip: Use CRM dashboards to quickly visualize monthly trends. A partner falling behind in engagement or lead generation can be flagged for extra support before the issue impacts quarterly goals.) DURING QUARTERLY CHECK-INS (Quarterly Business Reviews or QBRs): Assess KPIs and impact: - Revenue Contribution: Track revenue from partner-sourced leads. Are partners contributing to target revenue goals? Compare this against previous quarters to detect any patterns. - Deal Velocity: Examine the average time for partner-sourced deals to close. Faster deal cycles may indicate strong alignment with your audience, while slower cycles could highlight areas for enablement improvement. - Retention and Renewals: Review retention rates for customers acquired through each partner. Higher retention often suggests the partner is bringing well-aligned, high-value leads. (Pro Tip: Share a summary of the QBR data with the broader team and executives. Keeping everyone informed boosts alignment across departments and reinforces the value of your partnerships.) DURING ANNUAL CHECK-INS (Annual Pipeline Audit): Evaluate & adjust long-term strategy - Trend Analysis: Review metrics like partner-sourced revenue, pipeline growth, and retention over the year. Look for trends that show which partnerships delivered consistent value and which may need reevaluation. - Resource Allocation: Identify high-impact partners and consider how to deepen those relationships. This could mean exclusive training, co-marketing, or more dedicated support to further accelerate growth. - Forecasting and Goal Setting: Use annual metrics to set achievable targets for the coming year. Which partner types or industries contributed the most? (Pro Tip: Use insights from the annual audit to adjust your Ideal Partner Profile and refine your partner strategy. Trends from a full year’s data will guide resource allocation and pinpoint where to focus for maximum impact.) Anything you'd add?

Stop Chasing Cheap Leads; Start Focusing on ROI. Cheap leads ≠ Better leads.  They may just waste the sales team's time. If you’ve been in marketing long enough, you know the pitfalls of focusing on Cost Per Lead (CPL) over true ROI. Cheaper leads may sound appealing, but they come with hidden costs:  ❌ Lower quality, meaning they aren’t actually a fit   ❌ Higher churn rates, leading to more turnover   ❌ Lower lifetime value (LTV), impacting long-term revenue  Here’s a quick example: We worked with a company that had fallen into the CPL trap—lots of leads, but low ROI. Our approach was to start by: 🎯 Refining their audience targeting, making sure we were engaging the right accounts from the start. ⏳ We optimized their ad copy 🛬 Redesigned the conversion funnels to guide these prospects in a more relevant, value-focused way.  The results? A 158% increase in pipeline while only increasing spend by 89%.  So what should we focus on instead? Down funnel metrics that matter to sales: Cost Per Meeting, Cost per MQL (if it’s predictive), and Pipeline Return on Ad Spend (Pipeline-RoAS).  When we target, engage, and qualify better, we reduce waste, improve lead quality, and drive measurable revenue. Let’s move away from “more leads at a lower CPL” and focus on ROI-driven marketing that aligns with high-value customers.  The strategy was integrated across product marketing, demand generation, and the sales team responsible for responding to the ads.

Subject: The Power of Quality Leads Dear CMO, I wanted to share an insight I believe could make a significant impact on our marketing strategy. It's a common scenario in the world of marketing — we're often tasked with increasing revenue targets, and the assumption is that more leads equal more revenue. But what tends to happen is that we end up funneling more low-quality leads, and our primary focus becomes quantity rather than quality. And, these leads don't materialize into revenue, and the targets keep getting adjusted upwards. I propose a different approach — let's take a moment to pause and consider how improving our funnel conversion rates can drastically boost won opportunities and revenue. Quality should be our #1 KPI to start. I'm willing to sacrifice 200 leads if it means we can potentially achieve a 60% increase in opportunities. Instead of fixating on the red (quantity), I suggest we shift our focus to the green (quality). Here's a step-by-step plan to get started: Compile all digital ad spend data for the past 6-12 months. In our CRM, gather data on inbound leads from the same period. 1. Create an opportunity report with creation dates, closed dates, and all stages. 2. Calculate our funnel conversion rates and determine the true win rate. 3. Compute the cost per lead, opportunity, and customer. 4. Organize the findings into a table and assess our historical performance while setting benchmarks. By manipulating the conversion rates, we can quickly observe how quality impacts revenue. This data-driven approach will allow us to shift our focus from ineffective marketing tactics and concentrate on metrics that truly drive revenue. Let's work together to make this strategic shift and optimize our marketing efforts for better results. Cheers, 𝘍𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘊𝘔𝘖 #dearCMO #saas #b2bmarketing

I keep seeing the ageless #revenueoperations debate of leads vs contacts in Salesforce. I think there's still tremendous value in the lead object. That's if you set it up correctly for your business The problem isn’t the number of leads—it’s how you qualify them. A poorly defined lead qualification process means: ❌ SDRs chasing leads that will never convert (lead scores seem out-of-date today but I don't think they are!) ❌ AEs spending time on deals that were doomed from the start (again, lead score and qualification frameworks needed here) ❌ Marketing frustrated because their leads aren’t progressing (set up your disqualified reason feedback loop and run a cadence between #SDR #Sales and #Marketing) Here’s a simple setup and you can build out from there 🚦 Define Clear Qualification Criteria 1. Use BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) or a modern framework like MEDDIC to ensure consistency. (psssst don't expect the SDR team to qualify every single aspect so just focus on the high priority / low lift items) 2. Customize Salesforce fields to capture the data that actually matters. (bonus points for setting up your Conversation Intelligence solution to transcribe, parse, analyze, and summarize the points automatically for you) 🔀 Automate Routing & Scoring 1. Use lead assignment rules to ensure the right rep gets the right lead. 2. Implement scoring (e.g., demographic + engagement data) to prioritize high-intent leads. [Tons of innovation here recently] 📊 Standardize Handoff & Tracking 1. Create required fields so every lead comes with context before it’s passed to sales. 2. Set up dashboards to track conversion rates and identify drop-off points. 📢 Align Marketing & Sales 1. Define what qualifies as an MQL vs. SQL, and review it regularly (operating cadences!) 2. Make feedback loops easy—if sales isn’t working the leads, figure out why. My two cents 👋

I've never met a VP of Marketing that didn't want more "quality" conversions. However, sometimes the actions you or your team take lead to poor quality conversions. (intentional or not) Which ultimately leads to blaming the channel, your agency, or your in-house team. 9/10 it happens because: ❌ You are targeting keywords or segments outside your ICP ❌ You spend too much on roles/personas that won’t come inbound ❌ Your incentive structure isn't aligned with quality ❌ You pass “leads” to sales with little to no intent You need someone to spend more time analyzing historical data BEFORE launching new campaigns to de-risk the investment in paid advertising. Some examples of this: 1.) PAID SEARCH: Review every single keyword in your Google Ads or Bing Ads account to ensure as close to 1:1 alignment with your product as possible. Then, figure out the top 10 best-performing keywords (based on quality/pipeline) and focus your entire budget there until the search impression share is maxed out. 2.) CRM: Run a historical analysis of every title, industry, company size, etc. for everyone that filled out your inbound demo form to ensure your budget is focused on the people that "actually" come inbound. Pair that with that down-funnel to understand what types of people and companies covert to opps. 3.) INCENTIVES: Make sure the incentive structure for your marketing team isn't based solely on CPL and lead volume, but the number of quality leads that meet sales qualification criteria. (E.g. Hubspot had a commission claw back agreement in its early days to ensure reps didn't push bad fit leads through) You need fewer tactics and people to execute. Instead, you need a more thoughtful analysis of your situation to ensure you drive the highest quality conversions to sales. That said...I will say that after working with 150+ B2B SaaS brands, there will always be "some" bad fit leads that come through; always. Marketing does not have 100% control, but they have much more control than they think. TL;DR Make sure you are targeting your best fit clients, the people that have the highest probability of coming inbound, and that your incentives align with what you want.

Myth: The more leads you generate, the better your sales results.  Reality: Only high-quality leads drive predictable revenue…everything else is noise.  Here’s why this matters for lead gen: Teams burn budgets chasing vanity metrics like lead volume, only to watch deals stall in messy pipelines. Quantity without quality wastes sales time, inflates CAC, and masks systemic gaps in targeting and messaging.  The best leads aren’t just “interested”… They’re in pain, have authority, and align with your strengths. This requires ruthless focus on ideal client profiles, hyper-relevant content, and sales-marketing alignment to disqualify mismatches early. When you prioritize precision over reach, conversion rates climb, cycles shorten, and churn drops.  What most miss? Lead quality isn’t static. It’s shaped by how you educate prospects, nurture trust, and clarify outcomes *before* pushing for a sale. Stop feeding your pipeline with empty calories. Build a system that attracts buyers, not browsers.  What do you think?

Let's talk about the Demand Conversion challenge. Below is the situation I see in ~50% of the companies I engage with. ** The better marketing becomes at creating demand, the more likely sales is dropping the ball on converting that demand to revenue ** The specifics: - Marketing shifts away from low-quality lead gen. - Marketing focuses on creating demand. - High-intent leads raise their hand to engage (e.g., demo request). - Qualified Lead growth reaches a new high. However: - Qualified Pipeline doesn't grow at the same rate. - Revenue doesn't grow at the same rate. - CEO and Sales Leader blame marketing. - Marketing pressured to do more lead gen. This isn't a marketing issue. ** It's a Marketing and Sales Alignment issue ** To fix this problem 👇 Review your demand conversion / inbound sales process. 1 - Marketing talks with Sales The issue starts with sales treating all marketing leads equally. Historically, marketing leads have been low quality, so sales have built a process for triaging low-quality leads. Align on treating the leads who want to talk with sales differently. 2 - Ensure you can measure lead to revenue. You need to measure lead to meeting to qualified pipeline with customer and lead enrichment to segment for qualification, routing, and stage progression to revenue.   3 - Assess if meetings happen. You will likely find that less than 40% of your high-intent leads meet with sales. The reason is a lack of urgency and efficiency in booking meetings. Effective automation can raise this to > 70%. 4 - Review your first call process. You will find SDRs taking first calls using a process designed for leads who don't want to talk to you. Instead, have AE's take first calls using a process optimized for qualified leads who WANT to talk with you. 5 - Align lead qualification between marketing & sales. You don't need MQLs and SQLs. Instead, it's one qualification criteria to route leads to sales. Adjust criteria based on what you learn by running a purposeful process. 6 - Determine if prospects need more education. You don't want sales spending the entire first call educating the prospect. The education process should be under 10 minutes. If it's longer, determine why and prioritize educating prospects before the first call. 7 - Verify sales criteria for Qualified Pipeline. Validate the degree of subjectivity in how sales convert stage 1 opportunities to Qualified Pipeline (ex: stage 2). There should be less subjectivity AND different criteria for leads who want to talk with you. 8 - Continually optimize for efficiency This process isn't "set it and forget it." You need an eye on performance with clear metrics & goals aligned across marketing and sales. Your volume and sales cycle will dictate how often to review. The above isn't visionary. It's data, logic, and systematic thinking. It's marketing and sales aligning to convert demand into revenue. Give it a shot. #b2bmarketing #b2bsales #leadership