Quality Lead Generation: The Quantity versus Quality Debate

1. The Quantity versus Quality Debate Quality Lead Generation

2. Quality Lead Generation When it comes to quality B2B sales lead generation, marketing and sales teams tend to focus on generating large quantities of opportunities. The more the better is often the philosophy. But, experience has taught us that isn’t always the case. The ideal situation would be to have the best of both worlds: lots of high-quality leads.

3. Quality Lead Generation But, quality lead generation requires a significant investment. A cost trade-off often exists with degrees of lead quality. Highly qualified leads will include very detailed information about the opportunity, access to the decision-maker and the level of interest. On the other hand, an unqualified lead might be no more than a contact’s name and phone number.

4. Quality Lead Generation So, would it be better for you to have a high volume of names and phone numbers, or a smaller number of well-qualified sales leads with lots of details about the specific opportunities? It depends on your type of business. In many B2B scenarios, quality versus quantity is more beneficial. However, each company must identify their ideal prospect, then establish quality lead generation programs to reach them.

5. Quality Lead Generation In addition, determining the best course of action for quality lead generation depends on your available budget. As you can expect, it costs more money to generate quality leads. You have to know your prospects well and communicate to them with well-targeted messages of interest.

6. Quality Lead Generation The broadcast methodology casts a wide net across a large number of leads. These leads will have varying degrees of interest in the company’s solutions. With a focus on quantity, broadcast techniques want to get the message out to as wide an audience as possible. Based on statistical sampling, some qualified prospects will rise to the surface.

7. Quality Lead Generation An example might be a company setting up a booth in a high-traffic, public place like at a sporting event. They may give away t-shirts to thousands of passer-bys. But, when all is said and done, only a small number of these leads will be genuinely interested in the company’s product. And, even fewer yet may culminate in a sale.

8. Quality Lead Generation Focusing more on quality lead generation, the concentration methodology finds significant concentrations of qualified prospects. For example, a technology company may exhibit at a trade show. Since they’re involved in the related industry, the trade show attendees will be somewhat pre-qualified. When they visit the company’s booth, the sales staff can qualify them further by collecting pertinent information.

9. Quality Lead Generation A sound strategy for quality lead generation in many companies is to combine both broadcast and concentration methodologies. Companies should train their marketing and sales staffs to focus on their industry using a concentration approach to find qualified prospects. Then, they need to broadcast to all prospects within this concentration.

10. Quality Lead Generation Although strategies, processes and practices exist for quality lead generation, there’s no single right answer that will apply to all companies. How you go about generating leads will be specific to your business. You need to take into account your industry, company size, sales staff, market share, strengths, weaknesses and numerous other factors that will impact the direction you take. Evaluating lead generation options and aligning them with your company will help determine the best approach for securing qualified prospects.

11. About the Author Larry Fleischman is Director of Marketing for Televerde, a leading B2B provider of sales pipeline development solutions. For more information about Quality Lead Generation, visit http://www.televerde.com/solutions/qualified-lead-generation today.