Marketing & Sales have always seemed to have a strained relationship and what’s most concerning is that 1 in 4 companies say their sales & marketing teams are misaligned.
This leaves room for opportunity for those B2B companies that do get it right…
Sales and Marketing alignment can help businesses become 67% better at closing deals…
We’ve compiled 27 proven strategies to increase lead quality for your business to help bridge the gap between Marketing and Sales.
One thing we can all align on is that every business needs more customers and the beginning of that journey begins with lead generation. More specifically generating MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)...
95% of buyers buy from a company that has given them content at each stage of the buyer’s journey… making this list of ways to increase lead quality even more valuable to you…
Below is our compiled list… each individual strategy will be linked to its corresponding section within the article.
27 Strategies to Increase Lead Quality
- Unique Positioning within the Market
- Understanding Your Ideal Customers
- Knowing What Your Ideal Customers Need Most
- Engaging Ideal Customers Where They Are Online
- Create Content Marketing Strategies for Unique Buyer Personas
- Create Content for each step of the Buyer’s Journey
- The Difference between MQLs vs. SQLs
- Align Marketing & Sales teams for Key Lead Qualification Questions
- Using Questionnaires/Assessments to Qualify Customers
- Keeping Your Sales Process Natural
- Increasing Incentives for Ideal Leads
- Refining Your Sales Funnel
- Utilize Multiple Touch Points Online
- Nurture Campaigns turning MQLs into Pitch-Ready SQLs
- Utilize Email Marketing Campaigns to Nurture Leads
- Turn On Your Facebook Pixel If It Isn’t Already
- Run PPC Ads
- Utilize Customer Lists for Lookalike Audiences via Facebook Ads
- Call Out Your Ideal Customers in Copy – Front and Center
- Target High-Intent Search Terms
- Use HotJar to Identify Your Traffic Flows & Bottlenecks On-Site
- Generate Feedback from Your Newest Customers & Best Customers
- Use Feedback from Customers to Create “Painkiller” Content
- Use Feedback to Create Ad Copy
- Always Use Clear, Concise Calls to Actions
- Ask Leads for Their BEST Email / Business Email
- Make Form Fields Required
Let’s begin unravelling how to improve lead quality, one-by-one…
1. Unique Positioning within the Market
Defining your unique positioning within the market helps you call out your ideal customers so they can identify with your solutions over the sea of other solutions.
Think of going an inch wide, and a mile deep to target specific buyer personas.
The goal of solidifying a unique positioning within the mind of your target market is to take an existing perception within their mind and retie it with something unique, outstanding, and different to what’s already existing within their mind.
An example of unique positioning within a marketplace is Dollar Shave Club… you immediately associate it with an affordable shaving alternative based on the brand name.
Another example is a Luxury Real Estate agent, immediate positioning within the mind as the first thing you think of is someone who helps buy and sell hot property for ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNW).
Lastly, a B2B example for you is QuickBooks. Quick, easy accounting software for businesses.
That’s their positioning.
Think of it as going an inch wide and a mile deep to solidify a positioning that ties into an existing thought.
This helps to build your moat within the market.
2. Understanding Your Ideal Customers
As we briefly touched on, going an inch wide and mile deep will help to understand your ideal customers, and help your marketing target a specific buyer persona…
To start, we’ll define what a buyer persona is and then delve into more on why this understanding can be so fruitful.
Sam Kusinitz, from HubSpot says:
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
Numerous companies have different scopes of customer profiles or buyer personas that make purchases from them.
Our recommendation is to take your most significant three buyer demographics to make your ideal buyer persona.
These Buyer Persona demographics can include:
- Industry
- Key decision-makers Job Title – who green-lights sales?
- Age Bracket (18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+)
- Gender – not as important in B2B as it is in B2C
- Budget – the ability to pay you
- Location – self-explanatory
- Pain Points
- Frustrations
- Goals
- Values
- Influenced by – any key influencers in their decision-making?
- Reads or watches – information sources they use
- Preferred content format – what do they consume (video, article, audio)
- Motivators
- List what pains (above) that your product or service solves
When it comes to understanding why your ideal buyers have the motivations they do, the fears that they do.
Your product or service will most likely solve their key pains to help achieve their goals.
The why is used for further solidifying your unique positioning and value to a potential customer in your messaging.
Overcoming their fears, using their goals and values to future pace your solution being key in their prime frustration, helping the sales process move along down your funnel.
Marketing and thereby selling becomes easier when you understand your customer’s biggest desires.
Heck, you could be on the completely wrong platforms yelling in an echo chamber if you don’t understand where your potential users are, how they communicate, plus who & what influences them.
Understanding this will significantly drive costs down as you can use this data to pull levers on targeting, copy, creative and even landing pages focused on different personas.
Your business possesses customers of multiple personas…
If there is one action item for you it’s this…
Make it a routine to survey your customers so you can understand their pains and even more detail on the success of your solution.
3. Knowing What Your Ideal Customers Need Most
To know what your ideal customers need most you need to ask…
Email, call, twitter polls etc.
When you routinely ask questions, survey, or analyze your ideal customers you’ll pick up on trends as well as identify undervalued angles your product or service can market.
Knowing what your ideal customers need most will help you cater your product or services evolution to maximize their success and in turn, retain their business.
Pains evolve as technology evolves, so it would be wise to routinely survey with questions about their industry pains, as well as doing some industry research for yourself.
4. Engaging Ideal Customers Where They Are Online
Your blog is a great way to use inbound lead generation with Search Terms that your prospects use in their Buyer’s Journey.
That is your business meeting them on their journey.
Content is a great way to amplify your inbound lead generation opportunities.
Create as much quality content as you can around Search Terms that get greater than 100 searches in Google.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Keyword.io or SEMRush to find keywords with as minimal keyword competition as possible.
Typically to build your Domains Authority within Google’s SERP, long-tail keywords are best to start with.
They’re high-intent searches and low in competition which helps you rank easier.
Use outbound links to other blogs on topics similar to yours, supporting facts and data linked appropriately to solidify trustworthiness.
Whatever you think are trust-worthy processes and natural internet habits (links within articles), you’re most likely doing okay within Google’s eyes.
You can also check out Quora.com to answer questions to establish authority in your area of expertise.
Hint: If you have enough content, you can gain links by providing value in those answers and also provide proof by linking to more information/article.
Another one to utilize are Subreddits within your niche / area of expertise.
A Subreddit typically means you can earn a living on it, get to know the content they like, share and marvel at!
Create that content.
5. Create Content Marketing Strategies for Unique Buyer Personas
We all have ideal customers, and as much as articles on the internet would love for you to believe… they aren’t all one persona.
Typically, a rule of thumb for our teams is to create Three Unique Buyer Personas using the information we’ve gathered from surveys, sales teams, and reviews.
This will help you cover different angles that your customers have divulged to you from their surveys, qualifying calls, and again, reviews…
Now, since you have gathered more information on your Buyer Personas pains, desires and urgency…
Create content strategies that literally guide prospects from the total wilderness that is Google Searches related to those that a cold prospect likely searches when they begin their awareness of said pain your solution solves.
This will help you to:
- Develop Content Pathways from Cold to Customer
- Educate Your Prospects on Your Solution
- Capture An Audience to Influence
This leads perfectly into number 6…
6. Create Content for each step of the Buyer’s Journey
You know how we just mentioned Developing Content Pathways from Cold to Customer?
It’s time for action!
Set a timer on your phone for 3 minutes…
Go onto Google & type in “how to fix ‘x’ problem”… the ‘x’ problem is what your solutions fix…
Look at the content, write down content headlines on the first 2 pages of Google.
This is your customers starting point. Well one of them…
The best part about this, look at the bottom for the related searches.
*These are golden for content searches*
You’re literally looking at what Google recommends it’s searches and you can now reverse engineer it to create content…
That’s also why you’ve wrote down 20+ headlines…
Which one sticks out the most?
What headlines were the top 3 searches?
Where they big, authoritative domains/you’ve heard of them a lot?
If you see even 1 domain you don’t recognize in the first 5 results… make content around that and UPGRADE it.
You know their concepts, their headlines – possibly even their backlinks… make the content longer, bigger, or just flat-out better than they did and you’ll more than likely find yourself climbing rankings sooner.
Another key aspect with the new-found data you’ve acquired from the Search Engines Results Page (SERP) is you can create a mind map of the content from your initial fix it search, to the related searches.
This helps you begin creating your content pathway for each step of the buyers journey.
Our next step is using this content to finally generate prospects, nurture those prospects, and address their pain points providing value to solve said pain.
Provide the utmost value you can for free, this will build a ton of trust initially…
On top of value, you want to be actionable with your content as action creates physical results…
A lot like your list of headlines and related search terms to create your content plan for your buyer’s journey.
7. The Difference between MQLs vs. SQLs
Tying everything together so far… you’ve identified Ideal Customers, Buyer Personas, Content Strategies for said Buyer Personas…
“What comes next from this content?“
“How do you generate leads?“
“Where do they go after they see my content?“
Why should they watch more, or read more content?
That’s the real key…
Are you giving your audience a reason to stick around or take more action?
You know they have a pain…
Your content is catered to the buyers journey now, so you should give them a Call To Action.
A call to action within your content can literally be within your content like our headline example.
Or it can be a Lead Magnet like an e-Book, cheatsheet, swipe file etc.
MQLs are Marketing Qualified Leads… they come from content marketing, ads etc.
The beautiful part about creating content for the buyer’s journey is you can use them as Ad touch-points for cold prospecting.
Your content can also generate Sales Qualified Leads too… which is really the hungry-for-a-solution prospect who has a level 8+ urgency.
Tip the scales in your favour by pre-qualifying leads with surveys, quizzes, or assessments.
When they are finally on the demo or call – further qualify them!
You don’t offer your product or service to someone who doesn’t fit your customer qualifications.
When you offer without qualifying, you open your business or self up to unnecessary failure…
Use myself for example, I pre-qualify prospects before I truly offer my Facebook Ad & Google Ad services…
If they don’t meet my qualifications, I give them further resources to check out… whether it’s my MQL Mastermind or a checklist to help them do it themselves.
The key difference of MQL vs SQL…
Marketing Qualified Leads take actions too, but they’re non-sales actions like asking for a quote (some just want pricing), creating an account, joining your email list, filling out an assessment or survey…
Sales Qualified Leads are leads who you’ve qualified via their MQL actions like assessments or surveys, or even segmented within your email list from certain actions on content pieces etc.
SQLs are actively seeking your solution and willing to pay for it…
MQLs are actively seeking the solution, but not willing to pay or know who to pay yet.
Marketing Qualified Leads just need more information, clarity and urgency from your marketing efforts to become a customer.
8. Align Marketing & Sales teams for Key Lead Qualification Questions
Aligning your Marketing and Sales teams is loosely defined as sharing goals and working together towards generating revenue.
It’s simple, but requires both teams to buy into the process of your lead generation goals, as well as communicate often and transparently.
Sales teams, communicate effectively what you need most from inbound leads generated.
Marketing teams, communicate clearly what you’re currently doing and the entire process until the lead is in the Sales teams hands.
This leaves no discrepancies between both Marketing and Sales teams, helping align both on common goals to generate revenue for the business.
You don’t need stats to know that communication, transparency and “buying in” will be a key driver to your team’s success. However, if you need some stats to back my point – 87% of sales and marketing leaders say that collaboration between the Marketing & Sales teams enables critical business growth.
9. Using Questionnaires & Assessments to Qualify Customers
When you have collaborations and clear communication between Marketing & Sales, your Marketing team is now in tune as to what is needed.
As well as the questions can extrapolate that user-data.
So you’re now most likely at the stage where you need to put this all together.
Single Page Applications are a good tool for most company’s lead generation needs.
This helps you to keep users on the same page to acquire their information with the least friction possible. A great one for this is TypeForm.
A drawback is that certain ad-platform tracking has a tough time picking up on funnel step abandonment.
IE. You have 5 questions, a user abandoned the questionnaire or assessment after 2.
Ideally, you’d want to retarget users based on their funnel step so the creative and ad copy is as relevant as possible to them, but with Single Page Application’s this can be messy and thus not highly recommended.
Another option, is using your trusty old fashioned Landing Page that redirects based on form-fill outs. This way you can track each step of the conversion.
Some tools that follow this process for our non-code-friendly users are ClickFunnels, Kajabi and more.
Alternatively you can emulate it on your own website builder too, with some development help.
10. Keeping Your Sales Process Natural
Snake oil salespeople are not welcome.
That’s our motto.
Keep the entire process natural, conversational and as personable as possible.
Your salespeople will know what to do internally if they have that ‘gusto’ about themselves.
Trust your team, your processes and make sure you can track every aspect of the Sales Process.
Continue to iterate and get better, but never waver from the core principles of keeping your Sales Process Natural.
On the other side of the coin, Marketing must keep it’s own nurturing process natural.
Be omni-present in your approach if at all possible.
Win over key biases in your Marketing process for your Salespeople & overall company’s benefit.
11. Increasing Incentives for Ideal Leads
Discounts are not an incentive.
An old boss once told me this was a sure-fire way to attract low-tier customers.
Providing additional value upon your product or service with a bonus product/material is a fundamental way to incentivize your ideal leads to take action.
One-of-a-kind experiences are huge incentives, think of sports and what fans win.
Apply this kind of thinking with your own brand flavour & viola. You have your own magic to provide leads, find out what makes them tick…
Interview paying customers, survey them, collect as much data as possible from customers and give them gift cards if you’ve got to for B2B companies, and B2C brands, give them an additional free product that they’d usually buy.
12. Refining Your Sales Funnel
Continuous optimization is the motto, but don’t stray too far from your successful processes and principles after one down period.
Remember what has gotten you this far, how can you refresh it.
To do this, you need to have the ability to track your Sales Funnel.
There’s a reason it’s called a funnel for anyone without a pulse still reading, think of your college beer funnels, or as Americans call it beer-bongs.
For any alcoholics 😂 or beer connoisseurs, you don’t want a leaky funnel. Find where the drip is coming from and plug the gap.
It’s the SAME process in your business. Now instead of your eyes seeing a drip feed, you need your tracking & analytics in place so you can monitor this process.
Make the tweaks so your salespeople can enjoy that ice cold beer of success…
I can’t believe I actually wrote the above, but it’s there and I’m sticking to that analogy.
13. Utilize Multiple Touch Points Online
We’ve touched on this before, but omnipresent approaches are highly recommended and extremely effective.
If you’re a B2B company, you can easily identify 50-100 accounts you’d love to gain business from.
Create said list, scrape their social profiles, talk to key decision-makers in your creative and ad copy… and sell them naturally & not on the first touch-point.
That is simply Account Based Marketing (ABM).
Any B2B company as this capacity at their fingertips.
Personally, the most effective omnipresent approaches have typically come in the form of casual conversations across their platforms of use.
Be kind, personable and most of all don’t be that person to go all-in on their first hand. Feel out who you’re talking to and how you can be of service to them.
If you believe in what you do legitimately.
You should be confident enough to take it slow, gather information and break down biases, as all leads aren’t primed on touch-point number one.
14. Nurture Campaigns turning MQLs into Pitch-Ready SQLs
Nurturing your prospects starts at the very top of the funnel, from your first impression to a cold prospect.
Nurturing prospects with an omnipresent approach is most welcomed.
As we mentioned earlier, calculated and relevant touch-points at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey help your prospects to trust you. Understand your product/service better and be more receptive to further touch-points.
Break down core biases within ad creative and ad copy.
Top of funnel, middle and bottom of funnel — make sure you are breaking down belief systems and rebuilding them. Indoctrinate your users to see the life altering benefits…
Have a relatable story for your new leads, tell your Founder Story if you’ve got one.
This will always do well…
15. Utilize Email Marketing Campaigns to Nurture Leads
That first email has high open rates.
That’s where you indoctrinate your prospects into your brand, culture and start setting expectations for how you’re going to change their life for the better.
Here’s a great Welcome Series that you can literally plug & play from one of the best Email Marketer’s currently.
This will help nurture your audience, guaranteed.
Always pre-qualify leads, nurture them, score them and pass them onto the Sales team.
Keep refining your system.
16. Turn On Your Facebook Pixel If It Isn’t Already
Even if you are currently not running ads. Turn on your Facebook Pixel.
Verify your domain.
Setup the 8 events for your Aggregated Event Measurement
It’s a real simple process which you can find in your Facebook Events Manager.
If you have not already installed your Facebook Pixel for iOS 14.5 you can see the quick guide here on how to do so.
17. Run PPC Ads
Now may not be your exact timing to enter your business into running PPC, but there are plenty of things you can do without spending the money to prepare & prime your business for entry.
As stated above, setup your:
- Facebook Tracking Pixels
- Google Ads Tracking
- Google Tags
- Google Analytics
- Create & Link Your Company YouTube Channel to Google Ads
- Google Search Console
Those are the typical set ups a business needs before even spending a dollar to acquire their first customer online.
From your organic traffic and social media referral traffic you can get a baseline of your Click-Through Rate, Popular Pages, Devices, Countries etc.
This will be key to comparing your Pay-Per-Click performance when you do want to spend.
If you’re ready and primed now to run PPC Ads, then this is a great time to have an understanding of where you want to advertise and who your core customers are on said platform.
Creative for grabbing attention is necessary, so check out what your competitors run on platforms or if in general, check the Facebook Ads Library to get a sense of their ads.
Find a consistency in their ad themes.
How can you utilize this knowledge, and now stand out from them with your own unique positioning?
Don’t get too wild, but try to acquire attention and focus on how you’ll change the state of your potential customers current situation for the better.
What common barriers have your current customers had to overcome. Acquire this knowledge and use it.
It will make your ads better, no matter your audience targeting.
18. Utilize Customer Lists for Lookalike Audiences via Facebook Ads
Disclaimer: Test this, as Facebook has changed a lot due to iOS 14.5 and a lot of people opting out of personalized ads… if you’ve got no on-platform data, take a customer list (CSV format) and upload it into Facebook Ads Audiences page.
You’ll be able to make audiences ranging from 1-10%, 1% being the closest and narrowest lookalike audience & 10% being the largest and broadest audience of similar users to your list.
It will help you point Facebook to your ideal customers, but it could also be inefficient and not a great cost.
Sometimes you just need to utilize the Facebook ecosystem and let the platform itself help find your best audience.
The algorithm is smarter than us, let’s utilize it and be direct in the conversions you’re looking for…
Want purchases, optimize for it.
Also remember your creative will help determine your audiences viability. Make sure to do proper A/B testing by using the same types of creative, or your best creative.
19. Call Out Your Ideal Customers in Copy – Front and Center
This is another aspect of your creative, you want to call out your ideal customer in your video, image and ad copy.
What are their identifiable traits, beliefs and common points friction?
Call these out, this helps retain your prospects interest to keep consuming.
Secondarily, it helps easily weed out those who don’t take action.
This is the action bias…
Your not advertising or showing content for those who don’t match your ethos.
Create your tribe.
We are tribal animals, who thrive on identifying with something.
Lastly, be super relatable…
Each brand and it’s target consumer differs in terms of what that relation is.
Personally, I love to golf on the weekends. I watch sports, have a couple pints with my buddies, I love Harry Potter and have read those books easily 5-6 times each.
We’re multifaceted people, lean into it.
I am no different from most of you reading…
Attract your tribe, call out your ideal customers.
20. Target High-Intent Search Terms
This is more Google Ads centric, targeting high-intent search terms are lower funnel Searches.
High-Intent search terms will help you be far more profitable from Google Ads, due to higher purchase intent, which reduces wasted spend on broad prospecting terms.
My style of campaigns for a new brand/client running Google Ads are:
- Brand Defense – either you bid on your brand, or competitors do.
- High-Intent Search Terms – grouped into multiple campaigns for higher quality scores.
- SKAG’s – Single Keyword Ad Groups for any high-volume terms to control spend easier.
You’ll cover a lot of ground initially with these types of campaigns.
Focus on what will drive conversions, than you can expand your targeting by layering new campaigns, ad groups, search terms/keywords.
Also, cycle new Google Ads in frequently, check your… Quality Scores, Ad Relevance & Landing Page Relevance to indicate what changes you should make.
Whether it be a new landing page test, or better terms used in your ads.
21. Use HotJar to Identify Your Traffic Flows & Bottlenecks On-Site
HotJar is a great tool to understand the User Experience (UX) of your website, as well as their tendencies.
You insert the code onto your website in the <head> section, then you can see the HeatMap of your users.
Here are a list of things you can gain insights on via HotJar:
- Page Scroll Depth – how far did they get?
- Popular Mouse Clicks – what do they click-through to most?
- Popular Mouse Heatmap – what do they hover over & not click on?
- Menu Navigation – What is actually getting used in your Nav. menu?
- Session Recording – Entire recordings of user sessions
- Funnel Analytics – How many convert, abandon cart, view pages
HotJar is a free tool, it’s great when you’re testing new traffic, and even better for new Landing pages.
Gain insights from real on-site data, heat mapping and their analytics dashboard.
22. Generate Feedback from Your Newest Customers & Best Customers
Post-Purchase Survey’s from Email Marketing channels are SUPER EFFECTIVE.
For the 90s kids, it’s like being offered Sunny D after 2 hours outside on a sweltering summer day.
You will take it.
Ask the key questions that will drive product iteration, as well as why they became a customer?
What specific need did they purchase for?
This can really help you inform your prospective customers in ads with real life applications of your product or service.
All you need to do is ask… and sometimes incentivize a survey response (store credit, gift cards etc.).
$20 gift card or store credit for thousands of dollars worth of insights to do better Marketing & Product Iterations.
Interview as many new & existing customers as possible, specifically your highest AOV purchases.
Why’d they buy so much?
Tap into that ‘why‘ & you’re potentially tapping into more frequent high AOV purchases.
No guarantee’s but you can reverse engineer how to get more…
23. Use Feedback from Customers to Create “Painkiller” Content
You’ve got your feedback, now create content that will overcome biases.
What pains are you solving, how can your shout about that within your content?
Again, your feedback will help determine further Marketing & Product iterations.
Painkiller content keeps people engaged, solves a problem & adds value.
Stop guessing what your customers want and just freaking ask them.
They will tell you, or your analytics will tell you based on traffic volume, the bounce rate on said page, as well as time on site/page.
24. Use Feedback to Create Ad Copy
Your customers have their own unique language they use on the daily…
For Marketing there is an exhaustive list of acronyms people use.
This is something you should think about angling your ad copy around, so that you can communicate how they do on each platform.
You’ll get customer stories about why they purchased, if you ask probing questions.
Customer Stories are the holy grail for ad copy.
Often times it will perform extremely well, you’re targeting likeminded people to your existing customers which will lead to acquiring prospect attention, breaking down beliefs & showcases a person who has gone from their current situation into a better one from your product or service.
Customer Stories, use them!
25. Always Use Clear, Concise Calls to Actions
This can tie into HotJar, which was mentioned earlier.
Heat mapping will help you understand where users hover over buttons/calls to actions without clicking…
If they’re not clicking, they don’t understand why they should, or you haven’t been direct/clear in the users benefit by clicking through.
We want to know benefits as humans, especially for new things.
Features only get so far… tell me why I should do something because it’ll help me achieve ‘xyz’ results.
Be clear, concise and always communicate why I, your user, should do something.
26. Ask Leads for Their BEST Email / Business Email
This may seem obvious, but my lanta… most do not submit their Best Email, they submit their spam email.
Again, convey your message crystal clear that you will NOT be spamming them.
Convey that you will only be reaching out with the utmost value & that their best/business email is required.
Lastly, make opting-out easy.
No one, I repeat NO ONE likes to have a hard opt-out for their email.
Users will love you if you say it’s easy to opt-out.
Now double down on this and prime your users by saying something like…
“Read at least 3 emails in full & take action before you unsubscribe.
95% of users simply read without taking action… action is the differentiator between my successful subs vs unsuccessful subs.”
This is especially great if you’ve got an email tutorial series or video series of some sorts.
You’ll see people stick around longer, because you’ve set the expectations.
Always set expectations.
27. Make Form Fields Required
This is borderline comical to include, but it must be done…
Make your form fields required, especially for Name, Email & other vital information your sales team needs from inbound leads.
Marketer’s… help make your sales teams life easier.
They will love you, they’ll back your ideas in meetings (marketing & sales perform better when aligned), they want you to help them as much as possible.
When revenue increases, the business wins as a whole.
You also, will see improvements as an individual. A vital team member, maybe even paid a little more… all from doing the little things right, like making form fields required.
Do the little things, they add up…