Leads are the foundation of business, but not every lead is created equal. Some go nowhere, while others don’t understand their needs or align with your capabilities.
Consequently, identifying quality leads is key. These individuals or organisations match your services, understand their pain points, and, most importantly, want solutions.
In this guide, we explore quality leads, their significance and characteristics, as well as how to define, measure, and generate great leads.
- The value of quality leads: High-quality leads have a greater chance of bringing in new business because they’re interested in and would benefit from your offerings. They’re also fewer in volume but rewarding in revenue.
- Measurement is part of the process: Identifying great leads is a multifaceted process. Using a mixture of scoring, engagement metrics, insights from your sales team, and query forms helps you measure and qualify the best potential customers.
- Where Who Needs Leads fits in: As a lead generation service, we expedite your processes by not only identifying but also pre-qualifying potential customers so you always have viable, actionable, and relevant leads to follow up on.
What Are High-Quality Leads?
Every lead represents a potential customer who may be a good fit for your products or services. However, not all leads have the budget or understanding to purchase.
A high-quality lead does. These leads fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and are easier for your team to qualify. They know what they need, have expressed concrete interest, and have the means to convert.
For example, a quality lead for finance brokers may be someone who is actively seeking financial services and has the budget as well as the criteria to apply for a loan. They’ve researched your business, reached out for a consultation, or requested a quote.
Someone who matches this description aligns with your business’ offerings. In contrast, a bad lead is a dead-end. They likely won’t convert because they don’t understand their pain points, have a budget, or lack the authority to make decisions.
Why Are Quality Leads Important?
Quality leads are more likely to convert and generate revenue, but they also bring other benefits that highlight their importance, such as the following:
- Refined strategies: You can use the metrics and touchpoints great leads interacted with (e.g. web pages, blog posts, webinar registrations) to evaluate effectiveness, develop similar tactics, and assess why other methods may not be engaging potential customers.
- Better return on investment (ROI): Quality leads are more likely to stay on as customers because their needs align with your business. A higher customer retention rate generates more revenue by providing opportunities such as referrals or upselling.
- Narrow down your efforts: High-quality leads that convert deliver solid data on purchase intent. This means your sales and marketing teams can make more informed decisions to help guide similar prospects towards the decision stage and de-prioritise other leads.
- Save time and money: Lower-quality leads waste time and resources because they’re less likely to become customers. By sourcing better leads and prioritising quality over quantity, you’re more cost-effective throughout the sales process.
What Are the Characteristics Of A Quality Lead?
Every potential customer is unique, but several characteristics set quality leads apart from others. Below, we break down what these qualities are and some suggestions on how to identify them.
Problem-aware
Not every lead knows they have a problem, much less how to solve it. Those who are aware will take steps to educate themselves.
To identify this characteristic, analyse how a potential customer comes across your product or service.
For example, they interact with your prospecting and marketing efforts, such as clicking an advert or reading blog posts about their needs, then signing up for your newsletter. Alternatively, a high-quality lead may come out of nowhere, potentially hearing about you by reputation or referral and understanding you can help solve their problem.
Decisive
Great leads are ultimately decision-makers. They not only have the ability to buy, but they invest the time to engage.
Leads with this characteristic may request a demo or register for an account and use your free offerings before upgrading.
Furthermore, they match the scope of your services. A dower-quality lead may need your services but later have changing demands your business cannot meet. In contrast, a quality lead is transparent early in the process and informed on your capabilities.
Trusting
Beyond being engaged, quality leads trust your products or services. Moreover, you’ve backed up their expectations. You’re timely, engaged, and enthusiastic about their interest, helping to cultivate a relationship.
A lead’s trust in you is noticeable in a few ways. For example, they feel comfortable asking questions directly, following up consistently, and seeking detailed information.
Reachable
A quality lead is easy to contact. If they’ve not provided their contact information by signing up for a newsletter or similar, then their information is easily available online.
All information is also valid and verifiable, which lead generation companies like Who Needs Leads can vet for you through pre-qualification.
Additionally, when you reach out, your potential customer is responsive. They provide clear answers to your questions and are open to discussing the next steps rather than dragging out the process.
How To Define Lead Quality for Your Business
Defining lead quality is different for every business because each has distinct target audiences, offerings, and sales processes. Consequently, you need to evaluate what a good lead means to you beyond their likelihood to convert and characteristics or behaviours to watch for.
For example, you should have a clear idea of who a good lead is through your ICP and market research.
Financial advisors and brokers may evaluate, for instance, whether a lead is a new or long-time business owner. Alternatively, they may belong to a target demographic, such as married couples looking to refinance their mortgage—or they could be a part of an emerging market with behaviours you’re not fully aware of.
Your team should also have the right tools to coordinate and analyse. Quality leads offer valuable insights if you understand why they engage. Furthermore, you need to have effective generation and measurement methods.
Budget is additionally key. Your cost-per-lead must be worth the investment to nurture and convert.
Potential customers can also have expectations that go beyond your budget. This isn’t necessarily a bad lead—but one worth re-evaluating to be cost-effective if there’s a promising return on investment.
How To Measure Lead Quality: 5 Key Strategies
Once you’ve narrowed down what a best-fit lead looks like for your business, the next step is to develop a strategy to measure quality.
We’ve outlined some suggestions below.
1. Define lead scoring criteria
Lead scoring assigns potential customers a point value. Points help identify the right leads to pursue and the qualifying attributes or behaviours that dictate a potential purchase.
Many score systems assign values on a scale of 0 to 100, though this varies. The higher the value, the higher the quality of the lead. You add or deduct points based on the qualities of the lead.
For example, if you’re a finance broker who primarily deals with middle-aged customers from southern Queensland, you might deduct points if your lead is in their 20s and located in New South Wales.
Companies also often use the Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe or BANT metric to assign lead scores. Each metric is worth a certain number of points (which you determine) and aligns with the previously discussed characteristics of problem-aware, decisive, trusting, and reachable.
2. Track engagement metrics
Another key way to measure lead quality is through hard data. Metrics inform lead scores, but they also give you insights into the kind of content customers prefer compared to the prospects who didn’t convert.
The metrics you should track depend on where you focus your efforts. For example, you can follow and analyse actions like email opens, webinar registrations, and social media interactions.
3. Get feedback from your sales teams
Salespeople are in the thick of it. They track, follow up, and convert customers, which means they have valuable insights into what a great lead looks like.
Schedule regular meetings and use their knowledge to measure quality. Ask questions about what makes customers convert. For instance, you might ask about the individual tactics a salesperson used or specific offerings the customers liked.
Additionally, ask them to document their activities, particularly if a lead converted, was disqualified, or dragged out of the process. Doing so gives you specifics on behaviour and even provides opportunities for coaching junior salespeople on nurturing leads.
4. Add a query form
Similar to tracking engagement metrics, a query form provides you with actionable data on your leads.
Query forms can be placed on web pages such as product pages, landing pages, or contact sections that potential customers are likely to interact with.
There, they provide specific details, such as their contact information, pain points, industry, and how they found your services or products. You can then use this information to determine the commonalities between converting customers.
5. Use lead generation services to pre-qualify
Lead generation services are third-party companies that source leads for your business. Take Who Needs Leads for example. You request the type of finance leads you want and order a number.
We then go through a process to find and qualify them before delivering them right to your digital doorstep. In doing so, we help you streamline the generation process – discussed below – and bring pre-qualified quality leads for you to act on quickly.
How To Generate Quality Leads
Generating quality leads requires a definitive and effective lead generation strategy. Here’s a quick breakdown of what the process looks like, focusing on higher-quality leads:
- Know your target audience: Quality leads fit your ICP. You should have a firm understanding of which customers match your products or services, backed by actionable data.
- Create great content: Compared to lower-quality leads, high-quality leads are more likely to engage. Creating great content that provides value, speaks to their needs, and stands out from competitors is consequently key.
- Leverage different channels: Depending on where your best leads tend to engage, using different marketing channels (e.g. email, social media) helps you capture their interest and distribute your unique content.
- Capture information: Use engagement metrics and lead magnets to glean insights into your target audience. Lead magnets coincide with great content, exchanging contact details for free offerings.
- Qualify, measure, and segment: Use the strategies we’ve discussed to measure quality leads and segment them according to relevant attributes, like demographics or decision-making ability. Watch out for the characteristics of a great lead and assess them according to your scoring criteria.
- Hand-off to sales teams: Leads who seem likely to convert should be a top priority for your sales team. Backed by tools and coaching, a salesperson ideally has the skill and data to engage, answer questions, and navigate objections to close a deal or nurture.
- Optimise: To better define lead quality, analyse what made customers convert. For example, you could submit a survey post-purchase and ask personalised questions about their experience during the buyer’s journey and what attracted them to your services.
Key Takeaways
- Obtaining quality leads is invaluable because they’re more likely to convert than other leads. In addition, they help evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies, see more long-term ROI, and focus your time and resources on the best prospects.
- Quality leads display several key characteristics. They’re conscious of their needs, ready to make decisions, trust your services and authority in your industry, and are easy to contact.
- Some quality leads are only great on the surface. Defining what quality means to your business helps you gauge which potential customers to pursue without going over budget or beyond your scope of operations.
- Measuring leads determines which potential customers meet your standard of quality. Lead scoring, metric tracking, and collaborating with your sales team help refine measurement.
- Finding great leads requires effective generation methods. Develop the right process and outsource to Who Needs Leads to identify more leads while pre-qualifying your best options.
How Who Needs Leads Ensures Their Finance Leads Are High-Quality
Who Needs Leads is Australia’s trusted finance lead generation company. We helped 100+ brokers capture quality leads to fast-track their business and land the best clients.
Using the latest trends and technologies, the leads we find go through a specialised process to verify, validate, and align with your needs—all before we send them right to your inbox, CRM, or Google Sheets.
How do we do it?
Who Needs Leads leverages a mixture of industry expertise and key generation methods to harness high-quality leads.
We own several brands in the consumer auto, commercial equipment, working capital, and mortgage refinance industries. Thanks to our scope, we can advertise on Meta, TikTok, Google Ads, YouTube, and native ads to capture high-quality leads.
We also leverage a multi-step questionnaire to capture critical information, pre-qualifying potential customers according to your requirements.
Additionally, numbers are pin-verified and emails validated so you can take action without worrying about hard-to-reach contacts. Once verified, we deliver leads in as little as 24 hours.
Land quality leads today
Our generation services deliver anywhere from 50 to 1,000 leads per month—increasing both your volume and quality.
Choose between car finance, personal, business, and home loan leads today and land the right clients tomorrow. Get in touch to learn more.