Lead quality
What is a sales lead, and how do I get more?
Most businesses do not have a lead volume problem so much as a lead definition problem. Once the definition is agreed, the fixes that produce more of them are usually cheap and dull.
What is a sales lead and how do I get more of them?
A sales lead is a person who has given you a way to contact them and shown some sign that they want what you sell: a call, a form, a chat, a booked appointment or a reply.
A website visit, a follower and a purchased list of names are not leads, and counting them as leads is the fastest way to misjudge what your marketing is doing.
You get more by making contact obvious on the pages people actually land on, answering quickly, following up more than once, and fixing the stage that is losing people before buying more traffic.
Two conditions, and both have to be true
Somebody gave you a way to reach them, and somebody showed intent. Miss either condition and what you have is an audience member, not a lead.
This matters more than it sounds, because almost every argument between a business and whoever does its marketing traces back to an unspoken disagreement about this one definition. The agency counts form submissions. The owner counts people who turned up. Those two numbers are never the same, and neither side is lying.
The disagreement gets worse the further apart the two definitions sit. A campaign that produces plenty of contact form submissions from recruiters, suppliers and people two states away will look excellent in a report and feel like nothing in the building. Write the definition down before anybody spends money, and make sure whoever answers the phone agrees with it.
One more distinction worth making early. A lead is a person, not an event. The same person calling twice and filling in a form is one lead, and a system that counts three is a system that will happily report growth that does not exist.
What counts, and what only looks like it counts
The left hand side of this line is worth measuring and following up. The right hand side is worth having and is not a lead.
- A phone call that was answered or left a voicemail: a lead.
- A completed contact or booking form from somebody who wants your service: a lead.
- A chat conversation that left a name and a number: a lead.
- A reply to an email or a message on a social profile asking about availability: a lead.
- A website visit, however long: not a lead, because you cannot contact that person.
See the full checklist: What counts, and what only looks like it countsHide the full checklist: What counts, and what only looks like it counts
- A follower, a like or a share: not a lead, for the same reason.
- A purchased list of email addresses: not a lead, because nobody on it has shown intent and mailing it can damage your ability to reach anyone.
- A form completed by a supplier, a recruiter or a competitor: not a lead, and worth tagging as such so it stops inflating your numbers.
None of that means awareness work is worthless. It means the thing awareness work produces is measured somewhere other than the lead count, and pretending otherwise makes both numbers useless.
Qualified, unqualified, and the jargon in between
You will hear the terms marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead. Stripped of the vocabulary, they describe one simple thing: a lead that meets your criteria for being worth time, and a lead that does not. For a local business the criteria are usually short. Are they in the area you serve? Do they want something you actually do? Can they proceed, in the sense of being able to afford it, being eligible for it, or having the insurance you accept?
Write those three questions down and you have a qualification standard that the front desk can apply in the first thirty seconds of a call. That is more valuable than any scoring model, because it is the one that will actually get used.
Read the full breakdown: Qualified, unqualified, and the jargon in betweenHide the full breakdown: Qualified, unqualified, and the jargon in between
The reason to bother is that qualified lead volume is the only lead number worth optimising towards. If you feed an advertising platform every form submission as a conversion, it will optimise for the pattern of people who fill in forms, which includes everyone who fills in forms carelessly. Feed it only qualified leads and it starts buying you a different kind of person.
This is also the honest answer to the complaint about junk leads. Junk leads are usually not the platform's fault. They are the predictable result of telling the platform that junk is what you wanted.
Every lead needs a record, not just a notification
A lead that exists only as an email in somebody's inbox is a lead that will be lost, double-handled or forgotten.
The minimum viable version is not expensive: one place where every enquiry lands, one field for where it came from, and one field for what happened to it. That is enough to answer the two questions that matter, which are where do our customers come from and how many enquiries are we losing.
The failure mode is always the same. Enquiries arrive by four different routes, each route is watched by a different person, nobody owns the whole set, and the ones that arrive on a Friday afternoon quietly evaporate. That is not a marketing problem and no amount of extra traffic will fix it.
Once the record exists, the follow-up question becomes answerable: of the leads we received last month, how many did we contact more than once? In most businesses the honest answer is unflattering, and improving it is cheaper than any campaign.
How to get more leads, cheapest first
Work top to bottom. Each step is cheaper than the one below it, and skipping to the bottom is the most common and most expensive mistake.
Count what you already get, and where it dies
Before spending anything, find out how many enquiries arrived last month and how many became customers. If the gap is large, you have found free growth and the rest of this list can wait.
Answer faster, and more than once
The business that responds first usually wins, because the person enquiring is contacting several of you. Same business day is the outside limit, sooner is better, and a single unanswered voicemail is not a follow-up attempt.
Make contact obvious on the pages people actually land on
Check which pages receive the most arrivals, then check whether each one offers a way to make contact without scrolling. On a phone that means a tappable number near the top, not a contact link in a menu.
See the remaining steps: How to get more leads, cheapest firstHide the remaining steps: How to get more leads, cheapest first
Cut the form down to what you genuinely need
Every field costs you submissions. Name, phone, and one line about what they need is enough to start a conversation. Insurance details, dates of birth and preferred appointment times can be collected once somebody is talking to you.
Fix the pages that already rank but produce nothing
There is usually at least one page receiving steady traffic with no call to action worth the name. Adding a clear next step to a page that already has an audience is the highest return hour in most marketing.
Ask your existing customers
Reviews, recall reminders and referrals come from people who already trust you. They cost almost nothing and they feed the consideration stage for everybody who finds you later.
Only then buy more traffic
Advertising multiplies whatever your pages and your phone already do. If those convert badly, advertising buys you a bigger version of the same problem at a higher price.
Six of those seven steps cost time rather than money, which is why they are first. Anybody who reaches for step seven immediately is selling step seven.
Some searches produce leads, most produce readers
Two pages can attract similar traffic volumes and produce completely different amounts of contact, and the difference is almost always intent.
Searches that describe a problem in the present tense, name a service plus a place, or ask about cost, availability or an appointment tend to produce contact. Searches that ask what something is, or how something works, tend to produce reading. Both are worth having and they should not be judged by the same measure.
The mistake is investing entirely in high volume informational topics and then being disappointed by the lead count. The second mistake is the opposite: covering only the ready-to-buy terms, which are competitive, expensive and a small share of total searching, and having nothing that reaches anybody earlier.
A workable balance for most local businesses is a small number of pages built for people ready to act, supported by content that answers the questions those people ask on the way there, all of it pointing at the same obvious next step.
What actually causes junk leads
Junk leads are almost always produced by something specific and fixable rather than by bad luck.
- Feeding the ad platform every form submission as a conversion, so it optimises towards people who fill in forms rather than people who book.
- Broad keyword matching with no negative keyword list, which buys clicks for jobs you do not do.
- Location targeting set to people interested in your area rather than people in it.
- A form with no qualifying question at all, so nothing filters before your team's time gets spent.
- An offer that is vague enough to attract people looking for something else entirely.
- No spam protection on the form, which produces submissions no human ever made.
- A search terms report nobody has opened, which is where the evidence for most of the above is sitting.
Fix the cause rather than filtering the symptom. A campaign optimised against qualified leads produces fewer, better enquiries, and the report gets worse before the business gets better.
What to read next
Three answers that cover the stages immediately before and after a lead is created.
What is a marketing funnel?
Where leads sit in the wider path, and how to find the stage that is losing you the most people.
What is a marketing funnel?What is a call to action?
The single element most responsible for whether a page produces contact or silence.
What is a call to action?What is a good conversion rate?
How to judge whether your pages turn enough visitors into enquiries, without a made-up benchmark.
What is a good conversion rate?The Google Ads guide
How to buy traffic without buying the junk, including negative keywords and search terms.
The Google Ads guideGetting enquiries that go nowhere?
We will look at what is arriving, what is being counted and what happens next, and tell you which one is the problem.
Straight answers.
What is the difference between a lead and a prospect?
A lead has made contact. A prospect is a lead you have qualified and decided is worth pursuing. Every prospect was a lead first and most leads never become prospects.
Businesses that conflate the two end up either chasing everybody or dismissing people too early.
Are website visitors leads?
No. You cannot contact a visitor, and most of them will never identify themselves. Visits are worth measuring as an input to leads and they do not belong in the lead count.
If a report merges the two, it is hiding whichever number is weaker.
Is buying a lead list a good idea?
Rarely, and it carries real risk. Nobody on a purchased list asked to hear from you, response rates are poor, and mailing cold addresses damages your sending reputation in ways that affect the email your actual customers receive.
The US CAN-SPAM Act also sets requirements on commercial email that purchased-list campaigns routinely fail.
How many leads should my business get?
There is no useful universal figure. The number that matters is derived from your own arithmetic: how many customers you want, divided by the share of leads that become customers, which gives the leads you need.
Any benchmark quoted without your closing rate and your average customer value is decoration.
How fast should I respond to a new lead?
Faster than the competitor they contacted immediately after you. Same business day is a reasonable floor for most local businesses, and much sooner is better for anything urgent.
Pick a standard you can actually hold, then measure whether you hold it, rather than adopting a number from an article.
Should I use a chatbot to capture leads?
It can help if it does two things: answers the common questions accurately and hands over to a person quickly. A chat widget that traps somebody in a menu is worse than no widget.
Whatever it captures has to land in the same place as your calls and forms, or you have simply created a fourth inbox nobody watches.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.