The Painful Lesson of Focusing on Leads (and not ICP)

Marketing: 90% of the leads that we are getting right now are spam. We are looking into why and what we can do to prevent it in the future. (We sold to CFOs and we were getting janitors and hairdressers)

5 minutes later at a company meeting.... (also Marketing)  We just had our highest month ever of number leads we brought in. 

Everyone: Cheering... high fives all around. 

ME: Rolling my eyes and shaking my head. 

Don't get me wrong... it is a numbers game. But it's a numbers game with the right leads within your ICP.

You can't fill your pipeline with garbage and be proud of it. 

Here is what happens when you are adding more garbage than good into the Pipeline

1. Wasting everyone's time... With reach out and follow-ups. IF it gets to the stage of meeting set, either no show or again waste time that it isn't going to go anywhere.
2. Lose trust... everyone stops ignoring what is brought in. They figure it's most likely going to waste of time so why even try? 

This is exactly what happened with one of my companies and everything that came from marketing. Sales stopped working anything (except those that at a glance looked good) that came from Marketing. They had a 13% conversion rate from SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) to SAL (Sales Accepted Lead). 13%!!!   

Just to compare this to the other teams in the company... BDRs 40% conversion (working on more improvement), AEs 65%, and Partnerships 85%.

How did a 13% conversion rate happen...

• Huge emphasis on the number of leads coming in

How did it get fixed...

• Focused on the number of a specific type of lead
• Emphasis on conversion 

Also, Marketing had to...

• Change their inbound lead initial status as not qualified 
• Qualify their leads before they sent them to sales.

Individuals and Teams will play the game you give them. If it's on straight numbers and not on quality... they will get you the numbers. It's not that they don't want quality, it's just easier to go after the masses than staying within your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). 

TLDR: Focusing on the wrong metrics can have a huge impact on your pipeline. Focus on your ICP and make the numbers game with the right leads instead of garbage.