Addressing Bad Lead Quality in Sales: Challenges and Solutions

When you say lead quality what do you mean? Non - ICP fits? Bad Contact data? (phone / email)

Lead quality - in my experience comes down to two things. Poor fit (ICP/DM Personas) and qualification. If the ICP is not a fit, then your teams wasting valuable prospecting time. If the ICP and target persona's are a great fit but they score low on the qualification framework, then the sales process, and possibly any misalignment between marketing and sales needs fine tuning. Some believe AI can solve lead quality, it can help improve quality but only if the GTM basics are done well and your sales and marketing teams are fully aligned on what constitutes an actual lead!

Thanks Eric J. - good question. When I say lead quality, I’m mainly thinking about leads that engaged with the Marketing funnels but aren’t really ready for sales — usually due to lack of urgency, timing, or intent. And Lisa M. - you nailed it. Great breakdown. I’ve been thinking a lot about how MQLs can create extra noise for AEs. Even with solid ICP alignment, the sales team often ends up chasing leads that aren’t ready to buy. I don’t think we can eliminate that entirely, but I’m wondering is the volume of those not-quite-ready leads becoming a real pain point for sales? How are your teams working to close that gap between marketing and sales?

Usually poor lead quality from website converts are due to misaligned messaging of the product, and also almost 0 friction in the web funnel. Adding some picklists to prequalify, ie make the prospect do SOME work in order to book, will eliminate a lot of tire kickers. When's the last time you did a review of your marketing messaging & sales messaging, chances are they're saying different things Edit: When someone books on thru the website, they should feel like the messaging is written directly to them (are they ICP fit) and they understand when the right TIME to book is. IE if they're too early to get value from the product etc.

Sudarshan Y. - Exactly the key term being 'Ready to Buy' how marketing and sales align on what actually constitutes as intent. I agree with Eric J. views on web traffic and top of funnel (TOFU) activities. Far too many pipelines are filled with folks that read a blog or downloaded a piece of content. True intent is made up of both TOFU and MOFU activities, that in my view is when an MQL becomes sales ready. Achieving alignment between sales and marketing is all about communication and the agreed-upon lead scoring criteria, with a collective understanding of funnel handoff points, lead ownership and accountability. Eric's points on messaging are spot on. Both marketing and sales need to collaborate to ensure messaging is unified across all funnel touch-points. If targets are being missed due to misalignment, it's time to revisit the go-to-market (GTM) fundamentals, realign strategies / tactics and refine processes until conversions improve, then scale the optimised approach. Definitely a pain point for AE's, especially if a business is very traditional in it's approach to growth.