How Some Leads Cost You Money

It’s probably difficult to believe but a lot of sales people actually complain about marketing. Not getting enough leads and bad quality leads is usually what they complain about.

I’ve heard this a lot. Most of the time the marketing department will react by focusing on the first issue (generating more leads) and basically ignore the second one (improving the quality.) 

This is usually the case because it’s a lot easier (and quicker) to increase lead volume. All you need to do is spend more on advertising like pay-per-click, Facebook ads, adding more events to your calendar, or sending out more direct mail campaigns…and before you know it, you have more leads.

In many cases, marketing teams are encouraged to focus on more leads. Their income is directly correlated to the results. 

“Suspects” are not “leads”

Unless you’re new, you most likely know that “leads” aren’t always really “leads”. There’s a large number of them that are just “suspects/contacts”. These are typically people that might be interested in buying sometime in the future but not necessarily just yet. You don’t have much information about them and they’re not quite ready to talk to a sales rep.

But these are the 2 problems that happen when you try and pass these “leads” to a sales person:

  1. The leads get bothered and annoyed. 
  2. They usually avoid your phone calls and/or don’t respond to your emails. Think about it, would you? If and when I get sales calls that start with “I’ve seen you’ve visited our website,” it doesn’t make me any more excited about their offer.

Research says you should connect to your prospects within the first 5 minutes of their inquiry, but I would argue that this is only true if/when they’re a qualified prospect. Signing up for a webinar or downloading a whitepaper is hardly enough to consider them “qualified”.

Wasting valuable time

 Sending your sales team to chase bad leads is a waste of one of your most valuable resources – their time.

WaaS companies specifically need to manage their sales team’s time resource if they plan to be successful and keep their costs for customer acquisition under control. This is true for all WaaS businesses.

Sending “suspects/contacts” to your sales team from marketing just creates more issues. For those sales reps that would complain about not having enough leads to follow up on, now are complaining about spinning their wheels chasing down bad leads that have no interest in talking with them yet.

Developing your “suspects” into becoming “leads”

A lot of your “suspects” just need some extra time to learn more about your services. They’re likely still in the beginning stages of evaluating all of their options. This process usually takes a bit of time, especially if they’re busy running other aspects of their business.

It’s easy to spend a small fortune chasing these unqualified/un-ready leads. As a WaaS owner, you should focus on developing your “suspects” into qualified leads by nurturing the relationships until they’re ready to make a decision.

To do this, you need to find cost effective ways to stay on their radar. My suggestion would be to send them fairly frequent emails that gives them information that can add value to their business. When they’re ready to pull the trigger, you’ll be top of mind and the preferred choice. 

Here are some ideas you can use in your email campaign to add value as you nurture the relationship:

  • white papers
  • downloads
  • newsletters
  • webinars

The trick here is to try them to see what works best for you and your niche.

The point here is to find as many inexpensive ways you can add value to have legitimate reasons to stay in touch.

Whatever tools you do decide to use, they need to include very clear call to actions and easy ways for your leads to take the next step and reach out to you.

At the end of the day, your focus needs to first address quality over quantity…not the other way around.

Throwing a lot of “suspects/contacts” into your funnel, without the proper followup tools to develop them into qualified leads is only ever going to be a waste of your valuable time and resources.

Just remember, not all leads are good leads. Wasting time and money on bad leads can do more harm than good for your WaaS.

Michael Short

Michael Short

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WaaS Marketing

Hi, I’m Michael Short, creator of WaaS.PRO, and the founder/CEO of Blitz Industries, Inc.  Before we started WaaS.PRO, my team and I spent many years in the agency business and what seems like THOUSANDS of hours on our own WaaS network. We’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to marketing and we’ve carried this experience over to marketing websites-as-a-service (WaaS) solutions.  Whatever issue you’re facing, there’s a good chance that we’ve seen it before. We started WaaS.PRO to share our experiences with you (the good, the bad and the ugly.) Our focus with these articles is to provide practical, actionable advice that will hopefully have a measurable impact on you and your WaaS business.

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