Volume is Vanity

The Big Obsession with More

When we start talking to new clients here at Lead Bop usually the first thing they ask about is how many leads they are gonna get. It is natural to think that way becuase in most parts of life having more of something is usually seen as better. If you have more money that is good and if you have more time that is also good so it makes sense that business owners think having more leads is the holy grail of growth. But I have seen it time and time again where a company gets obsessed with the volume of leads coming in and they completely ignore the fact that those leads aren’t actually turning into customers. It is what we call a vanity metric because it looks really nice on a spreadsheet or a graph when you are presenting to the board or your partners but it doesnt actually tell you if the business is healthy or making money.

The problem with focusing just on the number of leads is that it encourages the marketing team or the agency you hired to find the cheapest and easiest ways to get people to fill out a form. And let me tell you it is actually pretty easy to get people to fill out a form if you promise them the moon or use clickbait tactics that aren’t really honest. But what happens next is the sales team gets flooded with phone numbers and emails from people who have no intention of buying or who simply do not fit the profile of a customer you want. This is where the friction starts to happen and it can really damage the internal culture of a company if the sales team feels like marketing is just throwing garbage over the fence to hit a quota.

I remember talking to a business owner last year who was so proud that his marketing manager had doubled their lead volume in two months. He was beaming about it and showing me the charts. But when I asked him if his revenue had doubled he went quiet and said it actually stayed flat. That right there is the definition of a vanity metric. They were doing a lot more work chasing down leads and spending more money on ads but the actual result for the bank account was zero. That is why at Lead Bop we try to shift the conversation away from “how many” and start talking about “who” and “why”.

Why High Volume Can Actually Hurt You

It sounds counterintuitive to say that having too many leads can be bad for business but hear me out. If you have a sales team of five people and they each have enough time to properly work 50 leads a week then giving them 200 leads a week sounds like a great problem to have. But the reality is that if those 200 leads are low quality then your sales people are spending all their time sifting through the noise to find the few golden nuggets buried in there. They get burned out calling people who hang up on them or who say they never requested information in the first place.

This burnout is real and it costs companies a lot of money in turnover and lost productivity. When a sales person loses confidence in the leads they are getting they stop trying as hard. They might make one call and then give up instead of following up five or six times like they should with a qualified prospect. So by flooding the funnel with low intent leads you are actually training your sales team to be less effective. It is a hidden cost that doesn’t show up on the marketing report but it definately shows up in the sales performance.

Another thing to consider is the cost of the software and tools you use. most CRMs charge you based on the number of contacts you have in the database. If you are pumping thousands of bad leads into your system every month you are literally paying to store junk data. It bloats your system and makes your reporting messy and costs you monthly subscription fees for people who are never going to buy from you. We see this all the time where companies are paying huge amounts for HubSpot or Salesforce tiers they don’t need just because they are hoarding bad data.

The True Cost of Bad Leads

You can see from the table above that just looking at the top line numbers can be decieving. A cheap lead is not cheap if it costs you hours of a sales persons time just to find out they aren’t interested. I would rather pay $100 for a lead that has a 50% chance of closing than $5 for a lead that has a 1% chance. When you do the math the “expensive” lead is actually way more profitable in the long run.

Intent vs Interest

There is a big difference between someone showing interest and someone showing intent. Interest is when someone downloads a whitepaper because they are doing research or they saw a catchy headline. Intent is when someone fills out a “contact us” form because they have a specific problem and they think you can solve it. Most lead generation campaigns that focus on volume are optimized for interest not intent. They gate content or run contests to get emails but those people aren’t looking to buy right now.

At Lead Bop we focus heavily on capturing intent. This means we might generate fewer leads overall than some other agencies who promise the world but the leads we do generate are people who are actually ready to have a conversation. It requires a different mindset because you have to be okay with seeing smaller numbers on the weekly report. You have to trust that the quality is there. It takes a lot of discipline for a marketing manager to stand in front of the CEO and say “leads are down 20% this month but revenue is up 10%” but that is the conversation we want to help you have.

When you focus on intent you are looking for signals that someone is in the buying window. This might mean targeting specific keywords in search that show urgency or it might mean creating content that addresses very specific pain points that only a qualified buyer would care about. It is about being narrow rather than broad. Broad marketing gets you volume but narrow marketing gets you customers.

The Quality Feedback Loop

One of the biggest missing pieces in most companies lead generation strategy is the feedback loop between sales and marketing. Usually marketing generates the leads and hands them off and then never hears about them again unless sales complains. To really fix the volume vs quality issue you need to have a tight loop where sales is telling marketing exactly which leads are good and which ones are bad.

This does not mean just saying “leads suck this week”. It means giving specific feedback like “the leads from LinkedIn are better than the leads from Facebook” or “people who downloaded the pricing guide are more likely to close than people who downloaded the ebook”. This data is gold. It allows the marketing team to turn off the campaigns that are driving empty volume and double down on the ones that are driving revenue.

We encourage our clients to set up weekly meetings between the sales leads and the marketing leads to go over this data. It forces everyone to look at the same reality. When marketing sees that the 500 leads they generated only resulted in 2 sales they start to realize that maybe their strategy needs to change. And when sales sees that marketing is actually listening and trying to improve the quality they become more willing to work the leads harder. It creates a partnership instead of an adversarial relationship.

How to Shift Your Mindset

Changing from a volume mindset to a quality mindset is not easy becuase we are conditioned to like big numbers. It feels good to say we have a database of 50,000 people. But you have to start asking the hard questions. Here is a list of things you can start doing today to make that shift happen.

• Stop celebrating lead quantity: In your company meetings do not clap for the number of leads unless you also share how much revenue those leads generated.
• Change your KPI’s: Instead of Cost Per Lead (CPL) start measuring Cost Per Opportunity or Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
• Add friction to your forms: This is a scary one for marketers but adding more fields to your signup form usually increases quality. If someone is willing to answer 5 questions instead of just giving their email they are probably more serious.
• Clean your list: Go through your database and delete the people who havent opened an email in 6 months. It will hurt to see the number go down but it will improve your email deliverability and give you a more accurate picture of your audience.
• Talk to your customers: Ask your best customers what they were searching for when they found you. Use that language in your marketing to attract more people like them.

I remember we had a client who was terrified to add a “budget” field to their contact form because they thought it would scare people away. We convinced them to test it for one month. Lead volume dropped by about 30% which freaked them out at first. But the sales team was ecstatic because they stopped wasting time talking to people who had a $500 budget for a $10,000 service. The close rate went through the roof and they ended up having their best quarter ever with 30% fewer leads. It was a huge eye opener for them and they never went back to the old way.

The Role of Content in Filtering

Content is not just for attracting people it is also for filtering people out. You want your content to repel the wrong people just as much as it attracts the right people. If you are a premium service provider you should talk about your premium pricing and your high touch process. This will naturally discourage people who are looking for a bargain basement solution. And that is a good thing! You do not want those people in your funnel clogging up the works.

At Lead Bop we write a lot about how we aren’t the cheapest option and how we require a lot of collaboration from our clients. We do this on purpose because we know that if a potential client reads that and gets scared then they probably weren’t going to be a good fit anyway. It saves us time and it saves them time. Your marketing should act like a bouncer at a club letting the right people in and keeping the wrong people out.

When you write content that is designed to filter you will notice that your traffic might go down and your shares might go down. But the people who do engage will be the ones you actually want to talk to. It is a quality over quantity game every single time. Do not be afraid to be polarizing or to take a stand on something in your industry. The people who agree with you will trust you more and the people who disagree were never going to buy from you anyway.

Vanity Metrics vs Sanity Metrics

I like to think of it as Vanity Metrics vs Sanity Metrics. Vanity metrics make you feel good but Sanity metrics keep you sane and keep your business running. Lead volume is vanity. Revenue is sanity. Social media likes are vanity. Engagement from decision makers is sanity. It is really easy to get caught up in the vanity because that is what most marketing tools are built to show you. They put the big numbers in bright colors right on the dashboard. You have to dig a little deeper to find the sanity metrics but it is worth the effort.

If you are reporting to investors or a board of directors it can be tough to explain why volume is down. They usually just want to see growth in every category every month. But if you can show them that while lead volume is down the efficiency of the sales team is up and the cost of acquiring a customer is down they will usually understand. It is about educating the stakeholders on what actually drives value.

We help our clients build dashboards that focus on these sanity metrics. We want them to log in and see how many qualified opportunities were created not just how many raw leads came in. It changes the whole conversation and it helps everyone stay focused on the end goal which is growing the business profitably.

Why We Built Lead Bop This Way

When we started Lead Bop we decided early on that we were not going to play the volume game. We knew it would be harder to sell our services at first because everyone wants to hear that they are going to get thousands of leads. But we also knew that if we focused on quality we would keep our clients longer because they would actually make money. And that is exactly what has happened. Our retention rate is really high because our clients trust us to bring them business not just names on a list.

We spend a lot of time analyzing the data and looking for patterns. If we see that a certain ad campaign is bringing in a lot of leads but none of them are converting we kill it immediately. Even if the CPL is really low. It takes discipline to turn off a campaign that looks like a winner on the surface but is actually a loser when you look at the bottom line. That is the value we bring to the table. We are looking at the whole picture not just the top of the funnel.

It is a lot more work to do it this way. It requires more manual review of leads and more communication with the sales team. But the results speak for themselves. We have clients who have been able to double their revenue without increasing their ad spend just by shifting their focus from volume to quality. That is the power of getting this right.

Final Thoughts on Moving Forward

So if you are reading this and realizing that maybe you have been focusing too much on volume dont panic. It is a common mistake and it is one that is easily fixed. Start by looking at your conversion rates through the funnel. Where are people dropping off? If you have a ton of leads but very few first meetings then you have a lead quality problem. If you have a lot of first meetings but few proposals then maybe you have a sales process problem or a pricing problem. But you wont know until you stop looking at just the top line volume.

Start having those conversations with your sales team. Ask them which leads are the best and where they are coming from. Look at your best customers and try to figure out how they found you. And most importantly stop being afraid of smaller numbers. A small list of highly engaged buyers is worth way more than a massive list of tire kickers.

It is time to stop chasing vanity metrics and start chasing real growth. It takes some courage to make the switch but once you see the impact on your bottom line you will wonder why you ever cared about volume in the first place. Focus on the quality and the quantity will take care of itself in the form of revenue which is the only metric that really counts at the end of the day.

If you are ready to stop playing the volume game and start getting leads that actually convert give us a shout at Lead Bop. We would love to help you build a strategy that makes sense for your business and helps you reach your real goals.