Does your agency really need more leads?

A common question that gets asked by agency leaders is how we do generate more leads. But I don’t think this is the right question. It encourages you to delve into the tactics toolbox before you’ve properly assessed what’s right for you.

Often this conversation is happening because there is a desire to generate more revenue. I would encourage you to challenge the fact that more leads in the solution to this. This is can be an inefficient way to drive new revenue, and can also send marketing in a different direction from your new business team.

The goal should be to drive efficiency in your pipeline

You’ve probably looked at your sales pipeline and decided that to increase revenue, you need to put more effort into the top of the funnel. More leads will ultimately turn into more opportunities, and therefore more wins.

This isn’t wrong, but it’s not the most effective way to achieve the end result.

Why more leads can cause you problems

Turning on the taps at the top of the funnel might seem like the right solution, but only if it’s taking into account the unique situation of your business. You need to ask yourself these questions before you make this decision:

1. What’s the quality of your leads? Are the leads you are generating turning into anything? What’s the conversion rate from generation into revenue? Look at your sales funnel and your conversion rates.
2. Is it even the right KPI for your marketing team? This is something that can cause separation from your sales as marketing teams. You can end up in the situation where your marketing team can be hitting their leads generation goals, but if they aren’t converting or turning into revenue then it’s pointless.
3. Does this foster collaboration? A set-up like this also doesn’t encourage working together. For example sales might be wanting to re-engage some lost opportunities from 8-12 months ago, but marketing might not see it as a high priority because it isn’t helping their KPIs. By aligning your teams more on conversion and engagement for example, you can then look at things objectively. You can work out if a campaign targeting lost opportunities would yield more revenue than generating new opportunities through leads. There also might be a far shorter sales cycle as well.

How you should approach your agency lead generation needs

Marketing addresses so many more areas than the top of the funnel. If you look at it objectively starting bottom up, it’s likely you could generate more revenue by converting leads further down the funnel.

Look at the sales funnel and your conversion rates and look for efficiency gains.

• Where are you losing the most people?
• Where can you make the most difference?
• Look for the biggest hole and the easiest fix.

The further down the funnel the better as it’s closer to revenue which is ultimately what you’re looking for.

Take the below as an example. By looking at conversion rates you can see that top-of funnel is pretty good, but after people signal an interest there is a much lower conversion into proposals. Maybe there isn’t enough content to do this. Perhaps you’re really lacking proof points, client testimonials, or other rational factors. Marketing needs to find out what conversations are happening at this stage, and what sales need to convert more.

Example pipeline

Better marketing improves the efficiency at each stage. If you’re better at converting what you already have or generate, the result is that you need less at the top.