Do you have loads of poor quality leads?

Is there such thing as too many leads? Yes… if they all suck and don’t convert.

If you’re getting loads of leads but very few of them convert, you end up wasting your sales people’s time. In order to keep up with the leads, you have to hire more sales people, but the sales people can’t drive as much revenue as they need to. Sales people are expensive… so in other words, you’re wasting money. Also, obviously leads are good, but they need to convert and become customers to be really valuable.

If you have an avalanche of poor quality leads, you have a positioning problem. Some symptoms of poor positioning could be signs of something else, but loads of poor quality leads is always a positioning problem. I’m not talking about poor quality leads as in spammers, but rather people who work at serious companies and are looking to buy something, but never seem to buy what you’re selling.

Here’s what’s happening:

1) Person comes to your website, docs, etc and thinks ‘sweet! this solves my problem!’

2) They contact sales

3) They go through the sales conversation, or demo, or whatever, and realize they misunderstood what your project or product does. It’s not that your product/project sucks, it’s that it doesn’t actually do the thing your prospect thought it would. Therefore, they don’t buy.

You need to make sure the message you’re sending on your website and all your communication is in alignment with what your project and product actually do, and what it does well. You also have to make sure people are getting the same message from marketing and sales.

By the way, it’s really hard to know if you’re getting the equivalent of loads of poor quality leads for open source projects, because what happens is someone discovers the project website/docs, downloads it, and then discovers it doesn’t do what they want. So they don’t use it… but you might never know.

Do you know an open source company that is getting loads of leads but is struggling with super low conversion rates? Put them in touch with me — I can help.