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Six Strategies to Improve the

Quality of Your Sales Leads

Jingcong Zhao, Content Marketing Manager

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As a B2B demand generation marketer, you’ve got a lot on your plate. You’re responsible for

growing the lead database for your company. You also need to make sure that the leads you’re

bringing in are valuable leads, with a high likelihood of becoming customers.

There is no shortage of channels or tactics for generating sales leads in our increasingly digital

world. Chances are your company is investing more in digital today than ever before and you’ve

collected more data about your prospects than you can digest.

You know that your leads are out there, but it’s quite difficult to identify the high value leads from

the low value ones.

We’ve seen a shift in priorities in B2B marketing organizations. According the 2016 Demand

Generation Benchmark report, 83% of B2B marketers said focusing on lead quality over

quantity was a priority for 2016, a rise of 10% from last year.

As a social demand generation solutions company, the topic of lead quality is close to our heart.

In this guide, we want share with you six strategies for generating high quality leads based on

Socedo’s own experience. We’ll also dive into how our marketing team uses social media along

with other channels to engage with and nurture leads.

6 Strategies:

1. Determine the quality of leads that works for your business

2. Use social media along with other channels to warm up your

leads

3. Nurture leads through multi-touch email campaigns

4. Use retargeting ads

5. Implement lead scoring

6. Create a feedback loop between marketing and sales

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1. Determine the quality of leads that works for your

business

Every business is different. It’s important that your definition of a sales-ready lead fits with the

unique circumstances of your company. Coming up with this definition isn’t something marketing

should tackle alone. Instead, bring your sales leaders into the process.

According to research from Hubspot, companies that have alignment between their marketing

and sales department enjoy a 20% increase in annual sales, whereas companies with poor

alignment saw a decrease in annual sales of 4%.

When you think about your lead definition, you need to get everyone on the same page about

your ideal customer.

What’s their budget? What’s their business model? How big is their company or department?

Do they already have other technology in place to signal that they’re ready to use your

products? What content do they need to understand your business and develop their buying

criteria? Who influences their decisions?

The first step is to develop a buyer persona document to capture key insights about your

customer base. Your buyer persona(s) should guide you in your marketing decisions, including

how you think about qualifying your leads.

Defining a qualified lead isn’t something you do once. It’s a moving target because you’re trying

to strike a balance between quality and quantity. As you have discussions with your team,

consider these questions:

Is your current buyer’s persona so strict that you’re missing out on qualified leads?

In most B2B purchase decisions, there are multiple stakeholders who influence the decision. If

you’re only focused on just one of the stakeholders, you’re missing the opportunity to influence

the other people who need to be onboard. Keep in mind that most B2B buyers do the majority of

research online before they talk to a salesperson. So the content you use to engage with leads

is even more important towards converting your leads.

Are you giving your salespeople too many leads?

Many marketers send every single lead they capture to sales. But you may be sending

salespeople too many leads that they simply don’t have enough time to follow-up with each one.

If this is the case, you may want to tighten your definition of a sales-qualified or sales-ready

lead.

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On the other hand, if you work for an early stage business that struggles to get enough leads,

you may want to relax your lead definition. In this case, you may start accepting people who

sign up for product trial with their personal email address rather than with their company email.

Are you getting qualitative feedback from your sales team?

Your sales team can tell you why your product won in certain cases and lost in others. Ask them

to share their insight on why certain customers churned. This will help you make decisions

about how you position your products and engage leads with content. You may need to make

changes to your product positioning or create new content offers if you learn that you’re pushing

too many of the “wrong” people through the sales process.

Remember that your company and customers are always evolving, so it’s important re-visit your

lead definition over time.

In our own company, we’ve learned a lot by looking into why some of our early customers

churned. We found that most of the churned customers were early-stage companies that didn’t

have a solid marketing foundation.

On the other hand, our most successful customers are companies that have a marketing

automation system and a CRM system in place and invest in content marketing. Knowing this,

we are now focused on selling to somewhat larger businesses. We’ve positioned our product a

bit differently and developed content specifically around best practices on lead nurturing using

data in CRM and marketing automation systems.

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2. Use social media along with other channels to

warm up your leads

Great marketing is about reaching the right people, with the right message, at the right time.

The best leads are the people who fit your buyer’s persona and who’ve recently expressed an

interest in your market or a problem that your product can solve. If you can identify these people

and engage them with relevant content while their business problem is still top of mind, you’ll be

getting warm leads.

Twitter is a great channel for cultivating warm leads. People use Twitter to do research on

products and talk to brands far more than on other social networks (Source: Convince and

Convert).

It’s easy to find people who may be interested in your business on Twitter. You can browse

people’s profiles and read their tweets to get an idea of whether or not they’d be interested in

what you’re selling. The content of the tweets including hashtags, keywords, as well as

engagement with other users all represent people’s interests, needs and business pain points.

These signals give you a clear segue to start a conversation. You can send a prospect a direct

message that references a person’s expressed interest in your market or product and then link

to an article they’d find relevant. If these people follow you back or respond to your message, it

means they’re interested in hearing from you and may be good leads.

With Socedo, you can discover hundreds of prospects each day and qualify them through an

automated workflow. Instead of sending hundreds of Twitter DMs manually, Socedo matches

prospects’ Twitter handles with their contact information including their job titles, company

names, corporate email addresses and phone numbers. This gives you the option to

immediately follow up with your leads while they’re warm.

Social media is a great way to start a conversation with new prospects, but prospects need

more touch points with your brand before they’ll trust you and consider your product. To turn

prospects into sales-qualified leads, they need to be nurtured.

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3. Nurture leads through multi-touch email

campaigns

Nurturing simply means committing to building relationships with qualified prospects regardless

of when they will buy. You trust that with this commitment, you’ll earn their business when

they’re ready.

We’ve found that emailing is an effective method for nurturing leads. With marketing automation

software, you can send emails with relevant content to leads at a regular cadence so they

become more familiar with your company and products. You can adjust the offers, calls-to-

action, and cadence of the emails based on how your leads engage with your messages.

Now, we’ll share an example of how our own marketing team uses emails to follow up with

socially engaged leads.

First Touch

At Socedo, we use our own product to send prospects direct messages (DM) on Twitter. In our

DM, we typically invite these prospects to one of our upcoming webinar or a blog post they may

be interested in. Twenty-four hours later, while Socedo is still top of mind, we follow up with

these leads with an introductory email.

In our experience, we’ve achieved an average 44.1% open rate and 6.0% click-through rate on

first touch emails to social leads. That’s double our typical email engagement rates to cold leads

from other channels.

How we approach the intro email:

● We keep this message short and light.

● This email comes from a person, not a corporate email address.

● We use plaintext because highly-formatted emails at this stage can be perceived as

“spam”.

● We only include one call to action (CTA), which asks the person to take a look at a blog

post, guide, or webinar we have.

Over time, we’ve learned what kind of call-to-actions/offers work in direct messages (DM) on

Twitter versus follow-up emails. We’ve asked for a free trial of Socedo in our direct message on

Twitter. We’ve also put a webinar or a white paper as the CTA. We found that the softer CTA,

which asks people to read content rather than sign-up for a free trial is more effective.

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In our experience, leads from Twitter who engage with our content consistently convert at a high

rate. However, we send a few more emails with “softer” CTAs before we ask people to consider

a free trial or sign up for a live demo.

Second Touch

At Socedo, we send prospects a case study a week after the initial welcome email. We chose to

send case studies because at this point, leads are still not very familiar with our brand. A case

study adds social proof to the conversation.

At this point, we saw a small decrease in email engagement rates because not all of our leads

wanted to be on our email list. This is fine because they’re all net new leads we got from Twitter.

At this touchpoint, the average open rate is around 25%, with a CTR of 2%.

Third Touch

For our highly engaged leads (i.e. leads who clicked on our previous email or visited our

website), we sent the next email three days later. With those who didn’t click on our previous

email, we waited a week to send them the next email. At this point, we sent out product -

focused white papers, blog posts, and webinars. If a lead clicks on this offer, we then ask him or

her for a sales conversation.

Cold Streams

At Socedo, we’ve decided that if a lead doesn’t take any action within 3 weeks, most likely the

timing is not right, and we would move him or her into a less frequent stream. We have a “Cold

Nurture” program that only sends an email every other week. The content is more top-of-funnel,

such as an online article or blog that mentions our company.

However, if a lead clicked on our content, we would move them into a twice-per-week content

stream or send them an immediate follow-up.

For the “cold stream” emails, you can expect low engagement rates. We saw that our open

rates were around 15% and CTR around 1.5%. These emails are meant to “listen” for leads who

are re-qualifying themselves by showing interest, so low open rates are normal.

Getting Started

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Come up with a few initial streams with several different types of content to promote. Sketch out

your email nurture streams on paper and write down the cadence of the emails, content you

want to use and how someone would move from one stream to another.

Don’t expect to get this right the first time. Instead, set a cadence to start (i.e. eight weeks), and

see how things go. Once you’ve had at least a few hundred leads in total cycle through the

streams, look at the data and make a change to one element (i.e. cadence, content, call to

action). See how the change impacts your email performance. Repeat this process. If you

commit to this practice, you’ll be able to see real improvements in lead quality over time.

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4. Use Retargeting Ads

In addition to using email to nurture your leads, you can re-target socially engaged leads with

retargeting ads to keep your brand top of mind.

Retargeting ads are a form of online targeting advertising and are served to people who already

visited your website or are a contact in your database (i.e. a lead). If you’re new to the subject,

see Hubspot’s post “A Beginner’s Guide to Retargeting Ads” to learn how you can use this type

of ads.

There are generally two different approaches to retargeting. The first is a pixel-based retargeting

approach where you “cookie” anonymous visitors to your website and re-display your materials

to them. Socedo can help you here by bringing new visitors from Twitter to your website, so you

build a larger pool of website visitors you can serve the ads to.

The second approach is to use lists of your existing contacts. In this scenario, you upload a list

of the email addresses to a retargeting campaign (usually on Twitter or Facebook), and the

platform will identify users on that network who have those addresses and serve retargeting ads

just to them.

With this approach, you can serve ads to specific people. Because Socedo gives you enhanced

data about your prospects (their email address, Twitter handle, company info, job title), you can

serve ads just to the people you’ve already engaged with on Twitter.

With retargeting, you’ll want to make sure you don’t use the same message that you had used

in your original outreach. At this point, you’re making a second attempt. You’ll need to make

sure your offer is still relevant to your prospects. One idea is to make a post that references to

an upcoming event. For example, if you’re trying to get sign-ups for a content marketing

webinar, you can include tips from expert speakers for an upcoming content marketing

conference.

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5. Implement Lead Scoring

Developing a lead scoring model is essential if you want to improve the quality of your leads.

Lead scoring is important because the scores gives a way to figure out where to focus your

time. By ranking your leads based on indicators of interest and qualified personas, you and your

sales colleagues can spend your time on leads with the greatest revenue potential.

If you’re new to lead scoring models, we highly recommend you review a few resources, such

as Marketo’s e-book “A Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring” and Sirius decisions’ blog.

If your company has been around for a while, you probably already have a lead scoring model.

In this case, you want to make sure that your model isn’t missing any important behavioral and

demographic data.

Most marketers’ lead model captures behavioral data in the awareness, research and

consideration phases of the buyer’s journey. But few marketers consider the activities at very tip

of the buyer’s journey: before awareness and well before the research or the consideration

phases.

Social activities provide the best indicators of top-of-the-funnel interest. People often express

their initial interest in a product or vocalizes a pain point on social media. The biggest benefit of

social data is that it provides you a real-time view of who is interested in your product. With real-

time data on the social activities of leads in your database, you can prioritize your engagements

with leads.

Monitoring the social activities of your leads doesn’t actually require much work. You can use

Socedo’s Social Lead Monitor capability to track the social media activities your existing leads

around specific topics and hashtags. You can then use this data to create new trigger

campaigns in your marketing automation system. Here are some ideas to consider:

1. If someone follows you on social media, add them to a nurture program for a more

proactive subscription of your content.

2. If someone on Twitter mentions a specific problem or topic that your product addresses,

add them to a program with product feature content and case studies.

3. If someone tweets about a competitor, send an alert to their sales rep or account

manager. The sales rep can mention the recent tweet as a personal conversation

starter.

4. If you’re sponsoring an event, get the event’s hashtag and see if any of your leads are

using it. You can invite the leads who mention the event to your booth for a demo or to

attend your speaker session.

To get started, you’ll want to identify which of your leads are on Twitter. If you use Hubspot,

Marketo, and or Salesforce, you can get a free social lead report from us. This report will show

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you how many of your existing leads have already been influenced by your Twitter presence,

how many leads in your database are on Twitter and ready to be engaged there, and how many

leads have already engaged with you on Twitter but are missing from your lead database.

The second benefit of using social data in your lead scoring model is that it has the most up-to-

date demographic data about your leads. On your website, the information you collect about

leads may be somewhat limited. Social media profiles help you round out your data. Because

social profiles are updated by the user themselves you can assume a high degree of accuracy,

in job title, current company and location.

If you’re ready to implement a new lead scoring model, take a look at our guide “Build a Social-

Minded Lead Scoring Model” for examples you can use right away.

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6. Create a Feedback Loop Between Marketing and

Sales

To see if you’re truly making progress in increasing your lead quality, make sure to get

qualitative and quantitative feedback.

Two core metrics will show you if your lead quality is improving over time: the length of the sales

pipeline, and the rate at which leads convert. If you’re sending higher quality leads to sales, you

should see the time it takes to close these leads decrease. You should also see that a larger

proportion of leads sent to sales turn into customers in a given timeframe.

Don’t forget to gather qualitative feedback. For most small and medium organizations, it’ll take

you a while to collect enough data to validate your hypothesis about who makes for better leads.

Ask your sales leaders what their team’s experience has been with leads from marketing. The

anecdotes from sales about wins and losses should inform your process and be the basis for

new ideas.

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Conclusion and next steps

Improving the quality of your leads takes time and commitment. It’s critical that when you start

this initiative, you get your sales leaders onboard.

There isn’t a one-size-fits all approach. It’s all about figuring out what your company needs

today, committing to putting more resources and thought into your lead nurturing initiatives,

executing against a plan, analyzing the results and adjusting from there.

Here are some parting thoughts we’ll leave you with as you take on this project.

1. To define the quality of leads that work for your business, get everyone on the same

page about your ideal customer and the specific goals your company wants to achieve.

2. Your definition of a sales-ready lead should align to the capacities in your marketing and

sales departments. Revisit your definition and how you rank and score leads over time.

3. Use social media to discover new prospects. Use social media along with other channels

to warm up the leads.

4. Lead need to hear from you multiple times. Nurture your leads through multiple

channels: social media, emails and retargeting ads.

5. Implement lead scoring to prioritize your engagements with leads.

6. Social media data provides the best indicator of real-time interest. Make sure it’s in your

lead scoring model.

7. Track the social media activities of your existing leads and use this data to create

automated trigger campaigns.

8. Measure if your lead quality is improving over time. Track the length of the sales

pipeline, and the rate at which leads convert.

9. Get feedback from sales on how well your lead qualification methodology is working.

About Socedo Socedo’s mission is to bring social leads to every business in the world. We do this through

software. Specifically, we’ve developed a demand generation system that empowers B2B

marketers to discover, engage and qualify prospects through social media to increase revenue

at scale.

Sign up for a free trial