How to measure the quality of leads
In a perfect world, the perfect measurement of lead quality is win rate.  But there are a number of imperfections in the real world that need to be taken into account.  Are there other parts of the process that are failing? Between identifying a good opportunity and closing a sale there is a chain of events that, like all chains, is as strong as its weakest link. It's no good blaming the leads if:

	Your salesman are not doing a good job.
	Your lead passing and management are poorly executed such that good leads are falling through the cracks.
	Your lead management is so incomplete or screwed up that you don't really know the strengths and weaknesses in your marketing and sales chain! (If you are here, you are not alone.)

If your other marketing and sales "links" are in great shape
Then measure the quality of each source of your leads by win rate.  It's that simple.

Tactical: In just days, find out how good your leads are by one of the following methods: Read them and score each one out of 100. Get your leads from the last few weeks or months and inspect them. Assuming you have the skills and experience to sell your solution, you will have most of the skills to make a value judgment on the quality of leads.  How much detail is there? Is it well written?  If all you've got is a spreadsheet with name, title, phone number and 50 characters of comments - don't score them higher than 20 out of 100. Get a specialist to read them. Someone who has been handling thousands of similar sales leads a year, from a wide variety of sources, will bring an extra dimension to the judgment. KMA answers to this description; we know a good lead when we see one - and we know a bad one too. Plus we have an XPerience database (with results of thousands of leads from hundreds of campaigns); passing your leads against it will provide significant statistical support for our judgment. We would be glad to take a look at a sample of your leads (don't tell us your scores; we'll score each lead independently and then compare notes. [Click here to contact us.] Put all your future leads through an extra qualification step in which you have confidence. For example, you could send all your leads for the next three months to KMA. Our HiQ callers (25 years experience) will call each prospect to requalify the lead. It won't take long before we can tell you definitively how good the leads are that you have been giving to your sales reps. If it turns out that the leads are good, you can drop the extra step and get on with finding out what else is stopping you from winning the business. If it turns out the leads are variable or poor, you might want to keep the extra qualification step in place until you have fixed whatever is wrong with the programs that are generating your leads.

Strategic: You'll only get a long-term, permanent fix for your win rate problems by having an excellent lead management process.  Unfortunately, if you have to start a new one or mend a broken process, it will be months before your new lead management reports give you the information to fix all of the weaknesses in your marketing and sales cycle. So, you will probably need to combine this strategic plan with some tactical actions. While it takes time to mature, putting in place excellent lead management doesn't have to be either difficult or expensive. KMA provides cradle to grave lead management for its clients for around 1% to 2% of what it cost the client to generate the lead in the first place.  That extra 1% or 2% can cause a 50% increase in revenue from leads and even bigger returns in the long term. [Click here to contact us about lead management.]

Use the links at the top left of this page to see more discussion of the ideas mentioned above.