Who’s on your guestlist?
Why pay for leads that will never buy or never had any intention of buying? People who are clearly not interested in what you have to offer. A healthy ratio of quality leads is critical.
The seven gaps
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Picture a guestlist where everyone came to buy.
Imagine having full confidence that the leads hitting your CRM are the right ones. Sure, any lead can feel “warm” five minutes after submitting a form, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to buy. Your goal is a CRM filled with an ever-growing number of leads looking to buy. You shouldn’t have to convince a stranger to make a purchase; you should be stepping in front of someone already hunting for your solution. Scaling lead quality isn’t about throwing more budget at a campaign, it’s about fundamentally changing who walks through the door.
This caliber of quality exists. Unfortunately, most businesses never experience a CRM growing with high-converting leads because they are too busy tracking their total reach instead of counting the people who actually intend to buy.
Cheap leads, expensive sales
You paid R50 a lead. So why did each sale cost R5,000?
A conversation we have almost every week:
Leon du Preez
Role
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
- Revenue Engineer
What I do
I innovate and pioneer unique blueprints that changes and places companies in a position to reach beyond their limits.
Mission in Life
See businesses Grow, Expand, and Increase Revenue by spending strategically and making calculated moves that set their business on another level.
Experience
- 12 Years Helping Corporates Grow
What you are actually buying
Currently, your marketing budget pays for every lead generated, including those that never convert. What if you shifted that strategy to focus on quality, reducing wasted spend andinvesting exclusively in leads that actually buy?
What a year of the same costs
80–90% of that budget went to
people who were never going to buy.
Month one
R20,000 Spent
4 Sales out of 400 leads means that 1% of all leads turns into a sale.
Is that good?
Month six
R120,000 Spent
6 identical months. Also 4 sales out of 400 leads each month for 6 months
What happened to the other 99% of leads?
Month twelve
R240,000 Spent
Now it is 12 identical months each only having a selling rate of 1%.
You paid for the other 99% of leads. Leads that went nowhere.
Marketing cannot generate 100% sales out of the leads generated each month. But increasing lead quality means that you stop spending the majority of the money on job seekers, people not interested in buying your products or services, and people who do not have the right profile for what you are selling. But rather spending strategically more on people that fits your ICP (Ideal Client Profile).
Now you are no longer sending out quotes or doing sales on 1% of the total leads your marketing generated, but 10% – 15% of all leads generated are quoted or buying leads. Exactly like we have done for Execu-Move.
The mechanism
How do we do this?
Five stages, in order.
What changes at each one, and what you will be able to see while it happens.
- 1Lead quality auditWe find out what is actually coming in: how many leads, how many of them were ever going to buy, and what a real customer is costing you right now.
- 2The data that tells the truthNot vanity numbers. The handful of figures that show whether your marketing is producing revenue, and we make sure you can see them too.
- 3Qualifying before your CRMFiltering happens up front, so the people who were never going to buy never make it into your sales team’s day at all.
- 4Targeting through the ads and the siteThe ads stop speaking to everyone and the website stops trying to convert anyone. Both start working for the specific person who actually buys from you.
- 5Optimising on what actually soldReal sales data gets analysed, and the platforms get optimised on what actually produced revenue, and not on what produced the most leads.
Proof
We have already done this for IGrow
IGrow sat on masses and masses of low-quality leads that generated very few sales. We kept their budget exactly where it was and changed who it reached, increasing the number of leads worth calling by more than tenfold on what they were generating per day.
The obvious objection
Won’t increasing quality just mean fewer leads overall?
It is the first thing everyone asks, and it is the right question to ask.
The short answer is that increasing the quality of leads being generated, indirectly means filtering out leads that were never going to buy in the first place, so nothing of real value leaves the pipeline. What is left is built entirely from people worth your sales team’s time.
At IGrow the lead volume decreased while the targeting settled. Simply, fewer low-quality leads came through, which is the entire point, because those were the ones taking up the sales team’s week. After targeting settled, leads increased by 300% – 500%; without increasing the budget, whilst the amount of quality leads out of every 100, increased from 10 – 20% to 55 – 65%.
Filtering now became the tool, that few businesses utilise to build CRM’s with high-quality leads, ready to convert. Increasing lead quality-is always daunting, because all that businesses see is lower volumes of leads. It feels daunting only because reports don’t show the true face value of how many quotes, invoices and sales come from marketing. Once you see the figures of low-quality in a detailed report and not only feeling the impact of low-quality leads. You will start asking why those leads are even in your CRM. Leads you can do nothing with
The payoff
What higher quality leads actually look like:
The one change
The same budget starts reaching people who were actually in the market.
Within weeks
Within the quarter
And then it compounds
Get your blueprint
Want to increase your sales? Contact us today.
Leon du Preez
Role
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
- Revenue Engineer
What I do
I innovate and pioneer unique blueprints that changes and places companies in a position to reach beyond their limits.
Mission in Life
See businesses Grow, Expand, and Increase Revenue by spending strategically and making calculated moves that set their business on another level.
Experience
- 12 Years Helping Corporates Grow
See all Revenue Engineering posts →
Questions About Lead Quality
The same signals your best sales rep would notice: the right industry, the right need, and the ability to actually buy. They’re all built directly into your forms, landing pages, and ad targeting, so the wrong fit gets filtered out before it ever reaches you.
It varies, but it can move faster than most people expect. One client’s lead quality shifted within days of the strategy changing. How quickly it shows up for you depends on how much noise is already in your pipeline to begin with.
The filtering principle doesn’t care what industry you’re in. The same logic applies whether you’re in removals, hospitality, or a narrow professional niche. What changes is what signals matter, not the approach itself.
There’s a quick gut check: look at how many of your leads make it from first enquiry to sales-ready. If it’s stuck low, 1 in 10 or worse, across the board, regardless of which rep handles it or which day it comes in, that’s usually a quality problem upstream. If it swings wildly depending on how fast a lead actually gets called, that’s less about quality and more about what happens in the first hour which is a different problem, with a different fix.
Think of it as a guest list versus what happens once someone’s already inside. This page is the guest list that is making sure the right people get invited in the first place. If the guests are already the right fit and they still aren’t buying once they’re in the door, that’s a different problem: conversion, not this.
It’s a fair concern, and a blunt, overnight cut can do exactly that. The fix isn’t cutting the audience, it’s layering in quality signals gradually, so the platform starts optimising toward who actually became a good lead, not just who clicked. Done right, the algorithm ends up working for the quality shift instead of against it.
Yes. Early on, with a new product or an audience you haven’t fully defined yet, or with a low-ticket, high-volume offer, casting wider can be the right move. The shift toward quality matters most once you already know who converts and you’re mainly drowning in people who don’t.
The seven gaps
YOU ARE READING 02 OF 07