Lead quality vs volume

Lead quality and lead volume pull against each other, and almost every leadgen failure is a programme that picked volume without admitting it. More leads at a lower cost per lead is the easiest thing to optimise and the easiest to celebrate, because both numbers move the right way on a dashboard within days. Whether those leads close takes months to find out, and by then the budget’s spent.

The mechanism is simple. Widening the net - looser targeting, a lower-friction form, a more generic offer - brings in more people, but the marginal lead is lower intent than the average one. Volume goes up, average quality goes down, and the two effects can exactly cancel at the revenue line while looking like a win at the top.

MQL theatre

The clearest symptom is what I’d call MQL theatre: a marketing team hitting its MQL target every month while sales quietly complains the leads are junk and close rates slide. The target was a count of leads, so the team optimised the count, and the count is exactly the wrong thing to optimise because it’s disconnected from revenue.

This is usually an incentive problem before it’s a tactical one. Marketing is measured on leads, sales on revenue, and the handoff between them is where the two metrics diverge. The team optimising leads has no reason to care about close rates it isn’t measured on, so it doesn’t.

Two real fixes:

• Measure marketing on pipeline or revenue, not lead count. Move the goal to the outcome and the volume-chasing stops, because cheap junk leads no longer count as success.
• Feed the closed-won outcome back into acquisition, so the ad platforms optimise toward leads that close rather than leads that convert. This is the same shift product-led SaaS makes when it routes on in-product behaviour rather than form fills - judge the lead by what it does downstream, not by the fact it exists.

Where the balance actually sits

Not all the way to quality, either. A programme that qualifies so hard it passes three perfect leads a month has starved the pipeline, and a sales team with no volume is as broken as one drowning in junk. The right point depends on sales capacity: enough volume to keep reps busy, qualified enough that their time isn’t wasted. The cascade tells you where you are - if reps are rejecting most of what they’re sent you’re too loose, if they’re idle and chasing every scrap you’re too tight.