Here’s a conversation that happens far more often than it should. Six weeks into a campaign, the media side reports a healthy cost per lead. The sales side says half the leads are rubbish. Both are telling the truth, because nobody ever wrote down what a lead was.
Fixing this costs nothing and takes about an hour. It’s also the single biggest factor in whether a lead generation programme survives its first quarter.
Start with the people who call the leads
Marketing teams tend to write lead definitions from the form backwards. Which fields can we collect? What does the CRM need? That’s the wrong end to start from.
Ask the sales team instead. What does a good lead sound like on the phone? What makes them hang up after thirty seconds? Which answers tell them a deal is likely? If you can, listen to a handful of call recordings. You’ll learn more in twenty minutes than from any brief.
What usually comes out of this is a short list of things that genuinely predict a sale, and a longer list of things that are merely nice to know. Only the first list belongs in the definition.
The four parts of a usable definition
Required fields
Name, phone, email, postcode, whatever your process needs to make contact. Be specific about format as well. A UK mobile number, an email that passes validation, a postcode inside your service area. “Phone number” on its own invites typos and fake entries.
Geography
Where can you actually serve a customer? A solar installer covering the south of England has no use for a lead from Aberdeen, however keen they are. Write the boundary down, ideally as a list of regions or postcode areas rather than a radius someone has to calculate.
Qualifying questions
These are the one or two questions that separate buyers from browsers. For that solar installer, “Do you own your home?” is essential. “Roughly how much is your monthly electricity bill?” is probably useful. “Which brand of panel do you prefer?” tells you almost nothing and costs you completions.
Exclusions
The people who should never count as a lead. Existing customers, competitors, people under 18, businesses when you only sell to households, or the reverse. These are easy to forget and painful to argue about later.
Every question has a price
Each extra field on a form loses you some of the people who started filling it in. That’s fine when the question earns its place, because the leads you keep are worth more. It’s a waste when the question is there because someone in a meeting thought it would be interesting.
A useful test: if the answer to a question wouldn’t change what sales does next, take it off the form. You can always ask it on the call.
The trade-off is also why stricter definitions carry a higher cost per lead. That’s not a penalty. You’re paying for the filtering to happen before the lead reaches you instead of after.
Agree the grey areas now
Some leads will sit on the line no matter how carefully you write the rules. Decide in advance how you’ll handle them:
- Duplicates. Is a person who submits twice in a month one lead or two?
- Unreachable leads. How many call attempts, over how many days, before a lead counts as dead?
- Wrong details. What happens when the phone number simply doesn’t connect?
- Timing. How long after delivery can a lead be flagged as outside the definition?
None of these are complicated. They just need answering while everyone is still friendly.
Put it on one page
The finished definition should fit on a single page that both teams can read in two minutes. Ours usually covers the fields and formats, the geography, the qualifying questions with acceptable answers, the exclusions, the delivery method and the rules for the grey areas.
Then revisit it monthly. Sales teams learn, offers change and seasons shift who’s buying. A definition written in March might be too loose by June. We review ours with clients as part of the monthly reconciliation in every CPL programme we run.
It’s a dull document. It’s also the one that keeps the media team and the sales team on the same side.