Lead Quality : How we improved our Lead Response Rate from 8% to 41%

And No, We Didn’t Change the Ad Spend

Lead quality and lead response rates have sparked age-old battles between sales and marketing teams. For years, sales blamed marketing for poor leads, while marketing argued that the leads were fine – just mishandled. Honestly, we wrestled with this problem ourselves. Now, we’ve finally cracked the code. And we want to let you in on it.

Here’s what we did—and what you can do too—to dramatically improve lead quality & response rates overnight. Let’s get started!

1. Creative Changes That Spoke Directly to Decision Makers

One of the first things we did was tailor our messaging to speak directly to decision makers. Here’s how:

We addressed decision makers directly and immediately

We directly addressed sales managers in our ads. For example: "Are you a sales manager managing a team of 10 yet still missing your targets?"

We highlighted the most urgent issues

This made our audience’s pain points impossible to ignore. For instance: "Is your sales team spending too much time on admin, missing their quota as a result?"

We tested a lot of headlines and copy

Using variations in ad headlines and descriptions allowed Facebook’s algorithm to optimise for the best performing combination based on user responses. This helped us get our message in front of the right audience at the right time.

We added emojis for visual impact 🚀

Simple additions like 🏆 for achievements or ⏰ for urgency caught people’s attention and improved click-through rates.

2. Time-Bound Campaigns for Maximum Impact

Timing is everything in sales! We found our sweet spot by focusing on when our audience was in "work mode" and overlapping that with our team’s availability.

By launching campaigns during peak hours, we hit decision makers when they were actively working, which won us much more engagement.

What’s more, our sales team was on standby to handle incoming leads as soon as they arrived, ensuring that we missed no opportunities.

3. Relentlessly Optimised Lead Forms

When it comes to lead forms, less is not always more. We used the BANT framework (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) to design questions that weeded out low quality leads early. That way, we knew we were only spending our time and money on well-qualified, promising leads.

We identified the most common qualities that unqualified a lead

We made sure our forms asked the right questions, quickly and directly identifying critical factors that indicated misalignment, like business problems, team size or lead volumes.

We made sure we could reject leads at the form level

By filtering out unqualified leads upfront, we saved our sales team time and effort, allowing them to focus solely on high quality prospects. This also signalled to ad platforms that they shouldn’t spend our money on a certain type of user.

4. Instant Lead Assignment

The longer it takes to respond to a lead, the less likely they are to convert. We reduced our response time from more than one day to under 10 minutes by automating our lead assignment

Lead automation allowed for error-free specialisation

We automatically assigned leads to the right sales reps based on the campaign or region the lead came from.

This small but mighty change alone had a massive impact on our response times and drastically improved engagement rates.

5. Maximised Communication Channels

Instead of relying solely on phone calls, we layered our follow-ups across multiple communication channels, including WhatsApp and SMS.

This multichannel approach ensured that we engaged our leads in the way that felt most native to them.

6. A Lead Source Trained To Send Only High Quality Leads

Isn’t every marketer’s dream to get leads who are looking and able to buy right now? We made our dreams come true by using Meta’s Conversions API (CAPI) in combination with Privyr. Here’s how it works.

We used Privyr to mark quality leads

This helped us feed data back to Facebook, asking for more leads like the ones who were converting.

We built new audiences based on quality leads

By creating lookalike audiences from our top leads, we improved the quality of leads coming in, which led to better conversion rates overall.

In conclusion

By relentlessly refining how we attracted, qualified, and responded to leads, we saw our lead response rate jump from 8% to 41%—all without cutting ad spend. And now you know that implementing some or all of the steps above, you can too!

Privyr can help further improve your lead quality and response times by ensuring faster lead assignment, better data enrichment, and the ability to scale your best practices across your campaigns and lead engagement process.

Ready to see similar results? Get in touch to learn how Privyr can transform your lead management process!

Book a demo of Privyr for your sales team and let us take you through the best practices we learnt from processing over 100 million leads for 300k+ businesses worldwide. You keep using the campaigns, ads, and communications that have been working for you. We’ll help you more personally engage and manage your customers. 😉🤝