How to Identify Quality Leads that Convert

The staffing and recruitment sales process is complex and drawn-out and finding quality leads that convert can be challenging. Companies need assurances that staffing agencies save them time and money while simultaneously delivering quality talent with minimal risk. Of course, when the buyer—an HR or procurement department—initiates a conversation, the sales process is slightly less complex, as the company will already have determined its talent needs and budget. Plus, the organization has taken the first step to outsource its staffing and recruitment. However, when the seller—a staffing agency—initiates the sales process, it has to first correctly assess the company’s talent needs and then convince the decision makers to entrust it with this critical aspect of its workforce strategy.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that B2B conversion rates are extremely low; less than one percent for a lead-to-sale time of four months, according to research by Implicit. However, if you can improve the quality of your leads, it stands to reason that you can also increase your conversion rates. Before discussing how to enhance your lead quality, however, it’s important to understand what low-quality leads are and why they don’t work.

Why low-quality leads don’t work

Low-quality leads are leads that, because they’re based on insufficient and/or incorrect data, have a low chance of converting. In most cases, leads are low-quality for one of three reasons:

They’re not targeted to your market. Leads that provide names and numbers without detailed information about the listed companies’ talent needs are a drain on resources. While it’s theoretically possible to contact every company in the U.S. to offer your services, unless a company is in the market for your specific types of talent, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

They’re sourced from a purchased list. There’s a growing body of evidence that purchased lists aren’t effective. They rarely contain sufficient data to determine whether a lead is a potential client or not—plus, they often list names, emails, and phone numbers that are outdated or even incorrect. Furthermore, most professionals don’t welcome unsolicited communications calls or emails. In fact, according to a report by TechnologyAdvice, 36.4 percent of people marked emails as spam because they didn’t purposefully subscribe to an email list and 31.6 percent do so because the emails contained irrelevant content. (Note: If you do use email marketing, you need to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.)

They’re sourced from incorrect or inadequate data. Even if you have dedicated sourcers on your sales team who source leads manually, the information they find is frequently inadequate or incorrect. Roles in HR and procurement department change as professionals advance or move to other companies, so point people and their contact details change accordingly. Moreover, researching job openings rarely provides a good overview of a company’s talent needs; plus, there’s virtually no way of knowing whether an organization has worked with a staffing firm in the past and if so, why they aren’t doing so anymore. Yet all of this information is critical to determining whether a company could potentially become a client.

Of course, some companies still use low-quality leads and operate on the notion that if they put out enough hooks, something will bite. However, this strategy can have a detrimental effect on your sales efforts for three reasons. First, your sales people will burn out quickly. Second, it does your agency’s reputation no good to contact companies with unsolicited, irrelevant offers.
And third, if a sales person manages to interest a lead but doesn’t have the right information to follow through with a good proposal, you could lose that lead and by extension lose out on tens, if not thousands of dollars of potential revenue.