More Leads, Or Better Leads?

A thread on r/sales asked whether the only way to get quality leads is to go find them yourself. It's a fair question and it usually comes from the same place: someone bought a data tool, got a lot of contacts, ran the outreach, and it didn't work.

The tool was probably fine. It solved the contact problem, and the contact problem wasn't the one they had.

Two numbers that get treated as one

Contact volume is how many people you can reach. That's a solved problem and has been for years. You can buy a hundred thousand of them this afternoon.

Qualified volume is how many of those people could actually buy, would recognise the problem you solve, and have the authority to do something about it. Nothing you buy off the shelf gives you that, because it depends on things about your business that no database knows.

When someone says outreach isn't working, they almost always mean the second number is low. Then they go and buy more of the first one.

How to tell which you're short of

Look at your reply rate and your conversion separately. If people reply at a normal rate but the conversations go nowhere, you're reaching the wrong people and adding more of them will make it worse, not better. If almost nobody replies at all, that's volume or message, and it's a different fix.

Those two problems feel identical from the inside. Both feel like outreach doesn't work. They've opposite solutions, which is why guessing is expensive.

Qualification is your knowledge, written down

The reason the qualification layer is missing from most tools is that it can't be bought. It's what you already know after years of doing the work, and it lives in your head as intuition rather than criteria.

You know which jobs went badly and why. You know the size below which it isn't worth it and the size above which you get ignored. You know which industries argue about price and which ones argue about timeline.

None of that's in a database. All of it's writeable. Once it's written down as rules rather than instinct, prospecting becomes something you can hand to someone else, which is the actual unlock.

A cheap way to do it this week

Take your last twenty customers. Split them into the ones you'd take again and the ones you'd not. Then find what's true about the first group that isn't true about the second.

It's rarely industry. It's usually something like whether there was one decision maker, or whether they had already tried to solve it themselves and failed. Two or three rules of that shape will cut a list harder and more accurately than any filter a data vendor sells you.

What good looks like

A tighter list converts better and costs less to work, and the numbers stay honest because you aren't padding volume to feel productive. On my own outbound, 863 videos produced 71 booked calls, 8.2%. That rate holds because the list is cut before anything is sent, not after.

Common questions

Should I focus on more leads or better leads?

Check your reply rate first. If people reply but nothing converts, you've a targeting problem and more leads will make it worse. If almost nobody replies, that's a volume or message problem.

Why do lead databases not solve lead quality?

They solve contact volume, which is a different problem. Whether someone can actually buy from you depends on things about your business that no database knows, so the qualification layer has to come from you.

How do I define my ideal customer without guessing?

Take your last twenty customers, split them into the ones you'd take again and the ones you'd not, and find what's true about the first group only. Two or three rules of that shape beat any vendor filter.