Having too many leads is a very enviable position to be in. It is a sign that your company has made it, and you don’t have to worry too much about your revenue flow. It can also be a burden having to respond to all the leads, especially if there are a large number of junk leads that will never convert to sales either because they aren’t in your service area, they aren’t your target market, they don’t have the budget, or whatever other reason it may be.
So how do you reduce the number of leads, but increase the quality of leads that you are getting? The answer is to ask more qualifying questions on your contact forms. For some this might sound like a risky proposition. The more information you ask for, the lower the conversion rate right? Well the leads you lose by asking qualifying questions are most likely not serious to begin with, so that actually helps with our objective of getting rid of junk leads.
When asking qualifying questions, don’t offer the user options you don’t offer. So for example, if you only service a specific city, or a few cities, offer a City dropdown menu with only those cities available for selection. It will send a message to the client that you don’t service other areas. If your minimum project size is $5000, add a qualify question about the budget and set $5000 as the minimum (lookup HTML5 number fields to find out more about this.)
By asking qualifying questions, and limiting the answers you will see a decrease in leads, however the quality of leads will improve. So rather than getting 50 leads a week, with only 10 good leads in the bunch, you might get 20 leads a week, with 10 good leads in the batch. The site conversion rate will decrease but the lead to sale rate will increase, and you’ll spend less time working with leads that will never lead to a sale.