You Can Keep the Clicks (and You’re Welcome to Some of Mine)

The Blog

Ideas you can use.

It sounds like heresy from a stat guy, but here it is: if marketing initiatives don’t correlate directly to sales, why spend money on them — for clicks? If 100 clicks produce five sales, would you care about having only 10 clicks if they still produced five sales? No — though you’d want to know why you attracted the unqualified clicks, and where to find more of the qualified.

The same theory runs through the process. Converting visitors to MQLs improves less by adding qualified leads than by attracting fewer non-qualified ones: halve the visits, keep the qualified number, and a 20% conversion rate becomes 40%. It’s equally true from MQL to SQL — reduce the bad MQLs to raise conversion. One approach broadens; the other narrows. Narrowing creates a lean, clear system to drive sales. Start with SQLs and work backwards, and you’ll reduce the time and wasted touches you spend today.