The Importance Of Website Lead Validation

Research from Internet marketing agency Straight North indicates that about half of inquiries generated through a company's website are not sales leads. Here, find out why having your marketing department validate leads is essential.

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What is lead validation? In Internet marketing, it is the process of separating sales leads from other non-sales inquiries that are generated through a company’s website. As the data in the following presentation from Internet Marketing agency Straight North indicates, about half of those inquires are not leads. Instead, they consist mainly of spam, sales solicitations, customer service inquiries and personal phone calls.

From a sales perspective, there are two main factors that make lead validation essential:

1. Feeding inquiries to the sales department wholesale to sift through can result in them spending valuable time tracking down a lot of non-leads (as many as half of the total) rather than putting all of their effort into genuine leads. Which can be both distracting and frustrating.

2. Lead validation, which necessitates a human being listening to phone inquiry recordings and reading form submissions, enables your company to identify the best of the best leads and get them into the hands of your top sales reps. This will improve follow-up response time and follow-up quality close rates.

Having your marketing department validate leads will also greatly improve your Internet marketing efforts. If they solely judge the success of a campaign (SEO, paid search advertising, email, etc.) on inquiries instead of actual sales leads, the data could be off by as much as half. Thus, a campaign that generates a lot of inquiries may in reality be generating few leads, whereas a campaign generating fewer inquiries may be generating more leads. In the end, you’ll be left with more leads and an ever-increasing pipeline of quality leads.  

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