Why “More Leads” Is Usually the Wrong Growth Goal
When revenue is down, the knee-jerk reaction from leadership is almost always the same: "We need more leads!" Marketing is told to open the floodgates, and sales is told to hit the phones harder. While well-intentioned, this "more is better" philosophy is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a healthy sales pipeline works. Pouring more low-quality leads into the top of your funnel rarely fixes a revenue problem; it just makes your sales process more inefficient and expensive.
A mountain climber trying to reach a summit labeled 'More Leads' while the real summit 'Revenue' is in another direction.
The Cost of a Bloated Pipeline
A quantity-first approach has several toxic side effects:
- It Burns Out Your Best Reps: Your closers end up spending their days sifting through junk leads, wasting their talent on prospects who will never buy. This is demoralizing and a terrible use of resources.
- It Tanks Your Conversion Rates: When your pipeline is full of bad-fit leads, your conversion metrics at every stage plummet. This makes your forecasting a guessing game and hides the real strengths and weaknesses of your sales process.
- It Increases Churn: Even if a rep manages to force a square-peg lead into a round-hole deal, that customer is a high-risk for churn. They were never a good fit to begin with.
The right goal is not a larger pipeline; it is a more efficient pipeline.
The Better Goal: Increase Pipeline Velocity
Instead of asking for "more leads," a smarter leader asks, "How can we get more revenue from the leads we already have?" This shifts the focus from volume to velocity. The goal is to move higher-quality leads through the funnel faster. This means focusing on three key areas:
- Tighten Your ICP Definition: Get ruthlessly specific about who your ideal customer is. A list of 100 perfect-fit accounts is more valuable than a list of 10,000 mediocre ones.
- Fix Your Leaks: Analyze your funnel and find the biggest drop-off point. Is it from reply to meeting? Or from meeting to opportunity? Focus all your energy on improving that one conversion rate. A 10% improvement in a mid-funnel metric can be worth more than a 50% increase in lead volume.
- Align Sales and Marketing on Pipeline Value: Stop incentivizing your marketing team to generate a high volume of MQLs. Make both teams accountable for a shared goal: the total dollar value of qualified pipeline created each month.
Conclusion
Chasing "more leads" is a sugar rush. It feels productive, but it does not lead to sustainable growth. Focus on the health and efficiency of your existing pipeline first. Build a system that can effectively convert high-quality prospects, and you will find that you need far fewer leads than you think to hit your revenue goals.