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Lead Volume vs Opportunity Volume

December 15, 2008 on 11:07 pm | In Conversion Optimisation, Copywriting, Internet Marketing, Lead Generation, Sales |

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For several years now I’ve been asking subscribers and clients to visualise their online sales process as a funnel with knowable metrics. You’re no doubt familiar with the analogy:

1000 visitors hit your website (”Visits”) –> 100 opt in to your Free Special Report (”Opt Ins”) –> 20 enquire (”Leads”) –> 5 become clients (”Sales”)

Whatever the exact number or specific conversion steps are in your business, you get the idea.

But I recently came across a very useful distinction on a Marketing Experiments webinar that dovetailed with a recent experience working with a client.

That is the distinction between Lead Volume and Opportunity Volume.

Lead Volume is the number of people filling out your enquiry form, but Opportunity Volume is the number of viable sales opportunities available to your sales team (or you, if you’re the only salesperson at your company).

Lead Volume is very often a measure of activity. Opportunity Volume is a measure of results and future expected revenues.

I recently dealt with a client whose only metric was Lead Volume: “Just get us more contact form submissions”.

“More contact form submissions is a brief that is relatively easy to fulfil. For starters, you can make the form easier to complete. Second, remove “strings” from the offer or add a guarantee.

When you do this, will the leads be more qualified? Will you create more viable Sales Opportunities? Not necessarily. In fact, you can very often clog up your sales pipeline with unqualified leads that do nothing more than take up your salespeople’s time and detract from closing genuine sales opportunities.

That’s why I’ve now included Opportunity Volume as one of the key lead generation metrics to track. It is a more reliable indicator of the success of your pre-sales marketing activities.

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finally someone else who sees sales in terms of statistics - lead rates and such. phew, seems obvious.

Comment by vicky — December 20, 2008 #
I think the optimal approach is to combine the best in quantitative and qualitative methods to generate the desired sales results. i.e. strong focus on metrics backed by sound selling methods.

Comment by Will — December 20, 2008 #
Google analytics has a good tool to measure these. Has anyone tried out Motion charts? I am still learning it

Comment by Selbourne Designing — January 7, 2009 #
@Selbourne Designing — Motion Charts within Google Analytics are pretty cool [link here: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=UKsBTqqhVTs, but like any analytical tool, it’s a case of Garbage-In-Garbage-Out. You need to first know your outcome before you can use a tool like this to achieve it.

Comment by Will — January 7, 2009 #
Instead of a funnel I think of it as a qualifying filter, and each step has a finer grade filter to finish with a pure result.
Anyway, statistics and metrics are important and interesting, but dont get paralysis by analysis guys. It’s what you do with the leads that matters.

Comment by Amway Scams Support — January 12, 2009 #
Yep the filter analogy works for me too - whatever you find easiest and, as you say, produces results.

Comment by Will — January 13, 2009 #