Your site is always going to generate some weak leads. Even after all the sales lead optimization in the world your website will always generate some leads that are weak or maybe even completely out of your market. Whether you make the sale or not, I truly believe you can pull value out of almost all of your leads.

Salespeople should only be given valuable leads.  This helps build their trust in marketing efforts while minimizing wasted
follow-up efforts. With that, marketing should deal with weak leads but they can get a lot of excellent feedback from salespeople. Weak  leads can be handled in any number of ways, such as:

• Trash weak leads without contact (not good)
• Respond politely and suggest solutions elsewhere
• Forward the leads to a competitor or vendor
• Do any of the three above and keep the information for future marketing purposes

There’s Value in Them Leads

Even weak leads hold value for you. You have already paid for them so get whatever ROI you can from them. I commonly extract value from off-target leads in two ways. Both are simple and require very little no and certainly no money.

The first way I used weak sales leads is listed above- forward them to a competitor or vendor. Doing so builds goodwill with people/partners in your industry and they might return the favor with leads, referrals, better pricing, or (in the least) some kind words about your company. Contact companies to whom you would like to send leads. Tell them to expect some leads from you and that, although they are not obligated, you would appreciate the same courtesy in return. Follow up by sending them some information about what you do. This contact, in itself, is a value-creator. Some of those contacts might become your customers.

The second way, and the most valuable way, to use weak leads is for learning about products or services on the cusp of your current offerings that you should consider offering in the future. Doing so actually turns future leads you would have received anyway into valuable sales leads. That, by the way, will increase your site’s conversion rate. Lemons into lemonade and all that, right?

For instance, if you specialize in engineering bridges built with laminated beams and you continually get leads from people wanting bridges designed with trusses or natural timbers, spend some time finding out what you need to learn in order to offer those design services and how profitable you can make them. Alternatively, you can take the “shoot from the hip” approach and simply answer, “Yes, we can do  that.” and THEN learn how to do it.

Look Beyond Your Current Horizons

Sometimes the value in a lead is not directly tied to what you currently keep in stock. You probably spend a decent proportion of your marketing budget generating sales leads. Make sure you maximize the value of each for future returns.