That’s the question I raised to about 20 B2B SaaS CEOs in Amsterdam yesterday evening.

After some hesitation,….all hands went up…

Obvious from one side, right? We all want deals to come in faster. That’s in our nature.

But getting into a more profound debate revealed this was genuine. Here are some of the comments

“Our inbound lead quality isn’t of enough quality,” one told me

“When our sales look at the bag of leads marketing gives them, they pull up their nose and say “Nah.. nothing in there for me..”

Here is the thing
Just because some clicks a link to download our latest whitepaper doesn’t make them a lead.

As Charlotte Melkert, CEO of Equaltur, recently shared with me:

“We got some VCs on boards. So obviously, you need to show them you can reach your targets. And as a result, you will try to make your product work for everyone. And in our case, we were not only trying to make our product work for everyone, but our message also got increasingly vague because of that.”

It had the opposite effect of what they planned for. So they returned to the purpose that sparked the company – and became a magnet for the right companies again.

You don’t want many leads
You want quality leads

Fix that first, then see how you can find many of those

Question for you to reflect upon
What’s your gut feeling about the length of your sales cycle? If your answer is “too slow,” why not focus on what it takes to attract better leads?