Embracing Quality Over Quantity for Sustainable Growth in B2B

When it comes to sales and marketing alignment, it's time to embrace quality over quantity for sustainable B2B growth.

Our agency has helped over 500 businesses attract more traffic, more leads, and more sales since 2005.

The strategies, channels, and tools we’ve used to accomplish this goal have certainly evolved, but the mission has been the same; ‘more’.

Now, after chasing ‘more’ for nearly 20 years, I’m ready to challenge this mindset entirely.

For nearly 20 years, I think we’ve had it all wrong. The way to grow a B2B business today isn’t more traffic, more leads, and more sales.

It’s about the quality of the traffic, leads, and sales. 

Understanding the 'More is Better' Mindset

Growth Mindset in Business: In business, especially in B2B sales and marketing, everyone is obsessed with the ‘hockey stick’ graph. Everything must be up and to the right or we must be doing something wrong, right?. The pressure to showcase these upward trends in every meeting and report has led to a relentless pursuit of more – more campaigns, more traffic, more leads, more sales. If we produce more, we, as people, feel valuable. Or maybe I should say, more valuable. 

Influence of Consumer Culture: We live in a consumer-driven culture that idolizes abundance. This tends to blur the fine line between success and excess. People can’t help but spill these beliefs over into business practices, encouraging a mindset that more resources and strategies are inherently superior than fewer.

Visibility of Progress: Humans are visual creatures. As far as we’re concerned, if we see it we believe it. To us, tangible progress is seductively appealing. It calms the nerves and gives us confidence. The problem is that we don’t often ask if we’re making the right kind of progress.

Competitive Pressure: From the moment we’re born, we’re conditioned to understand more is just better. An 85% on a test is better than 80%. 3 goals are better than 2. 1 candy bar is better than none (I still believe this). And so it goes. In business, in a bid to outshine competitors, companies often fall into the trap of the numbers game they’ve been in their whole life – equating higher numbers with better performance. We need more awards, a greater market share, more sales reps, because bigger means better. 

The Downside of a Quantity-Driven Approach

Short-term Gains vs Long-term Strategy: A singular focus on quantitative growth can lead to short-sighted decisions that might compromise long-term success. Rather than thinking strategically about what the organization is really doing to grow and scale, the teams stress over the next report they need to give in this week’s meeting. Those numbers better look up and to the right.  

Quality vs Quantity: Overemphasis on quantity can diminish the quality of leads, sales, and customer relationships. Marketing might get desperate and put any offer out there just to hit their KPI’s. Sales might not give the best leads the attention they deserve because they’re needing to follow up on all the poor leads marketing has delivered. In the B2B realm, where relationships and trust are paramount, this is an extremely risky gamble.

Psychological Biases: We're wired to believe 'more is better', but this mindset can lead to inefficient strategies and bloated operations. Marketing might spend time and money planning and executing campaigns targeting the wrong people. Sales may spend time and energy talking to and working leads that aren’t qualified and will never convert into customers. Huge amounts of time and money are potentially being wasted in an effort to generate more. 

The Strategic Advantage of Quality

Efficiency and Effectiveness: By focusing on quality, businesses can develop more efficient and effective strategies. Marketing will build campaigns targeting the right audience, with the right message, enabling them to qualify and nurture only high-quality leads. Sales won’t waste time chasing the wrong opportunities. By talking to the best fit leads, sales cycles will be shorter and close rates will be higher!

Building Sustainable Relationships: In B2B marketing, the quality of relationships always trumps the quantity of contacts. Having a smaller, more engaged client base can lead to stronger, more profitable business relationships. This can and will happen when your organization attracts the right kind of leads and you give them the attention they deserve. 

Measuring the Right Metrics: Shift your focus from sheer vanity numbers (impressions, clicks, and leads), to metrics that matter (CSAT scores, NPS, Lead to Customer ratios, etc.)

Implementing a Quality-First Strategy

Setting Realistic Goals: Start by setting goals and KPIs that prioritize the quality of your leads and customer interactions over mere numbers. Drop the vanity metrics, and the “more” mindset. 

Developing Quality-Oriented Processes: Revamp your processes to emphasize quality. This could mean more personalized marketing efforts or more stringent lead qualification criteria. Put the customer first. Design processes that give them the best possible experience with your brand.

Training and Team Culture: Cultivate a culture that values quality. Train your team to understand the importance of deep, meaningful customer interactions and relationships. Recognize and reward your team accordingly!

A Cultural Shift to Quality Over Quality

Since 2005, we've been a steadfast advocate for 'more' – more traffic, more leads, and more sales. This was our purpose, our reason for existing. By supporting our clients in this mission of more, what we may have delivered is more chaos. Our team produced more traffic to analyze, more leads to filter, and more (un)qualified leads for sales to work.

The numbers may have progressed, but do we really know that we made progress?

What I've come to realize is that simply chasing 'more' isn't the most effective strategy. The real key to sustainable growth in today’s B2B landscape isn't just about seeing numbers and charts go up and to the right. It's about focusing on quality – attracting more qualified traffic, nurturing more qualified leads, and securing more qualified sales. This ensures that every effort and resource is targeted, efficient, impactful, and contributes to building lasting customer relationships. 

But shifting a culture from one of quantity to one of quality isn’t easy.

It requires coordination and alignment between the two teams responsible for revenue generation, namely sales and marketing. By unifying these departments with data, technology, and communication, you’ll start to see the quality of your traffic and leads improve. Operationally, systems should run more smoothly with less chaos and redundancy. Sales cycles should shorten, customer experiences should improve, and revenue will increase.    

Together, let's redefine what it means to grow.

Are you ready to redefine success in your B2B sales and marketing efforts? Contact us at Brightlark for a consultation. Let's work together to create strategies that prioritize quality, foster meaningful relationships, and drive sustainable growth.