2 of 2: A Tale About Why Qualified Leads Must Be Measured
I’ve had two consultations.
In the first one, it was predictable: they weren’t thinking about this. In the second one… I honestly don’t even know what to say.
This is, once again, about qualified leads. So I’ll repeat my “qualified lead square” just in case:
- They are the decision-maker.
In B2C the lead usually is the decision-maker. In B2B — not always. - They can afford your product.
Either the money is already there, or they have a real way to earn it. - They have a deadline.
A moment in time when they need the product. - They understand the category.
They either know they need something like your product, or they know exactly that they need the kind of product you sell.
In both consultations we talked about the conversion funnel: how revenue appears, what kinds of people and situations create sales.
Case 1: coaching / psychology
The first one was a coach. Of course he wasn’t doing detailed analysis like this — he’s in operations, developing the product, growing sales in a way that isn’t as systematic as it could be.
That doesn’t mean he has no system. He clearly does — otherwise he wouldn’t have come to me.
He’s simply not a marketing specialist. In his head, “qualified lead” is harder to grasp.
Honestly, I learned the concept relatively recently myself. But it got lodged in my brain fast, and now I use it everywhere. It’ll soon be a year since I first encountered it.
So: discussing qualified leads in coaching, I passed him the logic from my earlier post about qualified leads in psychology/coaching.
We found a key detail: clients often pay in instalments. If you divide their monthly payment by four, you basically land at the average market price of a psychologist’s session.
That answers item #2 (ability to pay).
Where sales problems begin is items #3 and #4.
In coaching and psychology there’s a type of problem people live with for years. They know it exists. But they haven’t made the decision to fix it.
Take alcoholism as an example.
You can suspect you’re an alcoholic deep down.
You can admit it openly: “Yeah, I’m an alcoholic.”
But the real shift is deciding: “This is a problem, and I’m fixing it.”
That decision — when it happens, and why — is the moment a person becomes a qualified lead for coaching/psychology.
Because there’s often no clean “deadline” the way there is in B2B. No plan like “double revenue by Q3.” It’s personal, messy, human.
So his research focus should be:
WHY and under what conditions did clients decide to solve the thing he can solve?
Then it becomes clearer why they chose him — and not someone else.
Case 2: B2C service with leads, weak sales
The second consultation is more complicated.
Before me (before us) there was another outsourced marketing department or a marketer. The “client” is a proxy — not Ergo Proxy the anime, I mean literally a person speaking on behalf of the company. And the company itself specialises in building sales departments.
They want us for ongoing work, management, support — you know the format. Whether they’ll actually come in, we’ll see. For now it’s negotiations.
What bothered me a bit:
They did work on the conversion funnel — basically colleagues in the craft: a salesperson and a marketer — and they didn’t catch what felt like an obvious insight.
The situation:
The product (massage) is affordable on a promo offer. The audience is clear (men). Leads come in, ask what/when, then disappear. After that you chase them, message them, try to get a reply — nothing.
So lead gen exists. Sales limp.
A quick scan of the whole system gave me a verdict: they’re missing item #3 from today’s post. And item #4 is likely nearby.
It’s B2C again, decision-maker is the buyer, price is accessible — yet people don’t move, or move sluggishly.
My read:
— Either these leads don’t have a real “massage need” driven by a consumption-chain job (Tony Ulwick language). Who does have it? People who train hard, for example — when muscle recovery is not a luxury but a requirement, and the deadline is real. Or people under such workload and stress that recovery becomes essential, and massage becomes a tool serving that deeper task — the core job.
— Or the leads are poorly informed and don’t really understand why they need it. They show up because they remembered, and thought: “Why not try it?”
These two things can overlap, of course.
And why I’m uneasy:
Sometimes in my work it goes like this: you figure something out, and then your work gets quietly sabotaged by someone’s worldview — Dunning–Kruger style. People have been “working for a long time,” but the idea of qualified leads (or the market’s fuzzy term “target leads”) never really landed.
We’ll see soon.
If we even start. I’ve had it happen twice: we reached agreement on payment, and then the client simply vanished. Until money hits the account, the project hasn’t arrived.
Moral of the story:
To move from a dead point, you don’t need to instantly buy months of ongoing support.
Sometimes you take consultations (yes, with me).
And the more systematically you take them, the faster you move ahead of competitors at the same scale.