How Powered by Search Increased Sales Qualified Leads by 142% Quarter-Over-Quarter

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John Bonini chatted with Mark Thomas, Head of Growth at Powered by Search for a recent Metrics & Chill podcast episode. Mark spoke to John about why Sales Qualified Leads was singled out as a metric to be prioritized by his team, how they improved it, and the actual results realized.

Powered by Search is a B2B SaaS demand gen agency that caters to businesses looking to drive demand for free trials, demos, and freemium through SEO and PPC. Worthy of note is that the team at Powered by Search have also made their mark in the podcast industry, which doubles alongside their blog as major customer acquisition drivers. 

Read on for more details, or listen to the full episode here: 

The Metric: Sales Qualified Leads

Although Mark joined Powered by Search as the first Marketing hire, they already had a well-converting funnel.

However, the problem was that despite having lots of MQLs coming in, they had a few obstacles that prevented these MQLs from getting qualified quickly–and half the time, these MQLs turned out not to be the best fit for them.

Ultimately, Mark sought to change this by creating paths that’ll directly impact their bottom line and better align to the bottom of the sales funnel.

“The reason that we chose SQLs was I felt that we were already doing well enough that we could just take a risk at predominantly focusing on SQL versus the MQL step, which just feels further away from the bottom of the funnel.”

Turning Point: Improving the Lead Qualification Process

Although they had some criteria for qualifying SQLs in place before Mark joined the team, many things had to change to increase the number of SQLs and qualify leads faster. Some of the steps the team took include: 

1. Crafting additional assessment questions to identify qualified leads better.
2. Setting up budget-related questions to identify clients that can pay for their services comfortably. 
3. Streamlining the different routes that leads had to take to become and SQLs, and creating a more focused funnel.
4. Revamping their content distribution strategy and creating templates for repurposing their content which helped increase the number of opportunities for prospects to engage with their content and ultimately visit their website.
5. Optimizing their CTAs and positioning them better to ensure direct leads reach a conversion point.

The Results: Converting 15 to 20% of SQLs into Paying Customers

“I have a target number in mind, and I want to know how close I am getting to that. So I measured goals in Databox, actually.”

The numbers:

Conversion rate: Seen an increase in conversion rate from 1% to 1.5% 

SQLs: 142% improvement in SQL quarter-over-quarter. Plus, they’re converting about 15 to 20% of SQLs into paying customers.

Revenue: 10% month on month growth in revenue

ROI from CTA optimization: “We’ve got free trial signups up 64% month by month, 53% more leads, 59% reduction in CPA.”

Conversion rate: They’ve also seen an increase in conversion rate from1% to 1.5% 

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