How to stop “pulling levers” and start generating quality leads.

What makes audiences sit up, 
lean in, and convert?

Think quality not quantity, behavior not demographics, and that juuuuuust right dash of friction.Read on to get use-right-now strategies and the customizable lead gen templates to accelerate rather than alienate your next best prospect.

Chapter One

“A lot of that volume is trash."

The myth of more has run its course.Every marketer knows the seductive pull of vanity metrics. 10,000 new leads! Thousands of views on that viral video!! So many registrations!!!But volume isn’t the same thing as value.While single-metric focus (e.g., “add this CTA everywhere so we can get more emails”) can lead to short-term gains, it also leads to long-term churn.

Full-service digital agency, SmartBug Media discovered this when, despite healthy lead volume, they saw their sales team wasting 76% of their time on prospects who’d never convert. “Leads from target companies looked perfect on paper,” says Stephen Lackey, SmartBug’s VP of Marketing, “but they were often from wrong departments with no buying authority.”

To understand the true value of your prospects, stop looking at who they are, and start watching what they do.

What Stephen realized is that most marketers qualify leads by matching demographics (is this person an ICP based on demographic factors?) Rather than tracking behavior (a much stronger indicator).

It’s a little like boiling the ocean and hoping for a few good lobsters. Instead, you need targeted lead gen that adapts for your ideal prospect.

The old way of identifying qualified leads included looking at user qualities like:

✅ Company size

✅ Right industry

✅ Decision-making title

A better approach for finding high-intent buyers means looking at qualifying user actions.

Did your prospect:



🦞 Visit your pricing page (more than once)?

🦞 Use your ROI calculator?

🦞 Download one of your assets?

🦞 Ask about timelines during a demo?

Not all conversions are created equal. To get high-value leads that actually move the needle, you need to be able to quickly separate the serious buyers from the looky-loos.

When SmartBug switched to behavioral qualifications—instead of the constant hunt for more, more, more—they saw:


• 40% more qualified leads
• 24% faster sales follow-up
• 2.3x better close rates

→ Your move:

Pick one high-value conversion point (a demo request, pricing page visits, a free trial signup). Then add one behavioral qualifying question (like Denim’s “When do you need help?”).Test for two weeks to see the impact on your lead gen machine.

Template: The 2-week 
conversion test

✏️ Week 1: Setup

Day 1-2: Choose your conversion point (e.g., a demo request, pricing page visits, a free trial signup)

Day 3: Add ONE qualifying question to your existing form:

• Instead of: "Company size?"
• Try: "When do you need a solution?" (Today/This quarter/Just researching)


Day 4: Set up tracking in your CRM/analytics to tag responses by answer choice


Day 5–7: Launch with 50% of traffic seeing the new question to A/B test your new lead gen approach

🔎 Week 2: Monitor

What metrics to track:

• Daily conversion rates for your A/B test 
• Total form completions (expect an initial dip here as you refine your process)
• Quality of leads passed to sales (track by qualification answer and sales team feedback)
• Time from lead to first meaningful sales conversation

What success looks like:

• 15%-25% fewer total leads, but 40-60% higher sales acceptance rate
• "Today" respondents convert to demos 3x faster than "Just researching"
• Your sales team reports spending less time on unqualified prospects

Red flags to watch:

• Conversion rates drops more than 25% 
• No meaningful difference in lead quality by answer type (question isn't discriminating enough)
• High abandonment right at the new question (poor question placement or wording)

🤝 Week 3: Decision point

If successful: Keep the question and consider adding a second behavioral qualifier


If mixed results: Test different question wording or placement


If poor results: Try softer friction (optional question vs. required)

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Want a peak behind Typeform’s own marketing curtain? We use a customizable Lead Capture Form Template to fit various qualifying criteria. Lobster-fied, just when we need it.

Chapter Two

“You don’t want just anybody coming in.”

Open the door to the right prospects…not ALL the prospects.

If everyone is a high-priority lead, no one is a high-priority lead.

Introducing a higher barrier to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) status helps you more put your focus where it belongs: on prospects with heat.

But to do this, you gotta create a little friction.


You don’t want the floodgates wide open but you also don’t want to make things so tricky that great prospects give up before they even begin. Instead, you want to land right in the friction Goldilocks Zone. 

Build trust, not walls

Rob Brooks from Double Denim Marketing discovered the power of asking questions strategically: "You don't overwhelm prospects with too many questions at once. Keep your ask simple, then build."

When Rob flipped this switch, his team saw conversion rates jump from 7.75% to 19.35%.

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By introducing—and continuously re-adjusting—some friction in your lead gen systems, you spare your sales team from combing through reams of prospects going nowhere fast—and instead focus your efforts on truly high-potential prospects.Your move: Ask yourself some basic questions to get clear about where you need more friction (and where you might need less.)

Questions like:

1. Where do good leads drop off?
2. Where do bad leads flood in?
3. What ONE question would disqualify 50% of poor fits?


Adding even a single qualifying question like "When do you need a solution?" can filter out researchers from ready buyers.Ready for insights? Brainstorm with your team, and use Typeform’s customizable Marketing Lead Generation Quiz to assess behavioral traits rather than just collecting basic information.

Give first, gate second

Part of a strategic friction strategy is knowing when to eliminate friction entirely. This is where a zero-click paid social strategy comes into play.

When you give away gold for free, you:

1. Build brand awareness and trust before asking for anything in return 
2. Identify what content resonates with your audience before investing in lead capture around similar topics

No forms, no friction. Just watch what resonates and gate accordingly.

Chapter Three

“Be business vulnerable.”

Your audience knows more than you think. Just ask them.

Emily Kramer built a 60,000-subscriber newsletter with one counterintuitive move: admitting she doesn't know everything.

Most of us (as much as we might wish otherwise) aren’t subject-matter experts in our clients’ industries. We don’t know everything about the audience or the workflows. But our clients do. So just ask.

"Marketers get so hung up on being the authority that they're scared to ask questions," says Emily, founder of MKT1. "But being 'business vulnerable' got me 25% more engagement for half the effort.

‍"When teams prioritize appearing authoritative over genuine audience connection, they miss opportunities to create content that truly resonates.

(And get stuck on generic content creation that’s over-reliant on guesswork, SEO keyword-driven topics, and what competitors are doing. Because there’s nothing readers love more than a vague, bland listicle…)

So get vulnerable. Because when it comes to understanding your audience, there are no wrong questions—only the risk of not asking any at all.

“Ask not what your audience can do for you…”

At the end of the day, the best lead generation is a two-way street. Don’t just ask prospects for what you need (e.g., all those email addresses to feed your CRM). Ask them what they need from you.You may be surprised by the answers.

For Emily, those results were clear: when she made audience listening a systemic part of her content process, she saw a 25% boost in engagement and grew to 60k newsletter subscribers—all for half the content creation effort.


→ Your move:

Start with simple, direct audience engagement—just ask your audience what they think. Make assets that reflect those insights and turn your audience into co-creators. 


Conclusion

“Marketing isn’t dead. It’s just not as easy as it used to be.”

Don’t put up the white flag just yet.

Marketing is evolving. Sure, the "easy" growth hacks are dead, but for marketers willing to:


• Ask uncomfortable questions
• Add strategic friction
• Focus on behavior over demographics
• Actually talk to their audience


The opportunity has never been greater.

New math, but marketing

No pop-quiz, we promise, but here’s a handy cheat-sheet for how to start prioritizing quality over quantity and results over rhetoric.

→ Your move:

Stop counting leads. Start counting customers.

Your audience doesn't need another form. They need a conversation that matters.

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