Better Leads, Better Conversations: Improving Lead Quality Through Smarter FormsBetter Leads, Better Conversations: Improving Lead Quality Through Smarter Forms

Better Leads, Better Conversations: Improving Lead Quality Through Smarter Forms Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. How are you doing? 

Jeff White: I’m doing great. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Nice. 

Jeff White: Good to be chatting. 

Carman Pirie: Keeping well in this 2026 thus far I trust? 

Jeff White: as much as I can.

Carman Pirie: All right. All right. There we exchanged pleasantries. 

Jeff White: Indeed. We didn’t talk about the weather, but it’s absolute crap. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I think I like how we complain or poke fun at people exchanging pleasantries or talking about the weather, and then we do it every time. And I kind of wonder, if people think we’re… I’m assuming most people don’t know if we’re being serious or not half the time. I think the way to think about it is if I sound serious, I’m not being serious at all. Oh. And if I don’t sound serious, then I probably am. Does that make sense? Jeff? 

Jeff White: I’ve been your business partner for almost two decades, and no. No it doesn’t. 

Carman Pirie: All right. 

Jeff White: It could go either way. It could go either way. 

Carman Pirie: It’s good that I appreciate not knowing myself. But anyway, we don’t need to get down too much of a tangent before we start chatting with today’s guest. I’m excited about the conversation. I’m curious to see where this leads. There’s some really interesting learning and things to think about here. 

Jeff White: Yeah. We’ll keep it mysterious for now, but joining us today is David Ceballos. David is the Marketing Manager at the Industrial Emissions Division at Testo Instruments. Welcome to The Kula Ring, David.

David Ceballos: Thanks for having me guys. 

Carman Pirie: David, thanks for joining us on the show. Maybe start by introducing our listeners to Testo. What do you all do at the firm? 

David Ceballos: Testo Instruments is a German based company in North America. We manufacture measuring equipment for HVAC, pharma, and food. I do industrial emissions and we do thermal imaging as well.

Carman Pirie: Ah, how long have you been there? 

David Ceballos: Just finished my first year in November, so now starting year two at Testo. 

Carman Pirie: Nice. Nice. And David, what did you do before that, if you don’t mind my asking? 

David Ceballos: Before that I was a salesman for Chrysler-Jeep. 

Carman Pirie: Ah, see that, I love having a bit of sales in a marketing background. I think it may probably just be me being biased because I used to be a sales guy too. 

Jeff White: I think a lot of the great marketers that I’ve ever met have some kind of sales background. They’ve experienced contact with the enemy. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jeff White: That hand-to-hand combat, and I bet it’s even more realistic when you’re talking about automotive sales. Hey David? 

David Ceballos: Yeah, I mean it’s pushed me to decide what actually makes a good lead versus a bad lead, because I was given a lot of bad leads. Not necessarily the marketing’s fault, just the way car sales are inherently.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I bet there’s a lot of salespeople listening that would be like, yeah, no, exactly. We want our marketers who have lived with bad leads so that they don’t send us anymore of those. David you mentioned you just concluded your first year there. What has the first year been like? What has been your area of focus as you seek to make an impact at Testo? 

David Ceballos: The first year has really been more foundation created at Testo Emissions, which is one of the smaller business units. So this was really the… My hiring was their first time having a dedicated marketing manager for that division. So previously it would play a bit of a backseat role to larger divisions like HVAC or pharma for example. So just now actually being able to create that foundation and have consistent growth over the past year and now actually being able to build on all the initiatives we started and having actual data we can look at. That’s what year two is really centered on. 

Carman Pirie: That’s really cool. And my goodness, it couldn’t be more impacted or influenced by that sales background with your first year being about really establishing the foundation for pipeline build and lead flow and getting the data to make that better.

I know when we were chatting about having you as a guest on The Kula Ring, we chatted about some approaches you’ve taken to try to improve the quality of leads that you are sending over to sales. And so that’s what I think we wanted to dive into because I just love how it connects with that sales background.

But I love even more the fact that frankly, it’s a reality every marketer lives in this space. So what have you been doing to truly… What would you say you’ve been doing to improve the leads that are coming into the sales organization? 

David Ceballos: One of the more impactful changes I’ve implemented was the approach to contact inquiries from end users. Taking a page out of my experience with car sales it’s much easier to sell a car to somebody if you know why they wanna buy that car to begin with. Versus if they just come in blind and you have to pick and prod, and a lot of people don’t necessarily want to give you that information.

So just changing it from a general contact request form to a more specific admissions related one. One of the more successful ones asked you at the bottom of the box what combustion source do you test? So that instinctively, okay, we have the experience to know what combustion source you may be working with, what sensors set up might work for you best. It gives the salesman more tools to really solve the problem that the end user’s facing. 

Jeff White: Do you find, going back to something you just said there, you know about how buyers, especially in the automotive world, they’re probably keeping a lot of their knowledge or their information close to the chest so they’re not revealing it. Do you find it’s the same thing in more of a B2B context? Are people retaining a lot or trying to hide information early on, or are they more open about it and more willing to give you what you need in order to be helpful? 

David Ceballos: I think, overall it’s more of just an instinctual thing people do, especially in today’s day and age where we have so much data tracking and people not wanting their data collected, et cetera. How many times do you sign up for an email to Walmart’s newsletter and all of a sudden you’re getting emails from somewhere else because, oh, they gave your data away, people don’t want to be spanned with emails. They’re very hesitant to give you that information, whether it’s because they have a certain budget and they’re negotiating with you and another company and they want to play it close to the chest to see if they can squeeze out a better deal or if they just don’t wanna be bothered with their email being leaked or sold to a third party and being bombarded with spam emails. I don’t think it’s, on average, a tactical thing people do. I think it’s just something people do because unfortunately that’s the situation in today’s day and age. 

Carman Pirie: That’s a really interesting insight, David. Like you’re really basically saying this is an instinct now. And so it’s like we need to work with that. 

Jeff White: It’s infiltrating B2B when maybe in the past you might have been more open about what you’re looking for… 

Carman Pirie: Maybe, yeah. I love this. But obviously people are at least willing to tell you what combustion source they’re testing. They may not be willing to tell you the budget that they have yet or something of that sort. But one of the big, not big challenges but a challenge. To say it’s a big challenge would rank it above a number of others, but one of the challenges I think manufacturers face as they’re trying to drive new traffic. Even saying, buying paid search traffic or something of that sort to try to drive more qualified leads to a sales team. I think a lot of people struggle with narrowing in that strategy to have a level of buying intent.

Sometimes they cast a pretty wide on the front end, and I really like your approach. Really must serve to filter out, not a lot of people are gonna answer that question in an intelligent way unless they’re a real buyer. 

David Ceballos: It also gives the opportunity to, if they don’t necessarily know, now you have the chance to educate them. You’re bringing more value and now you’re establishing trust in that way. So you may not be setting up a sale right there, but three months from now it could be a different story. 

Carman Pirie: How could they not know what combustion source they’re testing? 

David Ceballos: You’d be surprised. It’s the same thing with car sales. It’s, oh, do you have a four wheel drive or a front wheel drive? It drives. That’s the answer I’ve been given.

Carman Pirie: As someone who’s a bit of a car guy. You’re driving me crazy right now. 

David Ceballos: No, and it’s not to say anybody’s dumb or anything, or to question anybody’s intelligence, but it’s, when it’s important to kind of market to the lowest common denominator in the sense that you don’t want to just assume things about people. You want to give them information so they can learn more and be interested and ask for more. 

Jeff White: Do you find with buying committees that may be larger than just a single person, that maybe you need to scale that sense of understanding of what they actually know or are willing to divulge based on who they are in the buying group?

David Ceballos: Yeah, I think, again, it varies depending on who the audience is. Ultimately it’s up to the salesman. I try to give them as many tools as I can so they can go in prepared to be able to overcome whatever questions that the buying group might have. But at the end of the day, I’d rather do more and have all that relevant information and leave with a good taste in the end customer’s mouth, then just assume they don’t know what we’re interested in, what we’re selling or assume that they do because that’s also an issue I think people have is assuming, your audience knows who you are. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. What it’s been like there before and after here on the junk leads side of things, because like I said, it feels to me like this is going to help improve the quality of leads and make sure that the people that filter through are actually real. Have you noticed that in the data? 

David Ceballos: At the moment. Yes. I’m actually in the process of going through all of those, all of that data and then so we can prepare for Q2 more, our end of year promo finished in December. And just based on the way we structured the emails, social media captions contact forms contact field requests, just the way that those have been structured. We noticed in the moment just more, more leads in general, but also more oh, these leads are telling me pretty much exactly what they want. They’re interested in buying this specific part, or they have this project going on. What do we recommend? It’s almost like the end users doing the work for us, if that makes sense.

Carman Pirie: And what kind of a sales cycle do you experience in the business? Have you actually been able to see this through to the end yet? Appreciating that you’ve only been there a year, sometimes sales cycles can be quite long. 

David Ceballos: That I’m not sure if I could answer that right now, to be honest.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I’d be curious. I’d love to hear a year from now if you’re seeing increased close rates as an example, as a result of better quality leads and more focused information on what the customer actually needs so that the salesperson can be more successful. I’ve got to think that you’re going to see a lagging indicator being an increase in close rates there.

David Ceballos: I think it, we are seeing more so now MQLs or the actual quality of those leads have gone up in regards to conversion rates. That’s something that’s hard to do with only a year’s worth of information. And that’s something where I’m kind of hopeful I can see something positive there and then even if I don’t, that’s something that’s going into planning for next year as well, just so that way we can actually grow in both senses.

Jeff White: Once you’re receiving these leads that are hopefully better qualified and are providing more information, what are you doing with them? How are you routing the contacts that come in? 

David Ceballos: Through our CRM. So, some of our leads also do just go to our distribution chain, our distributors through their distribution channels based on a couple different factors, really location of the end user.

Sometimes it’s, if they need training, like in-person, hands-on training, those things will affect it. If it’s something more like a, just a corporate order or sensor replacement parts, that usually will just go straight to us directly. But yeah, otherwise, they’ll get qualified broken into whichever territory they’re in and either assigned to our sales manager or distribution somewhere.

Carman Pirie: Have you, based upon the insights that you have into the world of selling, have you made any changes? Apart from just sending more information along with that lead? 

David Ceballos: You mean in the sales process or… 

Carman Pirie: just in how you interact with sales. I wonder if that has changed with your influence.

David Ceballos: Mostly just working with sales to manage and try to grow our distributors as well. We have our distributors that sometimes they don’t necessarily have websites because they’re more just on the road, in person, but still figuring out what tools do they have available to them? How can we help them leverage those tools to grow as well, and grow not only their business, but the Testo brand. And then, just in general, promoting updating our website, promoting our social media and building a better customer journey overall. 

Jeff White: David, are there any other questions you’ve tested in the conversion form in order to more appropriately direct the leads that you’re getting? Are you trying anything else or…? 

David Ceballos: Planning to right now to create a couple different application specific questions. Primarily the one that we had successful was for combustion, but we also do things with steel, cement, concrete, so going in that direction as well. We are doing more specific targeting towards concrete, specifically with emails and newsletters, which have gone over pretty well. We did a short campaign in November and got about six sales out of it from maybe two or three weeks worth of emails. But overall, it’s also just experimenting with what required fields are required for the actual form submission, because I don’t want to make people have to give me their first name, last name, email, state location, just if they have a simple question. Hey, does this sensor fit in this instrument? So besides just the language, the actual field fields required, I think, play a part too. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s an interesting dance. Because part of what you’ve highlighted here is that when you ask more detailed questions. The people that are willing to answer them and that know how to answer these more specific questions are more likely to be buyers. But on the other hand, you gotta choose when you want them to answer those questions you don’t want to create so much friction in the customer experience with the brand that they’re frustrated as hell before they ever get to a point of being a real prospect. It seems to me to be a delicate thing to try to navigate. That was a question I was trying to ask, what do you think about it, or do you just look at it through the lens of what would I expect if I were the one reaching out?

David Ceballos: Kinda, yeah. Personally I don’t like signing up for things, especially online, unless it’s like a must-have. If my wife makes me get Hulu or whatever, then I’ll sign up for it.

But overall it also depends on what it is, where I am on our landing pages. If it’s something, we have webinars pretty much monthly. So for those, I’m gonna make every field required because I do need your first name, last name, email, so I can register you for it. But I don’t necessarily need your state, I don’t need your location. Because again, this is just, Hey, you were looking for information. Let me provide you with that information. Just give me your contact so I can get in contact with you to give you that information. But if it’s something like, oh, I’m curious about this instrument. I’d like more information on it. Okay. Then at that point I do think it makes sense to ask you for your location because not only can I answer your question, but I can possibly connect you with one of our distributors if you need support in that area, if you need training, what have you. So I think you have to pick and choose. That’s why I wish it would, it’d be great if you could just have one form that just whenever someone goes to it’s perfect for them, but that’s not the case.

Carman Pirie: yeah, exactly. And I think a consideration that a lot of people miss is that they miss out on the opportunity for data enrichment after the fact. You don’t need to have all of the data in the first conversion. So many of the platforms that you might be funneling those leads into now can do a level of automated data enrichment and bring some of that firmographic information and some of the fields that you may deeply desire but didn’t ask can be filled in after the fact. And, people need to be eyes wide open to that and not be so rigid. Nothing pisses me off more, frankly, when you see somebody with a 20 field form, and they’re all marked as required, and I’m sitting there as a marketer saying, you know what, if you had my email address chances are the rest of this could be filled in a second. It just seems like a wasted opportunity,

Jeff White: On that front. David, do you restrict Gmail and Hotmail addresses from your forms in order to be able to collect that kind of additional information so that you have the domain of the actual business?

David Ceballos: To my knowledge, we don’t restrict anything in that regard. If you sign up with a Gmail account, you sign up with a Gmail account, you’ll get our newsletter or contact back request through the email you used. I don’t necessarily understand why you’d want to restrict something like that, if you’re expecting them to submit the information. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Most of the time I’ve seen it restricted because everybody realizes that, a year and a half in, every Hotmail account has been a junk lead, as an example. So they’re like, okay we just won’t allow them to convert anymore.

David Ceballos: Yeah. But then you also miss that one that turned out to be a sale.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. No you’re quite right. This is a debate, the endless tension. There’s no question. 

David Ceballos: I guess that’s the car salesman in me talking.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. You still have to have the energy to make that one sale though. And if you’ve dealt with a year and a half of garbage leads from Hotmail addresses, you may have burned yourself out. But I hear what you’re saying. I think the point is well taken. To defer to the prospect, to defer to the customer what their preference is, and then work towards that versus some sort of militant rule enforcement.

David Ceballos: Yeah, I think building off that, it reminds me a bit about how the way my leads would come in when I was selling cars. It’s primarily the reason I take the polar opposite approach to forms and submissions like that. Because if you’re on the website, you shouldn’t have to put in your contact information just to see our inventory. You should see our inventory and then decide you want to contact us. And that’s where I’m taking the polar opposite stance. I don’t think anybody should have to, if you want a window shop, you want a window shop. I’m not gonna stop you. If you have a question, feel free to contact us and I’ll answer your question.

Jeff White: Certainly the more sophisticated way to approach it, understand that people need to be able to access a certain level of information in order to be able to make a decision about whether or not they want to talk to sales, but not feel annoyed that they have to talk to sales just to get access to some stuff that they feel should be public. It’s interesting to think about what the stratosphere is, you put different levels of information, what requires an email in order to access what when do you ask them to fill out the more fulsome form because they’re further down the funnel. Like understanding that the buyer journey is a big part of making this work properly in a digital world.

David Ceballos: Exactly. And we have the luxury of most of our inventory, the item, the analyzers we sell. Because they have to be, for the most part, custom fit for your specific application. If you want pricing, you have to call me because I need to build it for you, essentially. We do have pre-made kits, but at the same time, that’s not something where I can just put the price up right away because there might be some type of price change in regards to tariffs here in the US or we might have a different type of promotion going on. Or even then you might think you need a specific thing, it’s for your application, but actually you’re looking for something else. So just being able to, you can look at it, you can see all the features it has, what it comes with. Once you want more information to the point where you are a serious buyer, then we can have that conversation and cross that bridge when we get there.

Carman Pirie: I love you drawing the parallel from the window shopping, to be honest, because where my head went when you said that was, you could go to a smaller town in rural France or you can go to fifth Avenue and in both cases people will be window shopping, right? And so there’s like a human behavior that we’ve either learned or invented shops to fulfill one of the two.

You can imagine a shop and just picture some random shop in some random town and them saying, look, we actually wanna be able to measure everybody that’s looking at the window. We need to know how many have looked in, and if they’ve looked at the left part, like which display they looked at as they looked in the window. And that’s critical for data measurement for us to actually improve the window displays. And you can just try to draw those digital parallels, like if you treated that window shopper, the way you treat somebody that comes to the website looking to know if you have some inventory. And all of a sudden it just sounds absolutely ludicrous. Like it sounds like he would never do that. And there’s a really strong bit of guidance in that because it means that it also is just going against the way humans behave. So if you go down that path a little bit further, you could probably weed out some pretty bad ideas.

But beyond that, I think you’re playing with that tension of everything in marketing these days. We want to measure it. But some of our efforts to do that actually. Mess up the customer journey, screw up the customer experience and go outside of what humans really expect. Does that make sense, David?

David Ceballos: Yeah. It reminds me of when I sold cars, my manager tried to put it on us that somebody would come in, greet them, ask them if they needed help. They say, no, just leave them alone. Let them look. And he’d drop parallels to his position to back it up. Basically in his mind, I come into a place, greet me, acknowledge my presence. Just so you know that I’m here, leave me alone because if I have a question, I’ll ask you, but don’t make me ask more than once. Don’t make me ask for help more than once. And that’s my approach to it. A lot of people, me personally too, I don’t like being pushed into something, whether it’s buying a car, whether I’m trying to read the menu at a restaurant and this person keeps checking in on me and it’s I just sat down, let me actually look it and see what I want, sometimes it comes out of a good place of, oh, they’re just very eager. Sure. But sometimes it just rubs you the wrong way. But again, it goes back to that point of not making someone ask for help more than once. If they’re making that contact request, they’re making it for a reason. 

Carman Pirie: Any concern about self-reference criteria? One of the things that we’ve been talking about here a lot is what our preferences are and then applying them to what we’d do. Do you ever feel like you, are you ever concerned about going too far there? Maybe the rest of the world isn’t as messed up as I am and maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about it this way. 

David Ceballos: Yeah. And that’s my main check. The way I check myself in that regard is just communicating with my sales team, communicating with my business unit manager, basically. This is what I envision, this is the reasoning behind it. This is my opinion. Let me know what do you guys think? Because at the end of the day. I’m not the one trying to close the sale. I’m just granting the opportunity. They might have another perspective based on just regionally where they are. If we’re doing a targeted regional campaign, people communicate differently in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, what have you, or they might just say, Hey, I don’t necessarily think that works for that audience because of X, Y, Z. So I try not to just go based on my own perspective. 

I think it’s important to work with your sales team because at the end of the day, you can have as many MQLs as you want, but if your sales numbers aren’t necessarily going up, how good are those MQLs? 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And it’s just another vanity metric then, isn’t it? 

David Ceballos: It’s either just the MQLs aren’t good or the salesmen are bad. But, what are the odds that your entire sales team is just that bad?

Jeff White: The whole thing. 

David Ceballos: not a single one. Not a single one of them. 

Carman Pirie: Somewhere there’s a sales VP saying yes, the whole thing’s terrible. 

Jeff White: He’s probably not a hundred percent right. Let’s give it to the other, there’s one guy there that’s really good.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. No. I’ve just… 

Jeff White: Carrying the whole team. He’s got the Glengarry leads. 

Carman Pirie: David, this has been… I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for sharing your experience with us. I wonder what bit of parting advice you might leave to marketers as they’re staring down the barrel of 2026 here and what advice do you have to leave them with?

David Ceballos: Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Whether it’s for your campaign, whether it’s of your audience, whether it’s of your salesman, it’s important questions. Turn into information, turn into answers that turn into information. 

Carman Pirie: This has been great. Thanks so much for joining us. 

David Ceballos: Thanks for having me, guys.

Jeff White: Thank you.