AI and the Future of Lead Generation: Why Buyer Intent Matters More Than Ever

Many marketing teams never see what happens after the lead is generated. The form gets filled, handed off, and performance gets measured at the top of the funnel. What happens on the other side is largely invisible.

That's exactly why we sat down with Phil Strohl.

Phil represents a unique perspective we have at LQ, heading up our contact center, seeing the consumer journey from the first expression of intent all the way through a closed transaction. Through his team and expertise we have the advantage to see things the marketing side rarely does. In a recent coffee chat with Monica Niblack, the two dug into what's actually changing at the bottom of the funnel, and what it means for the teams generating the leads in the first place.

The conversation covered a lot of ground. These are the parts worth reading first, the rest are worth the watch.

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The Consumer Who Shows Up Today Is Not the One Who Showed Up Five Years Ago

AI is compressing the consumer research journey, and for high-consideration financial decisions like mortgage, that's a material shift.

Consumers are arriving more educated than ever. Often, they’ve used AI tools to not only evaluate their options and compare pricing, but to also fully understand complex product terminology and features. By the time a consumer has reached the sales team they know your brand (or think they do), know your competitors, understand their options, and are ready to make a decision.

That dynamic changes what the first conversation needs to look like. The sales rep who treats an AI-informed 2026 prospect like a 2019 informational inquiry is going to feel it  in conversation quality, as well as time-to-close and conversion rate.

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“Cost Per Lead Tells You What You Paid. Not What You Bought.”

This is the line from Phil that cuts the deepest, and it's worth sitting with.

A lead's value isn't determined by the form fill. It's determined by the intent behind it, and that is shaped by everything that happened before the form was submitted. A prospect who found you through a search, evaluated you against competitors on a rate comparison site, and chose to engage has taken a fundamentally different path than one who filled out a generic interest form that got routed to four other lenders simultaneously. Both are "leads", but only one of them signals real purchase intent.

As AI is more heavily involved in the consumer's research work, Phil's view is that the hand raisers will carry stronger intent than they would have five years ago. This results in fewer low-quality informational visits and more prospects who've already educated themselves in the market before they contact you. Lead volume will shift, but the ones that come through should close at a higher rate, especially if the infrastructure is built to recognize and act on that signal quickly.

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Handoff Is Still the Final Mile

Twenty years into the marketing-to-sales handoff problem, most organizations still haven't solved it. And at Phil's vantage point, sitting directly in that seam, the gap is hard to ignore.

What it looks like when it's working: 

• the sales team has context before they pick up the phone
  
  • the rep knows what the consumer has looked at, what they’ve submitted, and where they are in the decision process
• the consumer doesn't have to start the conversation over
  
  • the human touch feels like a continuation of the digital journey, not a reset

What it looks like when it isn't: 

• marketing optimizes for lead volume
• sales questions lead quality 
• the consumer feels the friction of being handed off to someone who knows nothing about them

Done right, Phil says it is a virtuous cycle, a feedback loop in both directions where what converts informs what gets generated, and both sides of the business are pulling toward the same outcome.

There's more in the full conversation, including Phil's take on where AI belongs in the contact center and where it doesn't, what separates the highest-value leads from the ones that look good on paper, and what he'd be paying closest attention to if he were running a financial services lead gen business from scratch today.

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That last answer alone is worth the watch.

‍Watch the full coffee chat.

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Read the transcript.

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‍Phil Strohl is VP of Contact Center Operations at LQ Digital. LQ from Signals to Dollars is a conversation series hosted by Monica Niblack exploring what performance marketing looks like from intent to revenue.