How to Track Your Leads to Increase Your Sales Success
April 3, 2010 by admin
Filed under public relations
Sales leads are not typically covered in sales training books or courses as thoroughly as other parts of the sales process such as closing the sale. Every sales process begins with generating leads, so the more you know about sales leads, the more profitable your small business can be.
Are you able to name the number of leads you got over the last month? Most mentally review and can name a handful of quality leads they talked to, but a good amount of potential leads are lost every month.
So, what’s the big deal anyway? The more you know about your leads the more successful your business will be, because generating leads is the first step to making sales. And, if you can use your newly found information to either reduce the cost of your marketing or the time that you spend, wouldn’t that be worth it?
The first step is to establish a system to track identifying information about your lead generating activities. Here are some things to consider:
1. What main sources did your leads come from? A “pre-lead” is really just a prospect, for example a website visitor or someone you shake hands with at a meet-up group. Your job is to identify those venues you use to collect your prospects, such as trade shows, meet-up groups, advertising, or your website.
2. What “specific sources” do your leads come from? Organic search, PPC, a specific networking event, another website, response to a blog post on someone else’s blog, or a specific advertising campaign are all examples of specific lead sources.
3. How would you rank the quality value of each of those leads from your source and specific source? I have found that this is easiest to derive by assigning a percentage value to every lead received from a source. So a lead that is just kicking the tires gets a lower percentage value assignment than one that you send a proposal to or even ultimately sell.
Once you know where your best leads originate, you will find you are able to spend your marketing dollars and your time much more efficiently.
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