How to Track Your Leads to Increase Your Sales Success

Most sales training books and courses spend a lot of time on closing the sale, but very little time is spent on discussing the leads that, well, lead to those sales.  Generating the leads is the first part of any sales process, and the more time you spend understanding this important step, the more efficient your business will become. 

Can you count the number of leads you received over the past 30 days? The quality leads that are the most probable to end up in a sale are usually easy for people to name, but a great deal of other probably leads are actually lost each month. 

Why does it matter?  A huge amount of a company’s resources (both time and money) are spent generating leads that will hopefully result in sales, and the better you understand where and how you get those leads, the better off your business will be.  Would you find it worth it to learn something more about your leads if you were able to cut the time you spend getting leads, or even better marketing costs? 

Your first action plan is to create a way to track key information about the ways that you generate your leads.  Below are some questions to ask to get started: 

1. What is the main venue through which you get your leads? A “pre-lead” is really just a prospect, for example a website visitor or someone you shake hands with at a meet-up group.  Note those places that you pick up prospects, for example your website, advertising, networking events or tradeshows.

2. What “specific sources” do your leads come from? Pay per click advertising, a specific trade show, someone else’s website, or organic online searches are all examples of a specific source for your leads.

3. How would you rank the quality value of each of those leads from your source and specific source?  An effective way to come up with this is to assign a percent value to every lead a source provides.  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.

You will be able to spend your marketing budget and your time much more efficiently once you understand where you leads come from and the quality of those leads. 

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