How to Track Your Leads to Increase Your Sales Success

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.  The sales process begins with generating leads, so it is important to understand as much as you can about them in order for your business to be as profitable as possible. 

How many leads did you get last month? Most people can answer that question with a handful of leads that have high potential or resulted in a sale, but a large number of potential leads fall out of the process, sacrificing possible sales. 

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? 

First, you need to be able to track specific information about how you get leads.  Here are a few areas to start analyzing: 

1. Where do you first generate your leads 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. Next, what are the more particular sources your leads come from? For example, specific sources could be a particular trade show, an online blog a direct advertising campaign, an existing client referral or a pay per click advertising campaign.

3. Last, what quality would you rank the leads you get from the sources you defined in the earlier steps?  The best way I have found to pinpoint this is to assign a percent value to each lead.  For example, 10% for a suspect (not even really a lead yet); 25% for someone who is actually interested and you’re talking more; 50% if you’ve issued a proposal and 100% if you closed the sale.

Understanding where you are getting your leads and the quality of those leads will help you to spend your marketing time and money in the right places to increase your profits. 

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