Sales Success Is Yours When You Track Your Leads

While most books on sales training or classes do a good job covering closing a sale, few cover sales leads.  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 mentally review and can name a handful of quality leads they talked to, but a good amount of potential leads are lost every month. 

Why does it matter?  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? 

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? Before you have a lead, you only have a prospect, that is a website visitor or attendee from a networking event, for example.  Note those places that you pick up prospects, for example your website, advertising, networking events or tradeshows.

2. Next, what are the more particular sources 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?  The best way I have found to pinpoint this is to assign a percent value to each lead.  So, if a lead actually results in a sale, it receives a higher percentage value than one that expressed interest but didn’t get past the proposal stage.

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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