How To Increase Sales By Tracking Leads
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.
Can you count the number of leads you received over the past 30 days? 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.
What’s the big deal? Because a company spends so much time and money to get leads, the more you know about them, the more profitable the business will become. 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. 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. Then, answer the question, what specific sources do you get your actual leads 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? An effective way to come up with this is to assign a percent value to every lead a source provides. 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.
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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