To understand lead tracking one must first have a general understanding of what a lead is. Not to be confused with a customer or prospect a lead is someone who is in your target demographic and is looking for information about your product or service.
A customer is one that has already purchased your services while a prospect is someone who is in your target demographic but may not know about your product or services.
To change prospects into leads and leads into customers, some systems have been created to help.
These systems are vital to any successful marketing campaign. To ensure that a prospect becomes a customer it takes tracking leads through the sales process.
Gone are the days when a sales rep would have to physically collect leads. Now there are better, more efficient ways of monitoring and collecting leads. From the first interaction, you can begin tracking your potential client through each step of the sales funnel.
Allowing a business to see how their customers interact with each step helps in the planning process.
Lead generation and tracking is not a process that will happen overnight. It takes time and effort, but with the right understanding, you can use sales lead tracking to help grow your customer base.
Lead Tracking Vs. Lead Scoring
While lead tracking and lead scoring are in the same family, these two are more akin to cousins rather than siblings but are often mistaken for each other.
While lead tracking deals with the documentation of each step of the sales process, how many times a sales rep has interacted with a potential client; lead scouring deals more with the quality of that information.
Lead tracking and scoring are essential to the process of lead generation but have very different functions. While you can look at them separately to have any marketing analytics without both would be a disservice to you and your sales team.
Lead scoring helps you personalize your approach to each client. You are offering value to them at each step of the process which cannot be done without lead tracking.
One tip to make sure you’re getting the most out of your lead generation efforts is to create many touch points in each campaign that are easy to follow and track.
The 5 Steps of the Sales Funnel
Once your prospect has recognized a need for your service you can guide them through the sales funnel process.
- Prospect: Someone who is in your target demographic but knows nothing about your product or service.
- Lead: This is the part of the process where the prospect interacts with some form of marketing material for your product or service.
- Marketing Qualified Lead: Also knowns as MQL this is the part of the process where your lead shows real interest in your product or service, therefore, qualifying themselves as a potential customer.
- Sales Qualified Lead: Also known as (SAL)is a lead that has been checked out and verified and is then sent to the sales team for approval.
- Closing The Sale: This is where all the hard work pays off for everyone! Your prospect becomes your customer, and you continue to build a lasting relationship.
Lead Tracking Helps With Organization
There are many benefits to lead tracking and organization is in the top five! There is never a single point by which all your data will culminate. If this is how you’ve been monitoring your leads, then chances are you are missing a big part of the picture.
By being able to tell which page has the most views, where your visitors are coming from and which call to action is providing the best results you can then tailor your funnels towards what is proven to work.
There are many ways you can organize your funnel results.
- Source
- Sales Cycle Stage
- Qualification
- Interactions
- Buyer Persona
Lead Tracking and Accuracy
Accuracy in sales is key to any successful business in any industry. When looking towards planability one needs to have accurate information.
There are a few simple things you can do to ensure a more accurate business forecast.
Use the elements below in your lead tracking to guarantee accuracy and to set your business up for success.
- UTM tags: Adding UTM Tags to your URLs allows your system to know at exactly what point your prospect accomplished an action. This process helps you to be able to understand what methods work for your audience and which ones don’t.
- A full-funnel review: Just like any other system or process the funnel review allows your team to know precisely how everything works. This step is crucial as it helps ensure that you are not trying to close the sale too quickly or wait too long.
- Flow charts: Some things are better understood when they are seen, that is where flow charts come in. These charts are your map to the treasure of closing a sale.
- Marketing Automation Software: This is a must for maintaining the accuracy of any campaign. No one person can have eyes on all campaigns all the time at all hours of the day. That is why we have created software that can help.
- CRM: Please stop using sticky notes and spreadsheets to manage your customers’ information. Not only can it get lost in the shuffle but CRM software is more efficient and way less wasteful than paper.
Consistency is Key In Lead Tracking
Using platforms such as Graphly for lead tracking can help streamline everything you need for a successful campaign into one safe location. There is no need for ten different programs each one doing something different.
There is nothing better for any marketing campaign than having access to real-time information right when you need it or exporting it to your team with high quality easy to read charts and graphs.
Companies that track their leads from start to finish are the ones that get out ahead of the trends and are able to see fluctuations in the market.
They are the ones that cross the finish line and close the sale.
Approaching the sale with facts and proven data is the only way to do business in the information age and Graphly is always happy to help.
Just check out what our clients have to say about using Graphly with Keap and let us know how we can help you get the most from your business.
