What is one thing all firms have in common, no matter size, industry or location? You guessed it: the desire to get more customers. From a newly formed startup to the largest international corporation, customers are the driving force of business.
But before you attract recent customers, you would like to know where, how and when yow will discover them. Basically, you would like to have a solid lead generation strategy. Once you have it, you would like to observe it closely to determine if it is working because it should.
This process is also called lead tracking, and that is what this comprehensive guide is all about. Let’s start.
What are lead tracking strategies?
A lead tracking strategy is exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a process that helps each marketing and sales teams monitor B2C and B2B leads throughout the sales funnel (or customer journey). Because a lead tracking strategy takes into account a customer’s various interactions with your organization over time, it involves several steps.
These include monitoring the initial touchpoint – when you first communicate with a lead – to conversion (often indicated by the lead making a purchase or similar motion and officially turning into a customer).
Therefore, it is necessary that you just follow all these steps fastidiously. This is the only way to discover if the lead is facing any obstacles or, on the contrary, there is something that particularly helps in converting it.
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The importance of tracking leads
Whether you are starting a business from scratch, wanting to enter recent markets or beat the competition, a well-organized lead tracking system could also be useful to you. Below we present the three most important benefits that may be gained by using such a system.
Higher conversions
Companies don’t just want potential customers for their very own sake. They want leads so they’ll turn them into conversions. But that is easier said than done, especially without a foolproof strategy. On the other hand, by leveraging lead tracking, you’ll be able to gain invaluable information about your prospects, including:
- Their shopping habits.
- Their overall behavior towards your brand.
- Their pain points.
- Their preferences.
Armed with this wealth of information, your lead tracking strategy will enable you to create personalized, relevant and timely messages that may significantly increase your prospect’s probability of converting.
Better customer experience
By personalizing your marketing messages based on what your prospects are truly interested in, you may find a way to provide your customers with an overall higher experience. All your efforts, from email campaigns to free demos, will deliver much higher results and enable you to make more informed decisions.
Increased efficiency
Lead tracking not only provides great advantages for your customers, but it is also an extremely effective tool for improving productivity and efficiency in your organization.
Instead of asking marketers and salespeople to guess when finding recent leads, a lead tracking strategy equips them with the information they need to approach their most qualified prospects. These are also the ones who are more likely to turn into leads, so focusing on them significantly saves your team time, money and headaches.
Lead Tracking Best Practices: 7 Top Tips
Do you would like to implement an effective lead tracking strategy? Read on and you may learn how.
1. Set a set of goals
So it’s no surprise that the first thing you will need to do is set goals for your lead tracking strategy. Don’t just come up with a few vague, general goals – as an alternative, try to follow the SMART structure:
- Specific: Instead of claiming, “I want to increase my leads,” be specific: “by 5%.”
- Measurable: How will you know if your marketing efforts are working if you’ll be able to’t measure your goals? Establish consistent and accurate lead qualification elements for lead tracking.
- Achievable: Don’t aim for the stars because you would easily be upset. Start small and easy, with one or two achievable goals that may enable you to discover actionable insights.
- Important: It doesn’t matter what other firms do when it comes to tracking leads. You’re doing what’s best for your corporation, which suggests your goals are as aligned as possible with your overall strategy.
- Time-Bound: Give your teams a fairly specific deadline to evaluate and potentially improve your lead tracking system. This may even instill a sense of urgency in them, which can likely result in higher productivity and engagement.
2. Choose a lead tracking tool
You might think that tracking leads requires fancy tools and technology, but the excellent news is that that is not necessarily the case. Some firms find that a easy spreadsheet works great, while others prefer a more sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
Discuss all of your ideas with your team and come up with a solution that makes everyone joyful. Remember: irrespective of what lead tracking tool you utilize, you would like to make sure people are using it, otherwise it should be a waste of cash and time.
3. Get tracking
Time to start tracking! But before you get to this important part, make sure you have clarified your tracking criteria with all relevant team members. It’s a good idea to use parameters like:
- Leading demographic.
- Lead source.
- Leading behavior.
- Leading progress.
Please keep all information as detailed and accurate as possible and review it steadily to ensure it is as up-to-date as possible.
4. Create synergy between your teams
When it comes to tracking leads, it is important that each sales and marketing are on the same page. Typically, nonetheless, the marketing department is responsible for acquiring recent potential customers, and salespeople are responsible for acquiring them. And then what? Lack of further interaction between these two departments can create silos and miscommunications.
If sales and marketing don’t communicate and collaborate on lead tracking, how can they acquire only the best leads and work meaningfully and effectively to convert them?
Consider using a solid CRM so that each marketing and sales have access to the same data (perhaps from Google Analytics) each time they need it. In parallel, schedule regular team meetings with your marketing and sales representatives to thoroughly review your lead tracking system.
If you have a geographically dispersed team or people working remotely, you’ll be able to benefit from this Internet telephone systems for seamless real-time communication. This collaborative approach will ensure full alignment and significantly improved results.
5. Check the quality of leads
Once you have generated a decent variety of leads, you will need to discover if they’re good quality leads. One of the best and hottest ways is to use a lead scoring system. This is a process in which you assign a specific rating to each lead depending on several aspects, including: its behavior at various points of interaction with your brand.
For example, suppose you arrange a lead scoring system that assigns prospects 1 to 10 points. Has one of your potential customers downloaded the latest version lead magnet or began your 14-day free trial? Great, that is likely to be price 5 points. Has another person signed up for your newsletter and clicked on the links in it? It could possibly be 3 points.
Has a potential customer contacted your sales team and left their contact information to schedule an informational call? This can earn them as many as 9 points, which is a strong signal that they have qualified leads.
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6. Connect with leads
Now you have narrowed down your list of potential customers to a few good quality ones. What’s next? You need to find a way to contact them. While this is not solely the responsibility of a lead tracking project, it’s price taking the time to evaluate all the ways you should use to contact prospects – and increase your probabilities of converting them into leads.
Based on the lead type, vulnerabilities, and behaviors revealed by your lead tracking strategy, you need to find a way to discover the best marketing channels and start your interactions there.
7. Share your conclusions and continuously improve
Gatekeeping does not work in marketing and sales processes. If you would like things to go well and you would like to see tangible results, you would like to share the knowledge you gain from every project you engage in.
For this reason, it is extremely necessary to often discuss the findings of your lead tracking strategy with all relevant team members, from sales representatives to marketing team leaders. Do this monthly or quarterly, as this frequency ought to be the best place to keep everyone up to date – no one wants to discuss information from years ago when prospecting for recent leads!
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Key takeaways
Any business – from an individual entrepreneur to a global corporation – it thrives when customers come to it often. However, generating leads is no easy task, and verifying that the leads you are generating are working for you is even more difficult.
In this text, we discussed lead tracking and shared some of the best practices for implementing an effective lead tracking process for your organization. What are you waiting for? Start tracking your leads today to increase your probability of converting leads!