You Can Increase Sales By Tracking Your Leads
Saturday, March 27th, 2010Most sales training books and courses spend a lot of time on closing the sale, but very little time is spent on discussing the leads that, well, lead to those sales. Every sales process begins with generating leads, so the more you know about sales leads, the more profitable your small business can be.
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? 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?
The first step is to establish a system to track identifying information about your lead generating activities. Here are some things to consider:
1. What is the main venue through which you get your leads? Before you have a lead, you only have a prospect, that is a website visitor or attendee from a networking event, for example. Identify your main sources for gathering prospects, such as the Internet, trade shows, networking events, or direct advertising.
2. What “specific sources” do 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. Finally, what is the quality value for each of the leads you receive from those general sources and specific sources? 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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