Lead nurturing involves monitoring the activity of potential customers as they interact with your brand. Follow-up should start from the initial contact and throughout the sales process. In one study, 91% of marketers said that lead generation is their most important goal.
Lead tracking can help you categorize your leads. For example, an inbound lead is someone who has reached out to your company. An outbound lead is a customer you have reached out to. These details allow you to create strategies for specific customers. For example, an outbound lead requires more input from the marketing team, while an inbound lead can be fast-tracked to the sales team.
Lead tracking also helps you identify your most efficient cfo email list generation approaches. You’ll see patterns in what works best to convert leads into sales. What works best for you will depend on your audience demographics.
With the help of lead tracking, you can also identify high-value leads to target. You can identify the leads that are most likely to convert and implement specific strategies to shorten the sales cycle. For example, one of your leads might be another business. In that case, you can search for a specific LLC to gather information about their company before trying to close a sale.
Additionally, lead tracking data can inform your sales and marketing operations. The insights can fine-tune marketing efforts and guide future campaigns—your most efficient channels. Lead source data also allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.
Now that you know why lead tracking is so important, the question is: how exactly can you track leads? Let’s dive into five tips:
1. Identify KPIs
Identifying the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) is vital. There is a lot of data you can generate from your leads. This can be overwhelming. When you identify your KPIs, you can select the relevant information that you can use for effective lead follow-up.
That being said, here are some key KPIs that businesses should track when monitoring leads:
Traffic-to-Lead Ratio: Measures how effectively your marketing materials convert traffic into leads.
MQL to SQL Ratio: A marketing qualified lead (MQL) has interacted with your marketing materials but may not yet be interested in speaking with a sales rep. A sales qualified lead (SQL) expresses interest in your offering and wants to speak with a sales rep. Knowing this ratio allows you to assess how well your marketing team is moving leads through the sales funnel.
Conversion Time Ratio: Measures how long it takes a visitor to go through each stage of the sales process. The shorter the conversion time, the faster the conversion time.
Monthly Recurring Revenue per Lead, MQL or SQL – This gives you an idea of the quality of your leads, MQLs or SQLs.
Financial metrics are also essential KPIs to track. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is used to project the revenue a customer will generate over their lifecycle. This allows you to plan your sales and marketing budget and focus on high-value leads.