What Is Lead Tracking: Your company’s success is directly affected by your leads. They can influence your revenue, conversions, and organizational longevity. You must monitor your leads to assess their quality and decide which leads you should focus on.
A vital part of any lead generation strategy is lead tracking. This article will explain the basics of lead tracking, including how it works and why it is important. Continue reading to find out more.
Guidebook: What Is Lead Tracking? The basics of lead tracking
Let’s start with the basics before we get into tracking leads.
What is lead tracking?
Modern tools and software allow sales reps and marketers to track who inquired and monitor prospects throughout the process of developing into qualified leads. Multi-tools are often used to achieve this, including marketing automation tech, customer relations and lead management software, and call tracking service. These tools often track multiple touchpoints across channels, both online and offline.
Each software has its method of tracking leads. Many software uses Javascript and cookies to track how leads interact with your content online. Tracking numbers can be used to determine how users interact offline with marketing and sales initiatives.
Any individual who shows interest in your product/service is referred to as a lead. Lead tracking involves the identification of the source of leads and monitoring their positions in the sales funnel.
Your lead tracking system categorizes customers according to their behavior and activities. It also estimates their likelihood of purchasing. Companies can use lead tracking to concentrate leads further down their funnel, increasing conversions and revenue.
Why is it important for leads to be tracked?
Because it provides the following benefits, lead tracking is important:
- Improve understanding: By tracking your leads, it is possible to gain a better understanding of your customers. This allows you to reach your target audience by offering relevant services and product matches in a way that resonates.
- Information strategies: You can identify which strategies work and which don’t and then adjust accordingly.
- Optimizing your marketing activities: Your lead data can be used to create more informed marketing strategies that minimize your risk and increase your lead quality.
How does lead tracking work?
It takes a lot of planning and coordination to track leads. To track leads and identify originations, many companies use specialized software. Marketers can use these tools to keep track of leads, sales, and return on investment (ROI) more accurately.
Once you have the right technology, you can track leads using these best practices.
1. Capture leads
There are many ways to get leads for your company. Data from trade shows, in-person events, statistics from web forms, transcripts from inbound calls, and data from other in-person events are all possible.
Here are some examples of digital lead generation:
- Search engine optimization
- Email lead nurturing
- Paid advertising
2. Collect information
Once you have captured leads, organize them so that you can track their progress through the sales funnel.
There is no single way to categorize your customers. However, it is important to sort them out in a way that helps you achieve your organizational goals. You can, for example, categorize leads based on customer demographics or how they found your site.
You should keep track of all contact information, including email addresses and phone numbers, for every lead so that you can follow up on them about any new products or services.
3. Qualify leads
Your business can only benefit from specific leads. Lead scoring allows you to assign value to each lead to target high-impact leads first. You can concentrate your efforts on the most engaged customers by separating high-quality and low-quality leads.
When qualifying leads, keep these categories in mind:
- Inquiries User interactions that indicate a potential interest in your product/service.
- Marketing-qualified Leads Leads who have interacted with marketing materials in such a manner that they are ready to purchase.
- Accepted Leads: Marketing-qualified Leads who meet predetermined criteria have been transferred to sales for further action.
- Qualified leads for sales: Customers at the bottom of the funnel who are interested in your products. Your marketing and sales teams will approve these leads to move on to the next stage in the sales process.
- Closed Opportunities: These leads were previously purchased from your company.
Success in lead tracking requires certain elements
You need a quality tracking system to track your company’s leads. Google Analytics allows you to break down your user base and create digestible reports.
These marketing elements will help you ensure a more accurate forecast:
- UTM tags UTM parameters are attached to your URLs. They indicate how a user discovered your brand and when they interacted with it. This will help you determine which methods work best for your audience.
- Flow charts These charts visually represent the buyer’s journey and outline any actions they might take during the sales funnel. These insights can be used to help you make better lead qualification decisions.
- Full funnel reviews: Regular full funnel reviews can help you and your team to define your pipeline and determine which stages of the buyer’s journey your marketing and sales strategies are serving.
- Customer relationship management (CRM) CRM software allows you to automate repetitive tasks and track potential customer interactions.
- Marketing automation software With marketing automation programs, you can better collect and report valuable interaction data and use these insights for lead tracking, scoring and funnel analysis.
Tips for lead tracking
It would help if you had a plan before you start the lead tracking process.
These are some things to consider when creating your lead-tracking strategy:
- Take into consideration your budget. Make sure to invest in the resources that will give you the best return on investment.
- Consider the size of your team: Optimize your lead-tracking efforts and maximize your resources by evaluating your team’s capabilities realistically.
- Identify your weaknesses. Evaluate your leads to see how effective your current strategy is. You might need to reevaluate how you approach leads if you don’t have enough quality leads.
- Forecast lead numbers: To better prepare your team for tracking and organizing them, you can project your lead volumes every month.
- Nurture your leads. Although not all leads in your funnel are ready to buy, it is important to keep in touch with them and encourage future sales.
- Create an email marketing campaign. Engaging in email communication with potential leads allows you to generate open, reply, bounce, bounce rate, and click-through data you can use for tracking leads.
Measure the metrics that impact your bottom line.
Do you want custom reporting tailored to your business? WebFX is powered by MarketingCloudFX and creates custom reports that are based on the most important metrics for your company.
- Leads
- Transactions
- Calls
- Revenue
Lead tracking involves the identification of the source of leads and actively monitoring where they are in the sales funnel. Then, you take the necessary actions to move them to the next stage.
Carolyn Lyden and Jules Tompkins contributed to this article.
Why is lead tracking important for sales and marketing?
Lead tracking allows sales and marketing to collaborate to find more qualified leads and close more deals seamlessly. Lead tracking can also help you provide a better user experience to your audience.
Marketing departments can use lead tracking to track where leads are coming from and how they reached out. This helps them determine which campaigns bring in the best-qualified leads. The marketing team can then pass the qualified leads to the sales department with all information necessary to close the lead.
Proper lead tracking will ensure that your sales team has the information they need to personalize and tailor their approach for each prospect. This will increase the likelihood of a sale or conversion.
How do you capture leads?
It is crucial to understand how and where you are storing lead information. Many organizations collect lead data from many sources, including trade shows, in-person engagements, web forms, and inbound calls to the company.
This process requires the consolidation of information from all these inputs. Most sales and marketing teams use CRMs such as Salesforce or HubSpot to keep track of leads and prospects.
How to gather lead information (and what you should collect)
You can track the progress of your leads through the sales funnel by collecting and sorting data about their identity and needs. To be able to follow up with prospects, you will need some contact information. This is typically the prospect’s phone number or email address.
Lead information in digital marketing is collected mainly through web forms. You can gather more information about your lead to engage them further and inform future marketing efforts.
For example, if you know that a prospect came to your site through a campaign or by searching for a certain keyword, you can use this information to create future campaigns or to double down on the ones you are currently running.
A lead scanner is a good option if you are collecting lead information in person, such as at a tradeshow or at work. Call tracking software is also a great option if you collect lead information over the telephone.
How can you qualify prospects and leads?
Sales departments use different models to assess the actual value of prospects or leads. IBM created the BANT model to help qualify prospects. Some thought leaders, such as Ash Alhashim, claim that the BANT model has become obsolete.
These are the most common types of sales and marketing leads.
- Inquiry A user who interacts with you to show potential interest in your product or service.
- Marketing Qualified Leader (MQL:) A lead whose interactions with marketing materials indicate that they could become a closed-door opportunity.
- Sales Accepted Lead (SAL: This sounds exactly like it — an MQL that sales accepted as a lead.
- Sales Qualified Leader (SQL:) In theory, sales would use a BANT model (or another standard) to determine whether the lead is ready for the next steps in their sales process.
- Closed/Won Chance: The lead bought the product or service.
According to Marketing Insider CEO Michael Brener, an inquiry is someone who has done something to express an interest in solving a problem… A lead can be a qualified business opportunity. Asking them is the only way to determine if an inquiry is a qualified opportunity.
The funnel is different for different industries. However, it requires that sales and marketing closely coordinate and share critical data about lead status.
How can these two departments collaborate to generate inquiries and close deals? Tracking leads.
Why is lead tracking essential?
Lead tracking gives marketers the information they need to track leads who contacted them, improve campaigns and personalize their efforts. It also allows them to increase ROI. It also gives sales the information they need to close a deal, including the individual pain points for each lead. Lead tracking is, in essence, a tool that helps sales reps and marketers do their jobs better.
SiriusDecisions is a research and advisory firm that reported in a recent study, “B2B companies with closely aligned marketing, sales, and marketing achieved 24% faster revenue growth and 27% faster profit growth over 3 years.”
Lead tracking can fill in gaps or blind spots in sales and marketing processes. A staggering 75 percent of marketers struggle to calculate ROI due to not knowing the results of their campaigns. 42 per cent of sales reps feel that they don’t have enough information to make a call.
Lead tracking tools are essential for modern digital marketers because they bridge the gap between data collection and communication.
Lead tracking is critical to call tracking.
Research by Salesforce has shown that 92% of all customer interactions occur over the phone. Call tracking follows the lead tracking and attribution process once the sales team has connected with the lead by phone.
CallRail’s Call Attribution and Analytics Features give the information that sales and marketing teams need to coordinate their efforts and maximize their performance. Call tracking software gives marketers this information:
- Which campaigns brought in the most calls?
- What keywords should you continue to target?
- Which mediums reach the right audience?
Combining your lead tracking efforts and call analysis data gives sales reps the edge in:
- Call scoring allows you to identify which callers are genuine SQLs.
- Call recording is a great way to help sales reps succeed.
- Faster response times ( 30-50 percent of sales go directly to the vendor who responds first).
Lead tracking is essential to sales and marketing today. Marketing and sales departments have more tools to help them. This means fewer data entries, better attribution models, and intuitive sales processes. Customers are happier because of the toolkit.
