How To Track Sales Leads Effectively In 2024: 5 Essential Steps
If you don’t know where your sales leads are coming from or how they flow through your sales funnel, you are losing money.
Tracking sales leads is the key to understanding the effectiveness of your sales and marketing campaigns, so you can invest in the channels that work best and start reducing your cost per lead (CPL) without sacrificing lead quality.
What Is Sales Lead Tracking?
Sales lead tracking is the process of monitoring leads as they move through your sales funnel (AKA the sales pipeline).
Effective lead management doesn't just collect leads, it creates a well-defined process for tracking and nurturing leads through the funnel until they are paying customers. Leverage your RevOps team or your lead tracking software to identify where leads are getting stuck and how you can move them smoothly to the next stage of the funnel.
Benefits Of Tracking Sales Leads
Why should you be tracking sales leads? Let’s do the math.
Say you need 10 new customers to meet your monthly revenue target. Assuming an average conversion rate of 2%, that means you’ll need 500 leads in your pipeline. And with the average cost of a single lead exceeding $200, you’re spending upwards of $100,000 for those leads.
But the benefits go beyond simple math. Let’s dig in.
Improved Sales Process
“Sales process” is just a fancy term for the steps you follow to convert a prospect into a paying customer. No matter how freewheeling you are in your personal life, it’s important to have a repeatable process for making sales.
You don’t have to do exactly what everyone else is doing, but a good sales process usually has these steps:
- Researching your competitors
- Identifying your target audience
- Learning more about your prospects
- Determining if your products and services match a prospect’s needs
- Building positive relationships
- Pitching an offer
- Answering the prospect’s questions
- Finalizing the sale
With lead tracking, sales and marketing teams know exactly what they need to do at all times, making the sales process more efficient and effective. A smooth sales process equals a smooth buying process. And, ultimately, that’s what customers are looking for.
More Organized Data
If you don’t systematically track leads, there’s a good chance your salespeople are struggling. They will spend more time tracking down necessary information and qualifying than they will be selling.
Clean, organized data is the lifeblood of your GTM motion. It’s the only way to truly understand the health of your business. By utilizing sales lead tracking, CRM software, and other tools, your business will be more efficient and generate more revenue. And the RevOps team will thank you.
Easier Prioritization
Without lead tracking, prioritizing leads is like juggling a bunch of flaming bowling pins. Sure, it looks cool, but why risk it?
When you have a comprehensive lead tracking system, it’s easier to determine which leads are most likely and least likely to buy from you. Salespeople can focus on the people most likely to buy, increasing revenue and efficiency.
Sales Loss Prevention
To increase your conversion rate, you must contact the right person with the right offer at the right time.
Without lead tracking, it’s almost impossible to match potential customers to the right products and services. Sales lead tracking prevents lost sales by ensuring you have plenty of information about each prospect’s needs.
Improved Predictions
As we mentioned earlier, lead tracking makes it easier to determine who’s most likely to become a paying customer.
In other words, it improves predictions related to sales and marketing. Lead tracking also helps you identify the most valuable prospects, helping you with monthly, quarterly, and annual forecasts.
Psst! Follow these guidelines for an accurate sales forecast.
Effective Lead Nurturing
Once you have a lead in your sales funnel, you need to nurture it. Unless you live in the magical land of Narnia, most people don’t become paying customers within minutes of entering your sales pipeline. You need to anticipate their needs and follow up multiple times.
With lead tracking, nurturing is easier than ever. If you use CRM software like Salesforce or Zoho, you can even automate many of your nurturing activities, saving time and allowing your sales reps to focus on high-value activities in the sales cycle.
We mapped a nurture sequence for you in our article on the foundations of lead management.
5 Best Practices For Tracking Sales Leads
Have we convinced you that lead tracking is critical to your company’s success? Good. Then it’s time to learn some tested strategies for lead management. Here’s what we recommend for tracking sales leads in 2024.
1. Ensure You Understand the Buying Process
If it’s been a while since you took Marketing 101, it’s a good idea to brush up on the stages of the buying process. This is sometimes called the customer journey. Here’s a quick refresher on those steps:
- Problem recognition: Your potential customer has a problem. Their DVD player broke, their favorite pair of jeans has a big hole in it, or they’re about to fail calculus. Whatever the problem is, there’s probably a product or service that can solve it. In this case, a new DVD player, a new pair of jeans, or a calculus tutor.
- Information search: Once the customer is aware of their problem, they start searching for a possible solution. They may use a search engine or ask friends and family members for advice.
- Evaluation of alternatives: Most consumers consider several potential solutions before choosing one. For example, a student in danger of failing calculus might research the pros and cons of signing up for Khan Academy versus hiring a professional tutor.
- Purchase decision: This is when the buyer decides who to purchase from.
- Purchase: Many people think the "purchase decision" and "purchase" stages are the same thing, but they’re not. In the previous stage, the potential customer chose a vendor. Now they are signing the contract and paying for your solution.
- Post-purchase evaluation: Once the customer uses the new product or service, they evaluate it to determine if it actually meets their needs.
2. Use a Lead Tracking Software or CRM
When it comes to tracking leads, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead of storing customer data in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, invest in lead tracking or customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Pipedrive, Hubspot, Zoho, Salesforce, and other CRM tools take the guesswork out of lead management, leaving your salespeople with more time to close deals.
If you’re ready to buy a lead management software package, look for these features:
- Integrations: The best CRM software integrates with apps and other tools, increasing efficiency and making it easier for sales teams to achieve their goals.
- Dashboards: A dashboard gives team members access to real-time sales data, enabling them to adjust their priorities as needed.
- Customization: A lead management system isn’t all that helpful if it’s not compatible with your company’s workflows. Look for software that offers some level of customization rather than forcing you to change your lead management process.
- Social media: Good CRM systems allow you to monitor social media without having to switch platforms.
- Email marketing: With the right integrations, it’s possible to set up email campaigns without leaving your CRM interface, making it easier to reach leads at each stage of the funnel.
3. Define Your Data Fields
To reap the benefits of sales lead tracking, it’s important to have well-defined data fields in your CRM. Good lead management tools tell you exactly where each lead came from. They also tell you the status of each lead and where your leads are in the sales cycle. If you want your sales team to see that information, you must define appropriate data fields in your CRM.
Make sure you have these fields, at minimum:
- Contact type: It’s important to distinguish prospects from vendors, subcontractors, employees, affiliates, and existing customers. This field makes it easier for salespeople to determine where to focus their efforts.
- Life cycle stage: When salespeople access lead information, they should be able to tell if someone is a sales-qualified lead versus a marketing-qualified lead.
- Status: Imagine if your sales reps had to guess the status of every lead stored in your CRM. It would be total chaos! Keep everyone on track by setting up a status field to indicate whether each lead is open, unqualified, dropped, or in progress.
- Lead source: The lead source field should indicate where each lead came from, such as paid advertising, conferences, and trade shows.
4. Implement a Lead Scoring System
Lead scoring is the process of assigning a rating to each lead your company generates. How you set up this scoring system is completely up to you, but most businesses use a 100-point rating scale. The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to being your ideal customer.
5. Customize Your Lead Generation Forms
Many companies use templates to save time, but it’s better to customize your lead-generation forms. Custom forms make it easier to collect multiple types of contact information, ensuring that you always have a way to get in touch with your leads.
Using customized lead forms also makes it easier to tailor your messaging to each prospect instead of using canned messages. When a lead feels like you understand their unique challenges, they’ll be more likely to move through the sales funnel.
Lead Tracking Mistakes To Avoid
Now that you’re ready to put your new knowledge into practice, here are some common mistakes to avoid.
Focusing Your Lead Scoring System on the Wrong Metrics
Clearly define the lead metrics that matter to your business and get buy-in cross-functionally. Sales, marketing, and customer success need to work towards the same goals to make meaningful progress toward your revenue targets.
Forgetting to Track All Lead Sources
If you don’t track all lead sources, you may have no idea where your best leads are coming from. Once you create the lead source field in your CRM or tracking spreadsheet, make sure you have labels for as many sources as possible.
This will help you prioritize spend and channel your budget into the most effective channels. Talk about ROI.
Not Following Up or Nurturing Leads
It can take upwards of 40 touchpoints to close a new B2B customer. One of the worst mistakes you can make is calling a lead once and then never bothering to follow up with them again.
That's why nurturing campaigns are critical in keeping your business top of mind. Make sure you nurture each lead regularly, whether that involves making phone calls or sending out email messages.
Manage Your Leads with Ease
We’re not kidding when we say that sales lead tracking can completely transform your business. It'll help you:
- Prioritize the best leads to close deals faster
- Identify your most effective (and least effective) lead sources to prioritize spending
- More accurately forecast revenue and predict trends in your business
It's time to get tracking.
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