Lead Tracking - Keeping a Pulse on Your Sales Pipeline By Bill Rice
There is no magic metric--let's start with the obvious. However, tracking is important to reveal opportunity and catastrophe. The better your tracking, meaning minimal data entry by sales and consistency in sales processes, the quicker you are able to blow up successes and cut-off train wrecks. No Magic Metrics There is certainly no perfect measurement for lead or sales performance. There is even less hope for the one number that tells the whole sales story. However, there is a right way to track, measure, and analysis leads. It starts with business objectives and ends with producing good data. Starts with Goals Business objectives and goals for your sales teams are the keystone to any businesses success. Unfortunately, most of our marketing and sales plans jump straight to small details like conversion rates and advertising mix. Meanwhile, you may not even be clear on your company's target customer, product mix, revenue requirements, and profit per unit. Getting these fundamental data points in place injects real dollars into our lead tracking system. Putting business objectives and quantifying revenue indicators begins to make your lead tracking system reflect accountability. Are we making, exceeding, or missing plan? Are there marketing and sales channels that need to be scaled up or should we be cutting. K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid. No better advice for sales management planning and lead tracking. The best CEOs at the largest companies can tell you the health of their business with three to five key performance indicators (KPI). I like to call it sticky note or note card management. If you can't get your KPIs down to that size your business is too complex to succeed. Surprisingly though, even the most complex businesses can be boiled down to a couple of good metrics. Digging deeper is about forensics--solving problems or unveiling opportunity. So, short of doing forensics on your business keep your lead tracking simple. Look for smooth and timely flow of leads from one status to another. Look for
signs of heaping and slowing--indications of bottle necks, customer confusion, or capacity issues. Good Data Makes it All Work Lead tracking is fundamentally a monitoring and accounting for sales leads. Simplifying the gathering of sales activity data, as leads move through your system, will make your lead tracking and lead reporting stronger. Here are two keys to gathering excellent lead tracking data: (1) make the capturing of sales activity as passive as possible for sales people and (2) make the statuses and activities tracked as consistent as possible across all sales agents. The combination of simplicity and consistency will have you seeing opportunities in your lead management system in no time. Good lead tracking will increase your sales.