Last week we discussed how to warm leads so that they convert into customers. In order to successfully carry out the warming process, you need to track the leads that you get. There’s nothing worse than getting a highly qualified lead only to lose it in the hustle and bustle of daily life. There are plenty of customer relationship management softwares available to make tracking leads as easy as pie. Let’s learn some more about the softwares as well as what to track.

Customer Relationship Management Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software is software that will track leads for you. A few examples include Pipedrive, Freshsales, and Insightly. These software companies make it easier than ever to keep track of all of your leads. Back in the day, you’d have to make a spreadsheet manually to track prospects, but this software was created to replace that very long and tedious process. Because this software exists, we don’t recommend reverting to the stone age to create a spreadsheet by hand. It’s a waste of your valuable time and there is far too much room for human error. Rather, we suggest one of the many softwares on the market.

Pipedrive, for example, puts everything you need in one place. You’ll get leads sent directly to your account as they come in so that you can respond to them in a timely fashion. You can have emails and calls synced to the system so that when, why, and how long the call happened is recorded. You’ll get activity alerts to remind you to contact a lead, you can track emails, and you have access to a visual pipeline that helps you know which leads to focus on. Many of the customer relationship management softwares incorporate the same kinds of options. Basically, it’s your one-stop-shop for all things leads.

Why Communication Tracking is Important

With CRM softwares like Pipedrive, you’ll be able to track any and all communication your team has with a sales lead. As we discussed last week, frequent communication is critical for getting a sales lead to convert from a sales lead to a sale. With software tools, you’ll be able to see the last time a lead was contacted and how. You may notice a pattern that you can use to make a change to your sales model. You may notice that emails do not receive nearly as many responses as calls do. If this is the case, you’ll want your sales team to switch to a more call-heavy approach (calling is one of the best sales practices afterall!). You can also use the communication tracking tools on Pipedrive and other customer relationship management softwares to set a schedule for more contact. Many of the softwares allow you to set reminders or alerts when there is a lack of communication for x amount of time so that you never become irrelevant or distant to a sales lead.

What Should You Track?

Communication is honestly one of the most important factors to track because conversing with sales leads can truly make or break a sale. If you don’t contact them enough, you won’t stay relevant to the prospect and they’ll likely take their business elsewhere. On the other hand, if you are spamming a sales lead with emails and phone calls, they’ll get super annoyed and stop talking to you. To make sure you get the right balance, you want to track a few things about communication: type, frequency, and quantity. Are they getting emails? Calls? Texts? How many have they gotten of each? And how long has it been between conversations? You’ll want to know all of this so tracking is critical.

In addition to communication, you want to track whether or not you are still actively pursuing a lead. On first glance, a sales lead may seem great. A business trick that we’ve learned the hard way is to assess all sales leads for risks to see if they’re worth the gamble. If you decide to follow this advice, you’ll then want to be tracking the risks. Determine what about the company makes it stable, and what makes it risky. Weigh them against each other to see what the overall risk is. If a sales lead is too risky, it might be wise to back away slowly. One risk you might identify is the industry the lead is in, or what their goal is. If you know that it’s a tricky industry or you don’t think they have prioritized the right goal, you can choose to drop the lead, at least for now. You’ll want to track all of this so that you can find similarities in the sales leads that you drop.

A few more basics for what you want to track include where the sales lead came from (what sources - Google Ads, sales lead software, lead generation, etc.), and when and if they convert to customers. The source tracking is useful so that you can identify which form/forms of lead generation are working for you so that you can put more focus on the good sources and cut costs with the not-so-good sources. Obviously, you want to track any conversions so that you know when a sales lead becomes a customer. You can use this to a) stop treating the company as a lead and focus on them as a client/customer, and b) see what similarities converting leads have in common to see if a particular industry, product, service, lead source, etc. is better than the others.

How To Stay Organized

It might feel like we’re suggesting you track a lot of information. That’s because we are. But don’t panic! It’s easier than ever to stay organized. Customer relationship management softwares also tend to have features that track the lifecycle of a sales lead. Pipedrive has a pipeline that shows what sales leads have not been contacted, which have had some preliminary conversations, which had a proposal offered to them, and which are in the negotiation stage. You can customize the lifecycle stages to best fit your company and its product or service. The pipeline makes it very easy to see which leads are close to closing, which have been ignored for a bit too long, and which are just floating down the stream to become customers. You’ll also see brief summaries of each lead including the budget so that you know what you’re dealing with. The pipeline is a great visual representation for how your sales funnel is working so that adjustments can be made when necessary.

The other way you can stay organized is to group by risk. If you choose to follow our nifty business trick and rank sales leads by risk level, this type of organization might be for you. By ranking the leads by stability, you can focus more time on the stable clients who are probably more experienced. The risky or very risky leads may not be worth pursuing. If you do follow through, keep tracking them. You can use the data to find additional risk or stability factors as well as see what risk factors are most likely to churn (HINT: It’s the risky ones). This method of organization can help you better prioritize your time to go after leads that are more likely to stick around for the long haul.

Quick Recap

• Track leads to stay on top of them

• Track communication so that you can stay relevant without being annoying

• Invest in a plan with a customer relationship management software

• Track the important variables including budget, source, goals, etc.

• Tracking risk can help you find leads that might not be worth the chase

• Organizing by risk can help your sales team prioritize better

• Organizing by lifecycle stage can help create a more fluid sales funnel for the future

• Tracking leads is important so that you find patterns for what does and does not work

There ya have it, folks! Tracking leads is another of the best sales practices a business can have! Tracking can help prioritize the correct leads to get them to convert to customers, and even those you lose can be helpful for building a plan for the future. Tracking leads is honestly quite a lot of work, even with the helpful softwares. Our team at BusySeed has been perfecting the craft for years now, and we take pride in our lead generation and tracking abilities. We can help you generate new leads and offer you some of our top secret advice on how to track them. Give us a call at 833-353-1484 to get started!