Sales Lead Tracking: Analytics to Increase Your Sales

Sales leads are the lifeline of any sales organization. Curiously though, we rarely treat them as the valuable assets they are--the source of closed deals, now and in the future. Lead tracking and analysis can't close the deals for you, but it will increase your sales. Pinpointing opportunity is the the goal of your lead reporting and tracking.

Tracking Your Sales Leads

Everyone has seen the classic sales funnel, but are you using the concept to track and identify opportunities. Metrics captured at key processes in the funnel can point to areas for improvement.

Generate leads, distribute leads, contact leads, and track leads. These processes seems simple and straight-forward. But, each represents risk. Risk of mishandling a lead, lengthening the sales cycle, or even losing the deal.

Automate Your Lead Tracking

Obviously sales tracking and reporting is important, but sales professionals want to be talking to prospects and closing deals not keeping tick sheets for bean counters. Yet, these simple tracking items are important guideposts for increasing sales. Capturing these metrics are critical. Capturing them without distracting sales or introducing annotation errors is the trick.

The best way to combine simplicity, minimize distractions, and ensure accuracy is to capture these actions within the natural flow of sales activities. Here are some simple tips for creating your sales lead tracking:

Create Discrete Tracking Statuses or Actions: One of the biggest mistakes of most CRM sales tracking is that statuses are left to be defined by each individual user. This approach creates confusion in tracking and uncertainty in forecasting. Tracking actions are generally the same for any sales process. For that reason, your lead management system should take a minimalist and discrete approach in defining these steps. The actions should then be required annotations, or even better automated flags, made by the system every time a lead is touched. Here are some of the actions that your sales lead management system should be tracking:

• Attempt
• Contact
• Application/Proposal
• Closed/Contract
• Withdraw
• Bogus
• Do Not Call

These actions combined with timestamps will give you a simple, but very powerful data and analytics set. Few other metrics are required to optimize the both your marketing and sales processes.

Time Stamp Everything

The time stamp, related to an action or status, is hands down the richest data element in any process analytics. Lead management is very much a process management discipline.

The combination of the discrete actions above and the automated time stamping of each as it occurs will reduce your sales teams' wasted time annotating and tracking their sales activities and speed your flow of actionable information to team and organization leaders.

This powerful combination of actions and time with allow you to observe bottle necks, capacity imbalances, training issues, and various performance indicators. These simple tracking elements will also allow you to set and monitor benchmarks and accurately forecast production.

Create Enforceable Gateways

If actions and time stamps are the key to observing and measuring system performance and velocity, then enforceable gateways are the keys to ensuring the integrity of that data. One of biggest challenges in any sales lead tracking process is the integrity of the data. Following the preceding steps cures many of the common ailments in tracking your sales process--arbitrary or unintelligible steps or process points (replaced with discrete and consistent sales actions) and lack of lead annotation and feedback (replaced by automated time stamping and system tracking). However, it is important to close the final gap. Did it really happen? Does it always get tracked?

Providing the option to check a box or leave a note does not always ensure that it happens. Yet, being confident that data or the lack of data in your lead analytics is relevant requires another element. Gateways are a good way to bring this integrity to your lead management data. By creating gateways that require a lead to be updated with the appropriate action or even an accurate annotation of no action is a simple way to manage the integrity of this process.

Your gateway should be just as the term is defined: a single impassable path to the next lead that requires you first document what happened on the current lead.

Watch for Slowing and Heaping

You now have a lead management software or system that is efficiently feeding your sales force leads and and has simplified their ability to give feedback on every lead. Now it is time to use it. There is nothing more motivating to a sales group than a management team or marketing department that is improving their lead flow. With the data you will be receiving with this sales tracking system sale production impact and improvements will be at your fingertips.

Although there are tons of opportunities for various metrics and measures with this lead tracking methodology, there are two general concepts that should guide your analysis: slowing and heaping. As you look through your lead statuses, durations, and transitions focus on the following anomalies: durations and transitions that are slower than the average or pre-established benchmarks and statuses that are heaping or accumulating an unusual volume of leads. Digging into these types of trends will reveal everything from poor products to training gaps.

Tracking Leads Can Make You More Money

Like I always say lead analytics and reporting can't close deals, but it can make you more money. Follow these simple rules and implement a lead management software or system to put this data at your disposal and you will see new money-making opportunities.