How to Leverage a Lead Tracker for Sales Growth
A lead is an individual or business entity that shows interest in your product or services or possibly fits into your ideal customer. One of the biggest priorities of every success-driven company is to build and maintain a steady inflow of quality leads who can increase their success chances.
Without quality leads in your sales pipeline, it becomes much more challenging for the sales cycle to move toward sales. However, so much goes into the sales process beyond having the right leads in your pipeline. One of these is poor lead tracking and management.
Why is this important? Lead tracking is tracking the activity of leads by actively monitoring how they move in the sales and marketing funnel and creating strategies to nurture and move the leads forward to close the sale. Without understanding your leads’ needs, goals, and pain points, it won’t be easy to nurture the leads toward a buying decision.
A lead tracker is one powerful tool that can help sales and marketing teams track sales leads by monitoring where they originated from and whether they are inbound or outbound leads. This blog will explain what a lead tracker is, why you need to use it, and how you can close deals faster. Keep reading.
Table of Contents
- What is a Lead Tracker?
- What Data Do Lead Trackers Store?
- How Can Lead Tracking Help Your Business?
- How Does a Lead Tracker Work?
- How to Get Leads?
- How Does Lead Tracking Help You Sell More?
- 6 Lead Tracking CRM Software
- 5 Reasons to Use CRM to Track Sales Leads
What is a Lead Tracker?
Zoho lead management
A lead tracker is a sales tool that sales teams and businesses use to track sales opportunities, improve sales processes, and increase profitability by collecting vital lead data such as name, location, and contact details.
It offers valuable insights into the sales process with the correct data and helps you organize leads captured from multiple sources. All this useful information and insights from the leads can help you make informed decisions about the leads nurturing and closing strategy.
Although some of the usual lead tracking tool spreadsheets, documents, or software companies collect data like name, contact details, source, and location, more advanced lead trackers provide more business value because they include data like forecasted customer value, chances of conversion, and forecasted close time.
Lead trackers provide answers to the following questions
Where is the lead traffic coming from?
How effective are the lead generation strategies?
What sales practices drive the most conversions?
How many leads convert into customers?
What Data Do Lead Trackers Store?
Most lead track collect and show the following sales data:
1. First Contact date
This is the first time you contacted the leads – your first interaction.
2. Business Name
It details what business the lead is from. This is especially important for B2B sales.
3. Business Category
This includes the industry or niche the lead is in. It helps sales teams decide if the lead is interested in doing business with you or just looking to build mutually beneficial business relationships.
4. Contact Name
This is the lead’s name (or the point of contact). This helps you ensure that you are reaching the right person.
5. Lead Sources
This details where and how the lead found your business. Understanding how you got the information will depend on your business and industry operations. Famous examples of lead sources include a website, phone calls, referrals, and emails.
6. Status
This details the stage your lead is at. Some of the status updates include the following:
- Contacted – waiting for an answer
- Contacted – ready for a meeting
- Converted into customer
- Contacted: Not interested
7. Address Information
This details essential information about the physical location, such as the Address, Country, City, State, Zip, Region, and Phone Number.
8. Online Information
This section lets you include online information about your lead, such as a website or email address.
9. Email Address
This contains the email address of the lead
10. Alt Email
Since it is common for salespeople to have multiple emails for the same company, this section includes other email addresses besides the main one.
11. Website
This includes the website URL of the lead’s business.
12. Notes
This section allows users to record notes on a lead-by-lead basis about discounts or sales conversations. Essentially, a sales professional can detail any vital information, note, or concerns worth noting for future sales.
How Can Lead Tracking Help Your Business?
An important question that most businesses want to know before choosing any lead tracking software for their sales is its impact on sales. Hence, we have included below the five fundamental ways sales lead tracking can help your business.
1. To personalize experiences
Digital Beauty
Lead tracking enables sales reps to gain better insights into their leads – their needs, goals, and pain points – to help you identify how to contact the leads, solve their problems and build better relationships that can help you personalize your sales strategies and communication with them.
Personalizing your sales and marketing campaigns increase your chances of success and can help you drive more conversions.
2. To manage customer journeys
Decision Link
When you get a better idea of where your leads stay or move in the sales funnel, you can easily manage your customer journeys and schedule your following actions. This can significantly improve your revenue growth and increase your customer retention rates.
3. Enhance marketing campaigns
Cognism
The only way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is by understanding the number of qualified leads they bring in. In addition, you can enhance your marketing campaigns by closing the gap between sales and marketing teams when you track leads.
Marketing teams can use sales lead tracking software to ensure that only qualified leads are transferred to the sales team.
4. To calculate ROI
Glosario
Lead tracking enables sales and marketing teams to get direct access to valuable sales data that can be used to monitor the team’s performance and calculate your business’s overall ROI. When you analyze your business progress, you can identify opportunities and help you identify problems early enough in your sales funnel.
5. Make accurate forecasts
Live Plan
Lead tracking provides real, actionable insights and better visibility into your business. With these insights and data, you can make more accurate forecasts for your sales strategies.
Additionally, you can use the generated sales data to compare your growth rate in different months and years and to identify areas where your team’s performance is lacking and can improve. Importantly, tracking your leads helps you set better goals for the future.
How Does a Lead Tracker Work?
Zapier
The lead tracking process includes the following steps to accurately track leads and get valuable information that can drive sales success
1. Capturing
This is the first step of the lead tracking process, where you capture and store important information about the leads, such as contact details, lead source, buying preferences, needs assessment, etc. This is the crucial stage where you store all your important information to ensure you don’t miss out on any opportunity.
2. Qualification
This is the stage where you qualify the leads based on their interaction with your marketing campaigns. When properly preparing your information, you can help your team focus on high-value deals and are more likely to buy from you than general ones with no buying intent. Lead management software can allow you to view all the essential information required to qualify leads.
3. Scoring
Lead scoring is assigning scores to the leads based on the likelihood of their conversion and the value they can offer to your business. This process is crucial for identifying and prioritizing high-value deals.
With this data, you can determine the value of your leads and their likelihood to purchase and determine which leads need more nurturing and are ready for the next action.
4. For assigning leads
It is not enough to have good leads in your sales funnel; you must be able to distribute the leads to increase your conversion rates effectively.
An equal distribution of sales leads can help your sales reps determine which deals should be followed and which should be discarded. It also enables you to monitor the number of opportunities every sales rep works with. A good lead-tracking tool can help you distribute leads evenly.
5. Track progress
The final step of the lead tracking process is to monitor the leads’ progress as they move through the sales cycle. Sales tracking software helps you track every lead’s position in your sales cycle and can significantly enhance your personalization efforts.
Tracking your leads can help you monitor how close the information is to make a purchase and identify actions to improve your conversions.
How to Get Leads?
Sky Lead
There are a variety of ways to capture leads for sales. However, for this blog, below are some credible ways to get leads for your business.
1. Referrals
Referrals are one of the most effective ways to get leads for your business. You can do this by directly asking your current customers to refer your product to their friends and families who might need your products or services. It is easy, straightforward, and cost-effective. You don’t spend too much on this, and there are high conversion rates too.
2. Check out your competitors
Your competitors are the best people to learn from regarding sales and marketing practices. Consider checking out your competitor’s activities and partners to get leads or get ideas of where you can get leads. Find these partners and add them to your Excel or Google Sheets lead tracking sheets.
3. Demo Buttons
Requesting demos is another effective way to capture emails and encourage more people to engage with your company. You can use A/B testing and well-placed CTAs to get more people to click on your links -thereby capturing their information.
4. Other product/service integrations
Consider whether your product or services integrates well with other products. If you find any, look out for the users of those products to target and reach out to them. This way, you can tell them about your product or service and how they can benefit from using it.
5. Live chat
Live chats are effective for capturing leads and getting their information. Your live chat lets your customers log in and enter their names and email address. You can capture these contact details and reach out to them later in.
6. Newsletters
You can use newsletters to capture email addresses, however, be strategic about the content, and ensure you are not spamming your followers.
7. Use LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social media channel that can help you connect with like-minded professionals and potential customers. To get a lead, consider creating valuable content that is useful, relatable, and factual with your LinkedIn connections to help them connect with you on the platform and add links to marketing collaterals that they can download and read later. This way, they can fill out a form and add their contact details.
6 Lead Tracking CRM Software
An organized lead management process can help your business create personalized marketing campaigns and increase conversions. Although many offline lead tracking tools exist, such as Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, working with CRM software offers you deeper insights into your clients. Here are six CRM software that you can use for lead tracking.
1. Sloovi
Sloovi Outreach is a comprehensive outreach and CRM tool designed for businesses who looking to optimize their sales and marketing processes. With its suite of features, Sloovi Outreach streamlines all aspects of outreach campaigns, from lead management, pipeline management, email management, and customer relationship management.
Through its advanced lead management capabilities, Sloovi Outreach enables users to connect with potential customers and prospects based on specific criteria such as industry, job title, company size, and more. The tool also provides detailed analytics and reporting features, allowing businesses to track the success of their outreach campaigns and refine their sales strategies accordingly.
With Sloovi Outreach, businesses can easily manage and organize customer data, track leads, and build strong relationships with clients and prospects. Its starter plan starts from $19 per month per user.
2. Salesflare CRM
Salesflare CRM is used by small and medium-sized B2B businesses to make it easy to follow up with leads without having to input data to keep the system alive. It has built-in automation that allows you to visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines, send automated email sequences, track the sources of the leads, and analyze them.
3. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is a marketing automation platform with an all-in-one solution, including marketing, sales, services, and operations. It helps track leads with integrated email and website tracking, track and analyze the source of leaders, and send automated email sequences until leads reply. HubSpot also helps enrich tips from publicly available information and email signatures.
4. Freshworks CRM
Freshworks CRM is a sales CRM developed to provide a better, cheaper solution for customer service teams. It allows users to track the source of the leads, send automated email sequences, visualize leads, get a live overview of what the leads are doing, and manage all your leads from their inboxes with a handy email sidebar.
5. Pipeliner CRM
Pipeliner CRM is a software company that allows salespeople to get a live overview of what their leads are doing, visualize leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines, digitize business leads with a built-in business card scanner, and manage leads from the inbox with a handle email sidebar.
6. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is an easy-to-use and easy-to-setup lead management software that helps small businesses manage their leads more effectively with much more modern functionality than other platforms. It allows salespeople to manage drive leads, get a live overview of what the leaders are doing, track your information’s source, and analyze them.
5 Reasons to Use CRM to Track Sales Leads
Here are the five key benefits of using. CRM software over spreadsheets:
1. Standardized data capturing
sophisticated CRM software allows users to record the same data types in the same formats. This standardization allows salespeople to determine what’s most valuable to the business. Simply put, CRM software allows sales reps to pinpoint the information they need when they need it.
2. It saves you time
CRM tools have automation features that can help you save time by handling repeatable tasks, like synchronizing data between platforms and triggering follow-up actions. Unlike manually filling in a lead’s contact information, CR< tools help you automatically add a lead’s contact information to the lead tracker data and move them into the sales pipeline.
3. To gain better insights
CRM software is a one-stop shop for capturing and managing data such as lead contact records and purchase histories. Significantly, it can help you save time by clearly showing your buyer’s behaviors and needs. CRM software also helps to build a consistent end-to-end brand experience for buyers.
4. It enhances lead tracking
CRM software helps to track leads and instantly tie your data directly to create a slick and efficient sales machine. Working with a CRM tool that integrates seamlessly with other tools like WhatsApp, Gmail, Outlook, Calendly, Zoom, Slack, and many others to help you act quickly on leads and with minimal effort.
5. It allows you to manage leads from anywhere
CRM software lets you capture precise information about your lead on the move for smooth and effective follow-ups. Unlike using a spreadsheet on a smartphone, most CRM software allows you to manage leads, store records, and analyze data from any location with an internet connection.
The Conclusion
Lead tracking is tracking the activities of leads and monitoring where the leads are in the sales and marketing funnel to move them to the next stage to close the deal. A lead tracker is a tool designed to monitor where leads originated from and capture essential information about the leads, whether inbound or outbound leads.
Although some businesses use Excel and Google Sheets to capture lead information and track them, we also recommend using CRM software to store leads in a central hub and get a clearer picture of the audience to help you sell more.