Why It Pays To Track Your Leads And Conversions.

Here’s a little spreadsheet which is typical of the information our clients have.

You probably have at least a dozen different places that your leads come from.
And although I’ve only show FIVE possible lead channels in the spreadsheet above I want to help you understand why you MUST develop your own.

These are the things you need to record as a minimum;

1 You must record all leads so you know where they come from. (Enquiry Source)
2 You must record how much you spend to get the leads. (Costs).
3 You must record the number of leads.
4 You must work out what it costs you to get each enquiry.
5 You must know your conversion rate. (Leads/Sales)
6 You must know your average transaction value.
7 You must know your lifetime value of each client.
8 You must work out your Return on Investment of each channel.

Why do you need to record them?

Because you want to find out where your marketing works, where it works best and how you can get even more leads profitably. This you can do by stopping marketing that doesn’t work and reinvesting in areas that does work.

You can also work out how to increase your conversions of leads to sales.
Ultimately, you know exactly what you can afford to invest to acquire a new client once you have the facts to hand.

There are a lot of don’t knows in this spread sheet. And that’s something that will always happen when people don’t record the source of enquiry systematically or with automatic methods such as telephone tracking through unique numbers.

And “previous knowledge” can also be analysed better. (Previous knowledge in this case is part of the result of a planned marketing sequence which is called “Buy or Die” namely you market to leads until they literally buy or die. If you don’t know what’s working for you there’s no way you can improve.

Marketing isn’t about creative ideas, (although ideas well-implemented do help).
It’s about find markets (people), messages (things to say) and media (ways to get to the people) that work.

The example spreadsheet isn’t perfect. But that’s the point. You have to start somewhere. And believe me when I say that 97% of firms don’t even have the information above in a handy format. So if you do, BRAVO.

If you don’t know whether your marketing is working or not you have no chance of being successful unless you are very, very lucky. Are you feeling lucky?