With a recession on the horizon and consumer confidence at an all-time low, more and more businesses are looking for cheap and effective ways to generate sales and leads. For businesses across all sectors, the move is increasingly toward generating more high-quality leads to give to their sales teams. Too many companies however start from the unenviable position of not understanding where their existing leads come from, making it almost impossible to move forward with an improved lead generation strategy.
We spoke to lead generation agency Insite Web who explained the answer may lie in the wealth of lead tracking options available. From tracking software embedded in existing products such as Google Ads to standalone software such as that provided by Call Rail or What Converts, there are a number of options available, although for the less tech savvy businessperson or marketer this plethora of choices can make it difficult to understand which is the most effective.
What is lead tracking & management?
Lead management and tracking is the process of following prospective customers through all the stages of your marketing and sales funnel. Lead tracking allows businesses to follow each customers path to purchase, as well as understanding at what point prospective customers left the sales funnel.
The growth of different marketing and sales channels has made lead tracking in some ways more complex, as prospective customers come to business via many different platforms, with sales usually coming after many touches – that is contact points. On the other hand technology has ostensibly made lead tracking more straightforward as there is now a range of software available that allows companies to track leads in the background.
Why lead tracking is important
When businesses don’t understand where their leads come from, they can’t devise strategies to increase their number and, more importantly, the quality of the leads. Basing strategy decisions on guesswork is a fool’s errand, yet it’s an errand that many companies seem quite happy to continue with.
Think about how many times you’ve contacted a business – online, in person or on the phone – and been asked “How did you hear about us?”. Now think about how many times you couldn’t remember or just said the first thing that came into your head. Yet even in the 21st century this is still the method that many companies use to ‘track leads’. Not exactly scientific.
Tracking leads also gathers data that can be used by sales departments to enable them to personalise the customer experience, increasing the likelihood of a successful conversion.
What can companies track?
There are processes and software packages available to track pretty much every contact that prospective customers make with their business. Whether people get to a business after seeing an online ad or finding their website after a Google search, whether people phone, email or even use live chat, pretty much every avenue is trackable.
Beating a recession with lead tracking
While lead tracking alone won’t be enough to allow every business to survive a global recession, not tracking leads will put any company at a disadvantage over better prepared competitors.
When money is tight, lead tracking will help by identifying areas where spending can be reduced or cut altogether. If lead tracking reveals that virtually none of a company’s sales come from, for example, Facebook Ads then they can stop paying for them
On the other hand if tracking shows that the most profitable sales come from paid Google Ads, then it may be wise to focus more resources on this channel.
More than this though, tracking provides a richness of data that when used intelligently gives businesses detailed long-term information about customer behaviour. Over time companies will be able to see how many contact points leads had made in the past, as well as offering the opportunity to collect valuable data about what channel, who and where their most valuable customers are from.
Of course any of this will need to be done within the bounds of current data protection legislation, but in reality most companies are collecting some of this information anyway. What they’re not doing is joining it together and using it to fill the gaps between marketing and sales, or gathering it in conjunction with information about where leads have come from.
Taking advice from a professional lead management company about the best ways to track leads is another way to save a company money, as this will reduce the risk of wasting money on irrelevant systems, or systems that are too hard to understand. After all, while gathering data is important, gathering data that’s too confusing to do anything with is just throwing good money after bad.
In short, while the economy is certainly going to present challenges for every size of company for the foreseeable future, there are ways that UK businesses can ensure that they improve their resilience, by having in place rigorous lead management processes.
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