lead-source-analysis

Lead Source Analysis with CRM: The Key to Getting Rock-Solid Sales Leads

12/10/2018

Want more and better leads? Of course you do!

The key to getting rock-solid sales leads is understanding your best lead sources – and how you can find more prospects just like your best customers. Customer relationship management software like Dynamics 365 for Sales / Dynamics CRM can help you:

Identify your best lead sources
See the big picture
Accelerate the sales and marketing process

If you’re in a sales management or executive position within your company, see if you can easily answer these three questions:

Question 1: What’s your best lead source?

Customer and partner referrals?
Social media and online marketing?
Webinars and seminars?
Sales prospecting?

Many companies don’t know the answer. While acquiring new customers is vitally important, understanding the source of your sales leads can be complicated, especially if you have a long, complex sales process.

How CRM Software helps with Lead Source Identification:

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has several features that help you track your lead sources and compare your results to your goals and expectations.

Your first step should be to establish your primary lead sources within CRM. In addition to traditional sources such as trade shows, banner ads, SEO and referrals.

Question 2: Which specific sales and marketing activities accelerate the sales process and increase sales conversion rates?

Your sales and marketing teams may tell you anecdotally how customers and prospects responded to a particular campaign, but can you see the bigger picture?

Did that campaign work as well in Atlanta as it did in Cleveland?
Which types of marketing offers should you invest in – more video or more whitepapers?
What is your best sales person doing? Can their performance be replicated by others?

How CRM Software Increases Sales Insight:

In your CRM system, you can create deeper levels of detail for activities that produce large numbers of leads. For example, referrals could be broken down by customer, vendor, and business partner. Likewise, trade shows could include major shows that are a significant part of your event marketing strategy. To add insights to your analyses, CRM will aggregate this information in total and from a specific source. You can pull information into Excel or Power BI for even deeper analysis.

Question 3: Are your lead source expectations aligned with reality?

In general, leads are generated by many sources: marketing, self-generated by sales, or referrals from clients, employees, vendors, and business partners.

Sales management best practices recommend that you:

Set expectations for how many leads you want to generate by source. You can take this a step further and set monthly goals for marketing or by sales rep for each type of lead.
Communicate expectations to your sales, marketing, and customer service teams. If they don’t know what you’re shooting for, they can’t align their day-to-day efforts with what’s needed to meet your goals.
Create marketing campaigns and conduct sales outreach expectations for engaging with each group, from social media and event marketing to SEO and traditional inbound marketing programs.
Track, measure, and analyze your results. It’s the only way to measure campaign success and know whether your leads are coming from expected sources, and to the degree you expect.

How CRM Software Helps Analyze Results

In CRM, you can establish your goals by lead source. You would then associate every new account or contact entered into CRM with a specific lead source. As that customer continues to engage, you see other touchpoints that helped progress the sale. You can then generate reports to analyze:

Lead source expectation to reality
Marketing expenditure to return on investment
Which marketing offers and sales initiatives work (and which you should cut)

Now, instead of stories, you have evidence showing what works. The final step is to take action!

Act on CRM Insights

One of the ways that InfoGrow differentiates itself from other CRM implementation partners is that we really focus on helping our clients improve their sales results! Through our CRM Coaching and CRM Rescue services, we help you change your business processes to achieve your business goals.
We look at every stage of the sales process:

Marketing Strategy. Now that you know the number of leads by lead source, does this data support the company lore? How do actual leads per lead source align with your lead generation goals? With a clearer understanding of your sources of new revenue, you can budget and plan to capitalize on those markets, and develop strategies to further penetrate others.

Target Marketing / Nurturing / Niche Exploration. As you analyze results over time, is there a particular lead source that consistently generates the most leads? If so, what are you doing to nurture and exploit this market? And what does it mean if you have no leads in a particular category at the end of the quarter? Were there any recent marketing activities targeted to that group? Is it possible your product no longer meets that group’s needs? Dig deeper. Find the trends. Then create solutions to refine and improve lead generation and sales results.
Sales Conversion. You’re pleased with the number of leads generated, but few are converting to sales. Are sales reps following up later than appropriate or not at all? Because CRM provides a single, detailed look at customer and prospect activity, you can quickly see what actions have taken place since the lead was added to CRM. Take advantage of this opportunity to tighten sales processes or conduct refresher training to make sure sales reps understand your expectations.

Apply these sales management best practices to gain control over lead generation and improve its effectiveness in helping your find your best customers.

Explore InfoGrow CRM Services

We help companies just like yours – all over the country. We help clients with:

Not sure what you need? Give us a call at 330-929-1353, extension 224 and we’ll help you get your CRM project moving in the right direction. Yep. We’re the kind of company that still answers the phone.

InfoGrow Blog