The Life Cycle of a Lead: Convert

As marketers and sales people, there is one challenge that we all regularly face.  How can we determine which campaigns or sales methods really generate the most leads?  How can we identify the true ROI?

Most lead management systems stop tracking the lead at the point where it becomes an opportunity. Many sales force automation or CRM systems have a similar issue where they lose the tracking information when a lead is converted to an opportunity. The result is a highly complex and time consuming task where you do your best to create some statistical correlations between:

• What campaigns generated the leads
• What leads moved most successfully through the marketing/nurturing funnel
• What leads most effectively were converted to opportunities
• What opportunities turned into proposals
• What proposals turn into sales

One of the fastest ways we have found to improve marketing ROI is to understand how each of these questions are accurately related to each other. By having accurate data related to the entire sales cycle, it becomes drastically easier to make decisions on how to direct your marketing dollars and efforts as well as your sales dollars and efforts.

Once you have a method for truly lining your leads with your sold opportunities, the only thing left is to determine how you are going to assign credit to your campaigns if more than one campaign generated traffic from your lead.  For example, if you have an email and a pay per click campaign, both of which sent the same person to your site, which should get credit when they view the page?  There are three ways we have found that are effective for this type of multi-channel tracking.  All three are equally effective as long as they are used consistently:

• Assign all of the credit to the first channel that lead to a visit
• Assign all of the credit to the last channel that lead to a visit
• Assign all of the credit evenly across all channels that lead to a visit