Does your team deal with too many disorganized leads, which causes them to lose potential customers?
Losing a lead is like missing a jackpot. After all, reaching the purchase stage within the sales funnel is what all businesses strive for as it’s the profit that ensures business growth.
Still, to reach the point of growth, you need to start from the basics — that is, organizing your lead tracking process and learning how to track leads.
Are you a team leader or manager? Get ready to master effective lead tracking and (finally) boost your sales.
Table of Contents
What is lead tracking?
Lead tracking is the process of monitoring leads (your potential customers), analyzing their needs, and collecting information with the help of lead tracking systems.
All this is done to eventually capture leads and convert them into paying customers.
The process of tracking leads is usually conducted by marketing and sales teams that work cooperatively to keep track of various details regarding the leads.
These details might include specifics such as:
- How leads learned about your product or service,
- What made them interested in your offering,
- What competitors’ products or solutions they have used so far,
- What their budget is, and so on.
Overall, lead tracking provides data that helps you improve your strategies and increase the chances of sales success.
How to optimize your lead tracking process
Whether you track leads by phone or use some other channels, you should first understand how lead tracking works in practice.
We turned to one of our expert contributors, Artisha Walker, Marketing Strategist at Walker Media LLC, to explain what it all looks like in real life.
Artisha believes that “batch working in Sprints is the most effective method for lead tracking” in her business. She continued to explain why:
“Rather than managing leads on a daily basis, I dedicate focused periods to complete lead generation, nurturing, and conversion tasks.”
Here’s how Artisha organizes her lead tracking workflow.
Step 1: Setting up a timeline
“I begin by allocating specific days to focus on curating a sales pipeline — this might involve revisiting past visibility efforts or leads I’ve engaged with previously. For example, I may spend a day building a 100k sales pipeline by reviewing past connections and qualifying them.”
Step 2: Crafting compelling pitches
“The following day might be spent crafting pitches and preparing personalized outreach. During this Sprint, I focus solely on this task so that I can create compelling, tailored pitches for each lead to maximize the chance of getting a response.”
Step 3: Contacting leads
“Once the pitches are ready, I designate a specific day to send them all out in bulk, ensuring that I’m not just scattering efforts but making a concerted push to engage with potential clients.”
Step 4: Conducting follow-ups
“After this, I track the responses and follow-ups within a CRM or project management tool, which keeps me organized and aware of who needs further nurturing.”
All in all, lead tracking works the way you choose to set it up, which largely comes down to personal preferences.
However, one thing’s for sure — lead tracking should be a well-organized process.
Why is lead tracking important for sales and marketing teams?
But why does lead tracking matter anyway?
For marketing teams, lead tracking gives critical insights into the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Meanwhile, for sales teams, tracking and generating leads helps them actually sell a product or service.
In both cases, proper lead tracking contributes to overall company profits.
For example, if you notice that a significant number of leads came from your recent email campaign while paid ads didn’t get any results — you’ll know what to push and what to change.
When you stop wasting both time and money on unproductive marketing efforts, and start running effective campaigns, you’ll eventually turn your marketing-qualified leads (i.e., leads who are aware of your product but not yet ready to purchase) into sales-qualified leads (those who are ready to buy).
As you can see, these 2 teams, sales and marketing, operate hand in hand.
A contributor of ours, Jason Smit, the CEO of Contentellect, further explains how lead tracking benefits marketing and sales teams that work in cooperation:
“Our sales and marketing teams use our lead tracking system to stay synchronized. Marketing can see exactly which content pieces are turning into conversions, while sales get real-time insights into prospect behavior.
Lead tracking also reduces data silos; by centralizing your lead data, you can get a holistic view that’s absolutely critical, especially in the B2B space. We can now trace a lead’s entire journey, from their first blog visit to their latest sales call, which helps us identify bottlenecks and opportunities we might never have known even existed.”
💡Plaky Pro Tip
Read this blog post to learn how to create a good strategic marketing plan:
Advantages of effective lead tracking
We’ve already highlighted that lead tracking provides data that helps you refine your strategies and increase the chances of successful sales efforts.
But what are some other concrete benefits of proper lead tracking? What benefits will your sales rep team experience, and how will that help your marketing team?
Our contributor, Artisha Walker, shares a couple of specific benefits of lead tracking:
- “A properly tracked lead pipeline ensures I always have potential opportunities, even during slower periods. This has been beneficial for me, as it means I’m never scrambling for work when I want to bring on new projects. It provides predictability and stability in my business.
- Lead tracking allows me to identify trends and patterns in the types of clients that are converting, helping me focus my efforts on the most valuable leads and continually refine my sales strategy.
- Additionally, lead tracking helps me avoid missed opportunities, as I can easily follow up with leads that have gone cold or have been delayed for various reasons, ensuring that no opportunity falls through the cracks.”
Marketing and Digital Production Specialist at tretton37, Sabina Brdnik, points out another important benefit of effective lead tracking:
“Okay, this might sound logical, but effective lead tracking is absolutely CRITICAL for sales success. In my experience, proper lead tracking can boost conversion rates by up to 30% and significantly shorten sales cycles. (Which in B2B can be months to over a year!).”
To sum up, here’s a list of the most common lead tracking advantages:
- Better overall team organization,
- Data-driven decision making,
- Improved customer relationships,
- Better customer retention,
- Higher conversion rates,
- Shorter sales cycle,
- Facilitated strategic marketing planning, etc.
4 expert tips on lead tracking
You know the steps — but how do you ensure your lead tracking is effective? Experts have shared their top insights with us.
Score your leads
Lead scoring goes hand in hand with lead tracking. It is a way to prioritize leads by giving them a score of some kind.
How and what you’ll score is something you’ll decide together with your team.
You could, for example, score leads by assigning them a numerical value, a letter, or a term. The choice is yours.
The Sales and Outreach Manager for Custom Neon, Clare Jones, shares how her company scores and prioritizes leads by using unique terms:
“We categorize leads into Cold, Warm, Hot, and Ripe, with the latter being leads that are ready to make a purchase, we have a verbal or even a signed agreement, just awaiting payment.”
Know which data to collect
The lead data you collect is essential as it may help you in negotiations with leads when the time comes.
Apart from the basic contact information, such as name, email, and phone number, try to collect more personal details on your leads. Some seemingly unimportant details may turn out to be crucial for the later conversion.
Our contributor, Sabina Brdnik, shares what information you may collect, apart from the basics:
“I cannot stress this enough — collect more than just basic contact info. This is why (when possible) we also collect data on :
- Company size and industry,
- Current tools/solutions they use,
- Key pain points and challenges,
- Budget and decision-making process, and
- Competitors they’re considering.”
Here’s what lead data collecting could look like in CRM project management software like Plaky.
Lead tracking solutions range from spreadsheets or simple lead management systems to highly complex CRM solutions intended for handling large databases.
Whichever option you choose, the aim is to prevent losing leads and potentially miss closing an important deal for your company.
The use of dedicated CRM software helps:
- Improve collaboration of sales and marketing teams,
- Streamline communication among team members,
- Maintain detailed records of lead interactions in a centralized location,
- Make lead data accessible to everyone at all times,
- Promote transparency of internal processes, and much more.
Our collaborator, Sabina Brdnik, explains how she uses CRM software:
“I use our CRM system religiously to log all lead interactions right after they happen — calls, emails, meetings, everything. Make sure to add notes from what was talked about — from business to other misc topics that might come in handy for future business deals and/or simply building on your relationship. I also make sure to set follow-up reminders for each lead to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
One more important thing here — categorize leads based on their stage in the sales funnel and score them on key criteria like budget and decision-making authority. This systematic approach saves me hours each week! And when you scale that to months or a year — imagine the number of hours saved.”
Analyze your lead sources
Lead sources are channels or places that your leads come from. They are crucial for lead tracking as they give you an idea of your target customers’ habits and preferences.
Your sources will greatly differ depending on the product or service you’re offering, but here are some of the most common ones:
- Direct referrals,
- Organic search,
- Paid ads,
- Social media engagement,
- Email marketing campaigns,
- Web contact forms,
- Webinars,
- Trade shows,
- Inbound phone calls,
- Partnerships with other companies, and so on.
Sabina Brdnik shares what high-quality lead sources are in her experience:
“In my experience, the best lead sources are primarily referrals from existing customers (nothing beats a happy customer), and then others are industry events/conferences, and targeted LinkedIn outreach.”
Chief Sales Officer at Sopro, Steve Harlow, shares a few other interesting points based on a 2024 survey conducted at Sopro:
“According to our research in the Sopro State of Prospecting Report 2024, email remains the number one driver of leads, followed by referrals and paid social media — 46%, 31%, and 28% of surveyed respondents chose each of these channels, respectively, as being among their top three lead-producing methods.”
Since lead sources tell you a lot about your customers and their behavior, make sure to track and analyze each source thoroughly.
Evaluate lead quality
Before you actually pursue a lead, there are some boxes they should check first. So, how do you determine the value of a sales and marketing lead?
Here’s how Sabina Brdnik personally assesses leads:
“I evaluate lead quality based on:
- How well they fit our ideal customer profile (ICP),
- Level of engagement (e.g., content/whitepaper downloads, email opens, etc.),
- Expressed pain points that align with our solution,
- Budget and authority to make a purchase (!!!), and
- Urgency/timeline for solving their problem.”
Sabina shares a situation that shows how important proper lead qualification can be:
“Last year, I had a lead I almost disqualified due to company size, but after digging deeper, I discovered they had an urgent need and ample budget. They ended up being one of our larger deals that quarter. So please make sure to always practice lead qualification. This means don’t ‘just’ track and collect data — make sure to use it to make informed decisions (and build meaningful relationships with potential customers).”
Lead qualification differs from one company to another. However, some general criteria do apply to almost every company, including whether the target customer actually needs your product and whether they can afford it.
Seeking the best way to organize and track leads? Try Plaky
As we’ve already highlighted, if you want to be successful in tracking sales leads, you need to organize your processes first. And that’s exactly where Plaky comes in!
First, save yourself some time — and headaches — by keeping track of all your contacts and leads. Use Plaky’s contact list template to keep all this vital information up to date and accurate.
Thanks to this template, you can make sure all essential client information and data is organized and shared in a transparent way.
In general, this should enable easier information sharing across departments and teams — and even help you easily monitor the sales process.
You can also rely on Plaky’s pre-set CRM template where you can effortlessly track sales deals in the pipeline.
With this template, you’ll break the pipeline into manageable phases, making sure all team members are working according to the objectives.
You’ll be able to assign a salesperson to each client and let everyone from your sales team know who is responsible for what.
Also, with specific Plaky fields, you’ll categorize your tasks the way it suits you, e.g., to mark what’s urgent, what the value of a deal is, or to track the deal’s timeline.
Once you’ve set up your boards, go ahead and use Plaky’s straightforward features to keep a close eye on your leads.
For example, with the Status field, you can prioritize leads transparently. Pick the label that suits you or create your own custom labels, e.g., High, Low, or Medium priority, as shown in the example below.
To make important details more visible to sales and marketing teams, rely on the conditional coloring feature and single out specific rows or cells with the preferred color. Now, no information can fall through the cracks!
Finally, use the summary row feature to get a summary of important data (e.g., what percentage of leads came from a specific source, or how many leads are high priority).
With the summary row data at hand, you can save time on analyzing and visualizing key lead data with just a glance — and save your energy for scoring more sales!
Ensure an effective sales and marketing lead tracking process. Sign up for Plaky!
