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The Importance of Tracking Your Sales Funnel and Identifying Leads

By Ramona Sukhraj

The Importance of Tracking Your Sales Funnel and Identifying Leads

 

The Importance of Identifying Leads and Tracking Your Sales FunnelYou've identified your marketing goals, now what?


It's important for your marketing team to know how many leads they need to generate in order for sales to achieve their goals.


And once you've aligned your business and marketing goals, you have in many ways decided your sales goals as well.


Identifying leads and track your sales funnel is an important part of the process when you're planning your inbound marketing investment.


Importance of Tracking Your Sales Funnel and Identifying Leads


Even if you have an innovative, groundbreaking marketing campaign, it won’t be worth the time or effort if it does not translate into leads/sales. You need to know how many leads/sales you will need in order for your campaign to see an ROI and to meet your overall business goals. The best way to do this is by tracking your sales funnel.


Visitors > Leads > MQLs > SQLs > Opportunities > Customers


For example:








































  Current Year Next Year
Visitors 50,000 100,000
Leads 4000 8000
MQLs 1200 2400
SQLs 600 1200
Opportunities 300 600
Customers 100 200

If you have to double your sales from $50k to $100k, everything higher up the funnel must double as well. In other words, you need at least 100,000 visitors, which would ideally turn into 8000 leads, 2400 MQLs, 1200 SQLs, 600 opportunities, and ultimately 200 customers.


Tracking Leads and Distributing Content


Much like the Customer Buying Cycle, your Sales Funnel can also help you with lead nurturing, or how you tailor your content in order to drive someone into being a customer. Depending on where they are in the funnel, you can better understand their mentality and decide what kind of content would guide them in the right direction. You wouldn’t market or communicate with an infrequent website visitor the same way you would an MQL.


The sales funnel also helps you organize your sales team’s priorities. With Inbound Marketing software, you can track your prospects activity and easily see how “sales ready” they are.  While a Marketing-Qualified Lead has downloaded and viewed a lot of content, they are not as sales ready as a Sales-Qualified Lead who has possibly requested a consultation or contacted you for more information.


Is Inbound Marketing Bringing in Leads?


As we described in the last chapter, tracking your results is one of the most important habits and Inbound Marketer can have. Is your blog being viewed and shared? How many people are visiting and downloading content? What is the conversion rate?


These statistics are the black and white proof if your Inbound Marketing efforts are in fact working. Comparing these results with other campaigns (i.e. Outbound efforts) help you evaluate your strategy and allocate your marketing dollars efficiently.  If your blog is driving relevant traffic and profitable leads, but your magazine ads aren’t, take note and make a change. Invest in what works.


Thinking About Investing in Inbound Marketing?


Check out our newest Ebook! You will learn everything you need to know in order to make a smarter, more successful investment with inbound marketing and get the results you need.

Free Assessment:

How does your inbound marketing measure up?
Take this free, 5-minute assessment and learn what you can start doing today to boost traffic, leads, and sales.

Topics:

Marketing Strategy
Published on May 23, 2013

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