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You'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?
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