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You have a new website. Your social media efforts have expanded. Your personal profile is updated. You’ve done everything you need to do to increase leads to your business.

Or have you?

Do you measure your lead generation success? Is there a process in your business to record and track leads? Is your process managed?

In my last post, I emphasized the importance seeing your sales and marketing efforts as a process and not a person.

If you agree with my viewpoint, then it follows you need to carefully monitor your process. Simply executing is not enough. You want to be sure your process is actually working the way you intended.

Here are some suggestions for managing the lead-generation part of your sales and marketing process:

  1. Know Your Goal. Are you trying to grow faster than your industry? Reach parity with your industry? Maybe you want to double or triple your business. Executives should establish a goal, even if it seems arbitrary and high. Simply said, if you want to double your business, you need to double your leads.
    You can’t get what you don’t ask for.
  2. Count Them. I see many businesses in my work and with most, I don’t see a system for counting and recording leads. If you don’t count them, you can’t know whether you’re getting more or less than last year or last month. Leads can serve as a leading indicator in your business. Knowing the trends might be useful for sales forecasts, budgets, resource planning, hiring, and cash flow planning.
    Maybe most importantly, this is the metric which is the best measure of the success of your marketing efforts. Do you let the momentum of what you’re doing keep you on the same path or do you decide to pivot on your approach?
  3. Filter Them. Be sure that leads are, well, β€œleads”. Many practitioners declare victory in their efforts by merely counting bodies. Getting more LinkedIn connections, Facebook-likes, or website page-views do not necessarily equate to getting more leads. The quality of the lead is important. If they are not decision-makers for what you do, or from a geography you don’t serve, or any reason they don’t fit your search profile, then they are not β€œleads”.
    Consider a system for sorting and ranking your leads.

Lead generation should not be viewed as the entirety of your sales and marketing efforts. There are other steps which should follow. However, lead generation is the beginning of your process and success further downstream is not likely if you don’t begin with success in increasing leads.

Enjoying this content? Click here to read the previous article in this series.

About the Author: Bob Kroon is a coach for high-performing Founders, CEO’s, and Owners. He founded Expeerious, LLC (expeerious.com) in 2015 to exclusively focus on coaching the success of Top Executives. For over 25 years, Bob served variously as CEO, COO, Division President, and Group Vice President.

The majority of his career was in manufacturing durable goods. Bob is an enthusiast and practitioner of Lean Thinking since 1986. He also has broad skills in M&A including financial modeling, deal structure, diligence, and post-close integration.

Bob’s current clients are diverse and include businesses in healthcare, agricultural products, robotics, luxury goods, and education.

To learn more about how Bob coaches and thinks, you can find over 200 questions he’s answered on Quora. Visit his website at: www.expeerious.com for additional blog posts.

 

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