If you don’t track, leads will slip through the cracks. It’s that simple.
Tracking your leads tells you which leads to prioritize and how to best target communications to move them through your marketing and sales funnels.
But, if you don’t have a sophisticated tool to manage your sales lead tracking process, you’ll be buried in leads with no understanding of how to convert them.
Read on to find out how to segment and track your audience effectively and how monday.com makes that process even easier.
What is lead tracking and why is it important?
Lead tracking is the process of segmenting and tracking leads by their demographics and behavior so that you can more effectively progress them through sales and marketing funnels.
Consider that half of sales and marketing executives don’t think their lead nurturing strategies are up to scratch.
Now why might that be?
It’s likely because they don’t know:
- Who their top prospective customers are
- What those prospects want and need
- How and when to prioritize one prospect over another
Very simply, lead tracking is the answer.
Lead tracking allows you to identify and prioritize your top potential leads by their characteristics and behaviors, and where they are in the funnel.
Simply put, lead tracking helps you know which customers to nurture, when to nurture them, and how to nurture them better.
Since two-thirds of marketing and sales executives say they see a significant difference in results between nurtured and non-nurtured leads, it’s important that your lead tracking is on point.
The problem for most marketing and sales teams is operational. 77% said they’re struggling to build the right timing and workflows to nurture leads.
This is where monday.com’s Work OS comes in.
You’ll need a slick lead tracking software or customer relationship management (CRM) system that’s flexible and easy-to-use, so your whole sales team knows where your leads are and how to progress them.
monday.com’s Work OS allows you to build a sophisticated CRM that can automatically manage leads and send communications, so no potential sales fall by the wayside.
That’s how music streaming service, Deezer, increased prospective customer engagement by nearly 500% — it uses monday.com’s Work OS as a CRM:
By using monday.com’s Work OS as a CRM and lead tracking system, Deezer was able to track campaign performance and segment audiences based on behaviors.
That way, they could target campaigns perfectly to reach the right customers.
How to segment and track leads
Your marketing and sales funnels are closely intertwined, but they do different jobs.
Essentially, the bottom of the marketing funnel is the top of the sales funnel.
By segmenting and tracking your leads through your marketing funnel, you can work out where to direct them as they go through the sales funnel.
Basically, your marketing funnel finds out who they are, while your sales funnel uses these characteristics and behaviors to seal the deal.
Here’s how you track and segment leads as they move through those funnels.
1. Know your audience
The best leads are hot leads.
Hot or warm leads are highly-relevant leads that are warmed up and ready for a sale. By targeting these leads, you’ll waste less time and money chasing those that aren’t interested.
To target these leads, you’ll need to work out what they look like.
To do this, you’ll need to research your target audience and evaluate your existing customer base. See the values and virtues that sway their buying behavior.
For example, 20% of consumers are persuaded by how a company treats the environment, while 19% are concerned with what a company does for its community.
Next look at your existing customers. What characteristics do you top buyers have? What behaviors precede a purchase?
Using all this data, create your audience segments.
Most companies create target 3 segments, but a fifth of companies try to hit 5 different audience segments at once.
2. Create your sales funnels
It’s easier to reverse engineer the process of lead capture and nurture by starting with the sales funnel. Where are you leading those leads to?
This includes all the actions you count as a conversion. Are you trying to get them to buy a product? Attend an event? Sign up to a newsletter?
Creating the sales funnel means designing the stages of that process:
- How are you generating those leads?
- How will you further qualify them?
- What product, deal or negotiation will you offer?
- How will you close the deal?
- How will you convince them to refer you to others?
Remember, 49% of visitors don’t buy on their first visit, especially if a product is pricey. In fact. the more expensive the product, the more nurturing a prospective customer needs
This means you’ll need to design mechanisms that keep nurturing the leads that don’t buy first off, to suck them further down the funnel over time.
3. Pick your segments
Based on your target audiences, you’ll need to segment your leads by characteristics and behavior.
In terms of segmenting by characteristics, consider these factors:
- Demographic: nationality, age, gender, ethnicity, etc
- Psychographic: virtues, attitudes, values, interests, dislikes etc
- Sociographic: social groups, clubs, family composition, etc
- Geographic: language, location, city, etc
- Professional: income status, education level, employment status, profession, etc
- Corporate: industry, company size, job title, etc
In terms of behavioral segmentation, consider:
- Website visits: which pages, how long for, activity on these pages, regularity etc
- Lead source and signups: social media, email campaigns, organic traffic, affiliates, free downloads, free trials, lead form, etc
- Content: engagement in particular topics, content pieces, blogs, etc
- Purchases: first-time buyers, total spending, popular products, etc
- Search terms: particular keywords used to reach your website, social media, or other content
- Free trial: visited the page, signed up, didn’t sign up
- Return customers: buying history, product categories, customer lifetime value, etc
For example, say you’re selling a SaaS product. You might want to segment your leads to find IT managers in the US who have trialed your product and watched a product demo.
4. Build and automate your segmentation systems
Not only should you be segmenting at every turn, you should be automating segmentation and lead nurturing so that no leads go unturned.
As Patrick Hoban, Co-founder and CEO at Parvenu puts it…
“One of the most important aspects of sales is constantly being able to follow up and continuing to add value throughout the process. With monday.com, we’ve been able to automate that follow-up process and so people don’t fall through the cracks any more.”
That’s why Parvenu uses monday.com’s Work OS for over 150 automations. Now, they’re sending up to 2000 emails and 150 LinkedIn connection requests every single day.
5. Choose a CRM (not-so-subtle hint: monday.com is a great option!)
91% of organizations with over 10 employees use a CRM because it’s the best way to track and manage leads.
With a CRM working as a lead tracking system, teams are better able to prioritize leads and collaborate on closing deals.
The smartest companies choose monday.com Work OS to create a sophisticated CRM that can increase customer engagement by 500%.
Just look at AI fundraising platform, Parvenu.
Parvenu has created a comprehensive CRM using the monday.com Work OS. It integrates with 52 of their existing tools, including Slack, Mailchimp, Zendesk, Linkedin.
Now, the team has a centralized place to manage all leads and a streamlined workflow for the sales and marketing funnels.
Read: The Lead Management Process: A Practical Guide
How to build a lead-tracking CRM with monday.com Work OS
The monday.com Work OS is a sleek, flexible platform that allows you to build and customize the tools you need to segment, track leads, and automate communications to drive sales.
Honestly, it doesn’t get better than this. Take a look.
1. Use a ready-made CRM template
The monday.com Work OS is extremely flexible, enabling you to create a CRM that performs exactly how you need it to.
But, if you’re new to the process, there are several top-notch CRM dashboard templates to kick you off:
- CRM Template
- Sales and CRM Template
- CRM Incoming Leads and Sales Funnel Template
You’ll be able to automatically import leads, assign ownership, and manage contacts in one place.
That makes it a piece of cake to prioritize leads, understand sales lead behavior, and plan follow-up actions.
2. Track lead progress through pipeline
Leading tracking helps you tail your clients through the sales pipeline.
That way, you know where they’ve come from, what stage they’re in, and which follow-up actions need to be performed next.
Use monday.com’s brightly colored status bars to record and track behavior and sales activity.
By doing this, whole sales teams can seamlessly collaborate on closing deals.
3. Automate sales lead communications
Manual lead management is highly inefficient. If you’re not automating, you’re severely limited when it comes to how many leads you can touch a day.
monday.com’s Work OS is perfect as a CRM, thanks to its automation capacity.
For example, when a lead’s stage changes, you can automatically trigger the platform to send particular communications.
Alternatively, when a lead takes action, you can automatically trigger a change in status and a follow-up action.
Automate follow-ups after a certain time period, on a certain date, with changes of status, ownership, action, and so on.
Honestly, the automation possibilities on monday.com’s Work OS are endless. They’re only limited by your own creativity.
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When you track your leads through the pipeline, you can keep on top of them. You can weed out the most interested prospects and prioritize the low-hanging fruit.
Not only does this increase conversions, you’ll also save the time and money you waste chasing the wrong tail.
Here’s the kicker: you’ll need a high-caliber sales lead tracking software. Make sure your CRM can segment, organize, prioritize, and automate, otherwise you’ll be drowning in data.
That’s why top firms use monday.com as their CRM. So should you. Try it now for free.
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