We all know how important it is to capture inquiries within your customer relationship management solution. No company can exist without sales and sales cannot happen if enough lead generation is not in place. Not only does CRM centralize all sales information, but it also serves as basis for management reporting. Read how to manage inbound inquiries efficiently for real estate business.
If you are a small / medium sized company and may be wondering about whether it is useful to you, I must tell you, this aspect of CRM is an essential step for success of your company. Also read why SugarCRM and SuiteCRM is one of the popular application for start-ups.
Having understood the essence of importance of capturing leads within CRM, let’s deep-dive into the top reasons why you must also capture the source from where they are coming.
Importance of capturing Lead Source with CRM
Although lead source often provided as a default field within all popular CRM solutions that I have worked with. However, it is also often the field which is missed out during the project implementation. Listed below are the reasons why you must always capture the lead source within CRM.
1. Understanding the effectiveness of various campaigns
If you are running various campaigns for generation of leads, capturing this information helps you to understand which channel is resulting in more qualified leads and hence sales. Imagine that you are running advertisements in various print media, trade shows, Google Ad-words and through affiliate websites. Each of them has certain monthly budget allocated. However, you may want to do an optimization based on the outcome on sales. You may for example see an increase in revenue by spending more on print media and reducing affiliate sales. However, this is possible only when you capture to lead source.
2. Input to Lead scoring
Often, the lead source is also an indication of quality of lead and triggers an image of the prospect. For example, if you get a lead from a CEO trade submit, over a period, the sales representatives with be able to gauge the chances of the conversion as well as an indicative budget. This is of course based on experience but trust me, sales representatives can surely get their intuition going if we tell them where the lead come from.
3. Shortening of Sales Cycle
Let’s take an example of an organization which is into sales of medical devices. It might so happen, that your organization participated in an event exhibiting the latest X-Ray machines. You may want to directly assign the leads originating from this trade show to Mr. Smith, who has enough knowledge and expertise to engage lead and help them decide on their purchase. Instead of assigning the lead to a generic sales person and starting the sales process from scratch, this above approach will lead to a much-shorter sales cycle and put your organization.
How to capture lead source easily
Now that we understand the importance of capturing lead source within CRM, let’s explore ways to ensure that this information flows into the application. The foremost step in this process is to ensure that we create a finite list of lead sources in the CRM. It requires a close coordination between marketing team and the CRM administrator. Once this crucial step is over, we recommend the following steps.
a. Creation on Dynamic Web to Lead Capture forms
Leads which come online, eventually lead to an inquiry form where the prospect must fill in their names and description of their query. See how to design a Web to Lead form within WordPress.
Banner Image – SugarCRM WordPress Integration
During their creation of the web to lead forms, you must create a dynamic parameter and handle auto-population of the lead source. This may as well be hidden from the prospect and filled in the background.
b. Enforcing the source in contact form on website
Often people can directly open your website and fill in an inquiry form. In this case, it may be difficult to capture which source they have come from. In such cases, we must ask where they heard about you. Remember, you may not be able to list all your channels openly on your website publicly. Hence, you can categorize them into larger buckets. However, when the sales person has the first conversation with the prospect, he can politely ask for the accurate source.
Conclusion and Questions
We hope that as business owners and marketing specialists, you would be able to set up the process of capturing lead source and benefit from the outcome. We would be happy to listen and respond to your questions and comments. You can put them down below.
Looking at automating your business processes – We can help
Reach out to us so that we can assess and plan a road-map for your CRM implementation. Let’s build a system, which you will use for years to come.
