Understanding where your leads are hanging out in your sales funnel, and knowing how to manage them at each of the stages, is a fundamental part of an efficient marketing machine.
It’s not enough just to collect leads in and have them swimming around in a CRM or Google Sheet with no way to track them or have visibility of their activity. It’s a bit like catching a fish, dropping it back into the sea, and hoping that you’ll catch the same fish again later.
Having visibility on where your leads are in your marketing funnel and/or sales process allows you to tailor your approach specifically to each of the different segments and prospects that you serve, and really support you and your team in creating a personalised follow up.
This is the beauty of having activity and status reporting in your business.
It may not sound sexy, but when you know how it works, and more importantly actually implement it in your business, you will see a huge difference in your bottom line.
This blog is going to give you the basics of activity and status reporting, and will point you in the right direction when it comes to putting it to use in your business.
Activity reporting
Picture this…
Spring has sprung and the merry month of May has come to a close. You are sitting at your desk looking at all the leads that you have generated in the last month.
How much information do you actually have on them?
Do you know:
• …from which sources they have all come?
• …how many calls were made to each person and by each agent?
• …how many voicemails were left on their phone?
• …how many emails were sent to them?
• …how many of your promotions have they seen/clicked on?
All of these questions and many more are what we call the ACTIVITY of your leads/customers; the snapshot of what happened in that time frame.
Activity is constantly changing and updating
How many of these activities happened to your leads in the last month? These activities are never static. They are constantly shifting and changing as your leads respond to your marketing and sales process, and knowing what activities they took at any one time can give you a whole load of useful information which you can use in your sales/marketing messages.
For example, tracking your leads’ activities after launching a new marketing campaign will give you some real-time information on how well your people are responding to it. You will quickly know what is working and where you need to focus your budget for the rest of the month.
Knowing how many of those leads were ‘not interested’ vs ‘converted’ will indicate the quality of the leads and therefore the quality of the targeting and messaging.
Having these numbers is also a clear demonstration of accountability of your team members tasked with the follow-up (should you have an ‘in-person’ sales pipeline process).
That is the power of activity reports.
Then, you need to know the STATUS of your leads.
Status reporting
This is the state your leads are in right now, the stage they are currently at in your marketing and sales funnel. It means you can pinpoint exactly where each person is in their journey with you, and it tells you exactly what they need next. This is massively useful for a number of reasons, but probably the most obvious one would be for sales calls.
Imagine going into a sales call knowing:
- …what they have already bought from you.
- …from which lead source they came.
- …with what promotions and downloads they have engaged.
- …what emails they have clicked on.
- …what surveys they have filled out.
You have the data and are going in red hot and primed to give them exactly what they want.
Moving people seamlessly through your sales process
Activity and status reporting is so important to your business because it allows you to constantly push people through your sales process, while giving them the best experience possible. It also gives you the data you need to make informed decisions on your marketing and the accountability within your sales process.
If you are someone who is paying money for leads, you want to make sure you are getting your money’s worth, right? This means if you get 100 leads and 90 of them aren’t interested, you need to know why.
Was it the targeting? Was your message off? Do you know why your leads were of poor quality?
Either way, without activity and status reporting, you will never know, and you may just stay fishing in the same (wrong) pond for months before realising what’s gone wrong.
How to collect this information
I have been using Keap for years with The Business Catalyst, which allows you to dynamically and instantly report on leads in three key ways:
- The dynamic dashboard inside Keap itself.
- Dynamically export onto a spreadsheet directly from Keap.
- Instant advanced reporting (with pretty graphics) using a Power BI dashboard.
Whatever you go with will depend on the size of your business and the number of leads on which you need reporting, but any of these options will give you a great birds-eye view of every potential customer in your business.
For many of our clients, we also like to create a graphic representation of their data at the various stages of their funnel, so they can quickly see what is working and what needs some tweaking. It’s a much more engaging way to look at the raw data. Check out these beautiful ones we have made for our clients:
Automating your activity and status reporting
The automations that we build at The Business Catalyst will automatically update a lead depending on how that lead has been followed up.
Let’s say you are a dental practice and your patient care coordinators or treatment coordinators are following up on the leads.
Whether the source is from a chatbot, Facebook ad, website form or a leaflet, we will create a task for whomever is managing the follow-up, and the outcome of that task determines what needs to happen next.
This gives the business a streamlined and accurate way to follow up with every single person coming through the business.
Another great example would be abandoned shopping carts for an eCommerce store. Every time an item is added to a basket, a task can be created to follow up with that sale via telephone or email.
Think of how many more opportunities you will have to recommend new products, upsell, downsell or cross-sell with this information!
The first step to implementing your activity and status reporting
If you like the sound of this and want to know how you can take the first steps to nail your reports, the first thing you need to do is make sure you are capturing every single piece of information on a lead in a centralised location like a CRM (use Keap!).
Until you have collected the information, you can’t really move forward, so the quicker you can get a storage place, start tracking how you are capturing and have a centralised location into which to capture, the better!
Just remember, the more work you do now to set all this up, the more time, money and freedom you will have later. Make “future you” a happy you and get started!
You can learn more about implementing reporting that will make a difference in your business at www.lifecyclereporting.com