Lead to opportunity for retail trade

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So when I sit down with clients, I will always bring up the question, how do you track your leads? Or, do you track your leads? Now I will typically get one of three responses. First response being, "I don't track my leads," and they always kind of roll their eyes and they say, "You know what, I know I should be, and but I just haven't had time." The second response I get is, "Absolutely. We track every single lead that comes into our business," which is awesome. And the third response is, "Well I don't really need to, because I know my marketing is working if my phone is ringing." Ugh! No, no that, no. No, no. That does not work. No it doesn't. Hi, I'm Mike Mancini helping you market simplify and impact your business. Today, obviously, we're dealing with marketing and how to do lead tracking. Saying, "If my phone is ringing, it's working," is not lead tracking. That is throwing money against the wall, hoping it sticks. You don't have any idea if they're coming from referrals, if they are coming from new customers, if they found you on the web. Lead tracking is so insanely valuable. I'm going to show you why it's so important. I'm going to show you a form that we use to track every single one of our leads. I'm going to give you the opportunity, if you want it, you can have that form, so let's jump right in. So here is a sample that I've just set up. Obviously I don't have the email addresses. The phone numbers have all changed, but I'll walk you through it really quickly. You put the date in here. Now the lead sources, this is a little drop-down box. Now what happens is, you start out on the first page. You enter your lead sources in here. I use Google ads, I use Facebook paid ads, I put referrals here. This is a networking group I used to be a part of that I still get leads from. This is if somebody finds me from the website. Now, me and family means, those are referrals that I find. So for instance, if I'm out and about and I run into somebody and they're like, "Hey, great to see you. By the way, I need to give you a call." They're a personal friend, I just kind of divide those up so I know exactly where they came from. Any partner stuff that we do. And then I just put YouTube in here, because we started getting a lot more leads off of that. So you put the date the lead contacted you, the lead source. You just click this little dropdown box, and if you don't see anything, just scroll up here and you pick one of these lead sources. Now these lead sources were pulled right from this list. So anything that's in this list will be over here. You just pick one of those. Okay? So if it's a referral, I want to know who it's from, because I like to send out thank you notes. I put the lead name, their email address, phone. I just like to find out what state they're from because we do business all over the place. Now, here's the biggest thing. Here's what I quoted them on the phone, and here is any revenue that we got. Now I'll show you that part in a second. I'll put any notes in here. Now I will also always mark this one deal or dead. And then if I follow up, maybe just any other notes, or maybe I put a follow up date in here if we did not come to a conclusion. Now, at the bottom of the sheet, here's why I do this. So it shows that there's 21 leads that were filled in up there. Now, it shows that there are five of those deals I marked as dead. 14 are closed, but there's 19 total deals. Well, wait a minute. I got 21 leads, and 19 of them are closed or dead. So I can go back up and I know that there's still two that are open, and I can go in, and I can see, "Going to wait till November." He says he wants to do it waiting until season starts, whatever it might be. Now, down at the bottom of the sheet, it also will pull, for this particular month, what lead sources are bringing in income. Now, how does it know that? So I'll go back to this once a week and I'll fill this out. At the end of the week, I'll go back and say, you know what? I talked to Chet. We quoted him 500, it was $1,000 deal. All right, so I'll put that number in there under revenue. So at the bottom here, it shows I got five leads from Google, three from Facebook, two referrals, so on and so forth. But what's so important about this, is it shows that out of those Google ads, I got $2,000 in revenue, it's for two referrals. I got $1,000 in revenue, so on and so forth. But here's why I like this. Is because, all right, so we're paying for some Facebook ads. If I see that we're getting leads, but we're not getting any revenue off them, I know that that's probably not a good lead source for us. Now, I may not stop it immediately, but I'll go back and I'll look at the previous months and be like, you know what? We've been running these for two or three months. We've spent X amount of dollars on them, but we're not bringing in any revenue. I'm not going to use that lead source anymore, or at least I'm not going to pay for it. And in fact, what I may do is take the money that we're using for those Facebook leads, and put them towards another source, such as Google ads, that might be driving more revenue to us. Now, some of these are unpaid lead sources, which is great. Referrals, I don't pay for those, but it's always nice to know where they're coming in. I have a lot of business owners that say, "You know what? We don't really do any marketing, because it's word of mouth. We just get a ton of referrals." That's fine, but put it on paper and prove it. Because I promise you, you're probably putting some marketing dollars somewhere. And it's absolutely imperative if you want to scale your business, that you know exactly where those dollars are going, and what is working, and what is not. Because this is how you begin to scale. You take a look at, you know what? We're not getting any business off of Facebook paid ads. We're going to take that $500 a month and we're going to put it in Google. That is taking money that's not working from one place, and putting it into somewhere else that is. It's not costing you any extra money, it literally is just fixing a cog in the wheel that happens to be broken. Then you can click on the overview, and what it will do, is it will total all of these. And it will total all of them from February, March, April, May. It will put them down here. 21 leads, 19 were closed, two open leads, revenue of 7750 in January. But it will also total for the whole year up here as well. So as February, March, April, May, it will pull all of those leads in here, it will show all the totals here, it will break it down by month so that you can see exactly what is working for you and what isn't. So please, please, please, please, please don't ever say to somebody, "If my phone is ringing, I know it's working." I'm here to help market, simplify, and impact your business. This helps you with your marketing. This helps you simplify what is working, what is not, and when you figure out where your money is not working, this helps put the biggest impact on your business. So if you want that lead tracking sheet for your business, I'll put a link to it in the description area below. Let us know if it helped you. Let us know if you have a better way to track leads for your business. I'd love to hear about it. And if you liked this video, please do me a favor, smash that light button. It really helps us in the eyes of YouTube. Also hit that subscribe button and that little bell icon so you'll be notified of when we release new videos. Hey, and if you like this video, over to the right-hand side you'll see our marketing playlist, as well as some of our other free tools that we use in our business that you can have there as well. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time.