This is a guest post by Gerad Hoyt, a marketing Specialist with Chequed: Pre Employment Testing.
Do you know where your leads are actually coming from or are you just guessing? If your answer is “Uh yea, we have Google analytics” you’re just flat wrong. One, for anyone who’s in a lead gen centered business you know how inaccurate Google Analytics can be in reporting “leads”, but also you’re thinking about your leads at too high of a level. The real question behind this is “Where are your good and best leads coming from”. For those of us in marketing (like me) we can report all day on the number of leads we generate but it’s not much value if most of them are crap. The real defining value is know what’s actually driving real, valuable and most importantly, closable leads.
As a result of being fed up with not having insight into where my real leads were coming from, I started doing some digging and came up with an ingenious idea, use my data from Google Analytics and get it into my CRM, Salesforce. After some time banging my head against the wall I was able to come across some tips on how to actually do this from a great, albeit old, post from Justin Cutroni called Integrating Google Analytics With a CRM (for those of you who want to implement this, the post will give you almost everything you would need including the Javascript). Essentially what the script Justin created is able to do is strip data from your existing Google Analytics, and allows you to populate that data into hidden fields within a form…simply brilliant! You’ll have to do some modifications to your Salesforce forms to make sure that its mapping to your fields correctly but with some intuition you can figure it out. Once you get this implemented you get exposure to a whole new world of data that gives a ton of insight into your lead and sales pipeline (if you’re using Salesforce the right way).
While implementing this does provide a ton of data, you will also need to have a solid process for scoring leads and pipelining them. For this you’ll need to adopt the scoring to your sales process and cycle. Salesforce does have some good tips on leveraging lead scoring in their 9 Tips for Using Lead Scoring to Close More Deals. You can also leverage some of the awesome lead scoring technology from (time for the shameless plug) Loopfuse to help out as well.
Once you have your process, CRM and the pull script aligned you can begin to get incredible insight into what’s really driving your best leads as well as sales. This data will then allow you to really know how your marketing is really impacting the bottom line and know where all that revenue is really coming from.
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Tags: analytics, lead tracking
