Measuring Your Marketing and Sales: Lead Generation

One of the primary reasons we market is to help generate leads. Yet, sometimes we forget to actually measure the opportunities we generate from our activities. Whether you are holding an event, conducting a lead generation campaign or have launched a drip marketing campaign, there are two important metrics you should always measure.

Measure opportunities generated

The first metric to always measure is the number of opportunities actually generated through the activity. For professional firms, this opportunity is usually the first meeting. If you have a good sales tracking process, this should be relatively easy and painless to do.

Measure permission based prospects

The second activity you want to measure is the number of permission-based prospect you have obtained. Its important to note that permission based prospects aren’t prospects you buy from a list. These are prospects that have chosen to share their contact information with you or given you permission to continue communicating with you. This could be defined as a webinar participant, seminar attendee, newsletter subscriber, someone who downloaded content from your website, requested something from your “lead generation” campaign, took you call and gave you permission to continue communicating with you or registered for a conference you hold. Why is this so important? It tells you that the people on this list have some level of interest in what you have to offer. In this case quantity is not always better. Having fewer permission based prospects is actually better than have twice as many unqualified prospects.

Why measure both?

Measurement of both is important because often time it’s a series of activities that leads to a true opportunity, not one event. If marketing is working to increase your permission based prospects and staying in touch with them with relevant content, ideally these two metric should be increasing. If one or the other is out of alignment, that may mean that you need to refine your target segments, your message, your market approach or a combination of all of the above.