Lose your Focus and See the Big Picture

Website Lead Generation
By Kevin Hourigan

As many companies today are continuing to look to the web as a source of marketing their businesses, I see a common flawed practice taking place.   Companies spend so much time and energy trying to generate leads and perfect the lead-capturing capabilities that they lose sight of making sure the leads are actually qualified leads and that the leads will actually convert to sales. 

While the concept of tracking leads through the sale is nothing new, marketers new to interactive marketing are finding that the website analytics that they are being supplied are often so detailed that they find themselves compelled to improve the metrics of these lead generation reports.  This most likely comes from the ease of making campaign changes and how quickly one can see measurable results. 

For example, I recently had a client whom we had been supporting for a year with campaigns for Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, Landing Pages, and eMail Marketing.  As the year unfolded, the client saw significant positive website results in the number of unique visitors to its website, web page views and, ultimately, the number of actions taken by visitors which included white paper sign ups, PDF downloads, and eMail Newsletter Sign ups -  all of which they believed were the most influential actions that prospects could take on the website.  While the number  of visitors, actions clicked, and overall activity were growing very well, my customer became entrenched with tracking the Bounce Rate of the pages (defined by Wikipedia,  a bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs).   For three months all of our efforts were directed at lowering the bounce rate and nothing else.  The net result: they lost the momentum they had been building by focusing so much on JUST the Bounce Rate.  Three months later, the customer was now seeing a decline in actual sales. Through backtracking, it was easy to see that too much effort had been applied to one part of the interactive marketing metrics, and not enough to all the other variables that help marketers make the right decisions.

How do you not get trapped into just watching your web analytics? 

The answer is integrating a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.  The industry is flooded with great tools, from Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.Com to an open source software program called SugarCRM.   Regardless of which CRM tool that you select, integrating your marketing campaigns into the CRM will not only let you track the sources of your leads and the cost of those leads, but also the sources and percentage of the leads that convert to sale.  When you can now track what lead sources convert to sales, you can also measure the percentage that convert, the average dollar sold and the duration of time to close each lead source’s sale.  From there, you will make campaign changes not because it generates leads, but because the changes will generate qualified leads that convert to customers.  It takes longer to get this established, but it truly allows you to make sure your marketing investment is yielding new business.

This is one of many examples of how watching one metric too closely and losing sight on some of the other metrics may have negative results.  The capturing of lead data is a critical phase in measuring results; but the lead integration into a CRM, and tracking the lead sources, sales cycle, closing percentage and average dollar of deal size can ultimately turn great lead generation results into really great revenue growth.

Kevin Hourigan is President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions, www.BayshoreSolutions.com, and can be reached at Kevin@BayshoreSolutions.com

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