How many leads can you generate?
What is a lead?
A lead is an entity that has expressed an interest in your good/service.
When most businesses are asked ‘how many leads do you have?’ the number rarely matches between departments, much less individual contributors. Clearly defining leads is of enormous importance, because it provides the backbone denominator for the health of our business. If we do not have a clear definition of what a lead is, it is impossible to have a coherent discussion on the state of our sales funnel.
Lead Table Structure
| Lead_ID | Entered Sales Funnel At |
| aaa123 | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 |
| aaa124 | 2022-02-07 00:00:00 |
| rnd111 | 2022-03-01 00:00:00 |
The most important property of a LEAD is the DATE associated with it.
Instead of asking - “What is a lead?” Try asking - “What does it mean to enter my sales funnel?”
Your definition should be answerable for every single one of your paying customers.
It is ok to use OR statements, as long as they are clearly defined.
Examples
(B2B):
Date Entered Sales Funnel = The FIRST Date the entity…
- signed up for the product
- had a meeting booked in the CRM
- had a deal created in the CRM
in this case, it may be that most customers have meetings booked/deals created before ever trying the product. However, in the case where the lead uses the product before talking to the sales team, that is the day we want to associate with entering the sales funnel.
(B2C):
Date Entered Sales Funnel = The FIRST Date the entity…
- signed up for newsletter
- Added item to cart
in this case, it may be that most customers are anonymous until they actually enter the shopping cart or complete a contact form. In this case, the sales funnel will be much shorter - as most of our leads will likely be adding items to their cart on the same day of their first purchase. However, if somebody signs up for our newsletter before becoming a customer, that is the date we want to consider their sales funnel starting from
WRONG EXAMPLES
(B2B):
Date Entered Sales Funnel = The FIRST Date the entity…
- was added to the CRM
this is a bad definition because it does not correlate to any matter of intent from the entity.
(B2C):
- #leads = #website visitors
this is a bad definition because it does not take into account the uniqueness of each visitor, and it is by nature an aggregate metric. You will not be able to say anything about when a particular customer entered your sales funnel with this type of definition.
Other considerations
- Your Lead entity should be of the same granularity as your customers. If you sell to companies, your leads should each represent 1 company - not one contact within that company.