What Is Lead Tracking?

The sales cycle isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon.

Leads can spend more than a year in the sales funnel, which means your business needs to track and nurture each potential buyer.

Lead tracking involves documenting and managing contacts as they move from first touch to final sale (and beyond). That includes both offline data, like phone calls with a salesperson, and online data, like website visits, social media mentions, and email opens. Marketing automation technology brings it all together to show you a complete picture of a contact’s past interactions with your store — and to help you decide what interactions to encourage next.

It may sound like a lot of work, but with the right software (and the right people using it), lead tracking can help you streamline your entire sales and marketing processes.

Why Does Lead Tracking Matter?

If you’re like most businesses, you probably have a hard time getting your sales and marketing teams on the same page.

Enter lead tracking. By combining the machine power of marketing automation software with the human power of your sales staff, you’ve got a one-two punch that will knock out your competition.

Seriously — companies that use automated lead tracking enjoy a 10% increase in revenue in only six to nine months!¹

[Case Study] Smalltown Auto Dealer Uses Lead Scoring to Nurture Shoppers Through Email

Need more convincing? Here are some of the key benefits of lead tracking:

• Lead tracking helps boost your sales. Sure, your sales team will appreciate a more comprehensive picture of their leads. But along with their gratitude, you’ll also enjoy more sales. More than 75% of marketers saw an increase in both leads and conversions after adopting lead tracking technology.²
• Lead tracking keeps your data fresh. About a quarter of your database decays each year.³ With marketing automation, you can quickly and regularly clean up your data, so you not only protect your reputation, but also spend your time and money on the right people.
• Lead tracking saves you time. Most marketers cite this as their number-one reason for adopting marketing automation — and for good reason.⁴ Instead of tirelessly reaching out to leads who aren’t interested in buying, your sales team can focus their efforts on the ones who really are.

The 2 Main Types of Lead Tracking

Since lead tracking is such an all-encompassing service, it’s difficult to classify. But essentially, there are two main types of lead tracking:

• Lead qualification: Using a marketing automation software like HubSpot, you can view all information about a contact from a single online dashboard. You can even create custom properties to store any kind of data you want. Then, you can use that data to segment your contacts, send them targeted emails, personalize content according to their stage in the buyer’s journey — you name it!
• Customer relationship management (CRM) integration: Lead tracking truly comes full circle when you pair it with something like our Connector, which sends the sales-ready leads we generate straight into your dealership’s CRM. Once we decide on your ideal criteria for warm and hot leads, we’ll get them to automatically feed into your CRM, so your salespeople are alerted the second someone indicates they might be ready for follow-up.

Silver Star Sees Email and Lead Tracking Success in Just 2 Months

We know — that’s a lot to take in! To learn more about how lead tracking works, we encourage you to download a free copy of our Converting Leads to Sales eBook.

Multi-Touch Attribution

How do you know which marketing channel(s) actually helped a customer decide to buy? It’s one thing to track leads, but it’s another thing to know exactly what is influencing them.

Enter our multi-touch marketing attribution software. This tool maps each step of the automotive buyer’s journey to identify where your dollars are well spent — and where they aren’t.

We can connect you with this powerful attribution tool to help you prove ROI, reduce your customer acquisition costs, and maximize your return on ad spend.

[Webinar] Maximizing ROAS with LeadsRX

Why Choose 9 Clouds for Lead Tracking?

At 9 Clouds, we don’t just offer digital marketing resources. We create a true partnership, bringing together your sales and marketing teams with ours.

With our lead tracking service, we will:

• Connect you to our advanced marketing automation software and train you on the best ways to use the data.
• Segment your contacts according to their web behavior, purchase history, and other data from your CRM.
• Show the most relevant content for each stage in the buyer’s journey, then pass along the most qualified leads to your sales team so they can close the sale.

We get that lead tracking is a tough concept to visualize. To give you a better idea, check out the results we’ve achieved for our clients by reading our lead tracking case studies.

You can also learn more about what it’s like to work with 9 Clouds by clicking below.

Why Work with 9 Clouds?