To grow a business, it’s essential to generate a steady stream of sales leads. But the work doesn’t stop at just finding those leads — it’s also essential to organize and track them for follow-ups, organizational transparency, and marketing strategy evaluation.
To hit the ground running, you’re probably in search of the perfect template for tracking your sales leads — and that’s where we come in. Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about tracking sales leads, what metrics are important, and 5 of the best templates on the web so you can get back to doing what you do best: Prospecting.
Why Track Sales Leads?
Think of leads as a company’s lifeline. If they dry up, so does the business. That’s why it’s so essential to pay just as much attention to sales leads as you do to existing customers.
Tracking your sales leads is an important part of lead management. By keeping careful track of leads, you can assess whether your marketing and lead-gen strategies are working, maintain transparency throughout all parts of your organization, and ensure that you’re able to appropriately follow up with every lead in your pipeline. You can also ensure that new leads are being generated all the time, preventing lead stagnation.
Tracking sales leads can also give you some important insights into your business. By tracking leads, you can:
- Make more accurate financial forecasts. Knowing how many leads are in the pipeline can help your organization better estimate its finances down the road, which means better budgeting and resource allocation. This can also help you set appropriate and realistic sales goals.
- Improve sales processes. By tracking leads, you can track one of the most important things about your sales process: Where prospects tend to drop out. This data can help streamline and optimize your entire sales process. For example, if you find that most leads drop out at the proposal stage, it’s clear that potential customers don’t like what you’re offering them. If you find that many leads drop out because no one has followed up with them, it’s an indication that you need better response times.
- Collaborate more seamlessly across your organization. By tracking sales leads in a single template, you can create a single source of truth used across your department. This makes it easier to integrate your sales and marketing teams and allows both teams to use the same set of data to analyze and improve their own performance.
How to Track Sales Leads
Getting started tracking sales leads can be overwhelming, just because there’s so much to consider. Follow the steps below to start tracking — and organizing — your leads.
Step 1: Define Your Lead Sources
Sales leads can come from a variety of places.
Whether you use social media, paid ads, organic search, email outreach, cold calling, a B2B contact data prospecting tool, or some combination of those and other lead sources, the first step is to identify and define all the places where your leads may come from. This ensures that all leads make it into your tracking solution, and none fall through the cracks.
Step 2: Evaluate and Choose From Lead Tracking Options
The next step is probably why you arrived at this article in the first place: Evaluating and choosing from all the great lead tracking templates and technologies that exist.
If you’re tracking a volume of customer data, you may need an advanced solution like a lead tracking CRM. These solutions can help organizations overcome storage capacity limits on traditional spreadsheets, as well as automate some of the data entry processes to cut down on work.
For small businesses, though, a CRM may be overkill. It comes with added expenses, and can be complex — especially when a simple spreadsheet or other document is all you need to track your sales leads.
Below, we’ll look at 5 free templates, ranging from simple to slightly more complex, and talk about considerations small businesses should take when choosing the right template to build their lead tracking system.
Step 3: Set Up and Test Your Lead Tracking System
Once you’ve chosen a lead tracking system, implement it and test it out for a while — a quarter should be enough time to get a sense of how it works for your organization.
Remember that an important part of testing your system is sharing it among all stakeholders — so make sure everyone in your organization has access and can use and test the system or take advantage of the data it generates.
Step 4: Nurture Your Leads and Track KPIs
Keep in mind that even if you’re starting with a sales lead tracking template, it should be a living document — you can and should change and customize it based on your own organization’s specific needs.
As you use the template, track lead progression through your sales cycle. See if your conversion rates improve. Track where leads tend to fall out of the process so you can further refine your sales tactics. Compare all these metrics with before you implemented your lead tracking system, and look for what’s improving and what can improve even further.
Tracking KPIs over time will mean you can iterate and refine your sales and marketing processes to turn more leads into customers. This is one of the most valuable parts of having a sales lead tracking system in place — it can provide a wealth of data that can help your organization boost conversions.
What to Track in a Sales Leads Document
What to track in a sales lead tracker is entirely up to your organization.
Every template will be different. Some are simple. Some are more complex, using things like formulas to track and compute different data and metrics.
However, at the very least, when tracking sales leads, you’ll need the following information.
Basic Lead Information
First, you’ll want to include basic information about each lead. This should include:
- The company name.
- The name of your contact at the company.
- Your contact’s position within the company.
- A link to the company’s website.
- The source of the lead.
- A section for comments or notes, in case there’s anything else you’d like to add about each lead.
Lead Contact Information
In addition to basic information, you’ll want to include contact information for every contact you have at each lead. If you’re using a spreadsheet template, this can be easily imported from a browser extension prospecting tool like Datanyze.
In this section, you’ll want to include each contact’s:
- Email address.
- Phone number.
- Direct mailing address, including city, state, zip code, and country.
- Fax number, if you have it.
Lead Communication Log
And finally, to generate metrics that can help you assess the quality of your sales process, you’ll need a communication log for each lead. This should include:
- The date of last contact with the lead.
- A description of the next action you need to take to move the lead forward.
- A planned date for the next contact with the lead.
- Any other notes on the status of the lead.
Tracking Sales Leads: Excel Templates, Google Sheets, and More
Ready to see some great free options for tracking sales leads? These templates should help you get started — but remember, they’re just that: A starting point.
5 Free Templates for Tracking Your Sales Leads
- Excel Sales Lead Tracker: This no-frills sales lead tracking template for Excel comes straight from Microsoft Office. We like that it includes all the basic lead information you need, plus areas to forecast monthly revenue; however, this template is very simple and straightforward, leaving plenty of room for your organization to customize it to fit your specific needs. Since it comes straight from the company that makes Excel, you can expect it to work seamlessly if that’s your lead-tracking program of choice.
- Sales Lead Tracker for Excel or Smartsheet: This tracker is a great alternative to a CRM for a small business, and also includes tracking for prospective sales value. Another great feature is that this spreadsheet can be used with Excel or Smartsheet, a collaborative spreadsheet tool.
- Hubspot Free Lead Tracker: Hubspot is an inbound marketing giant, so it makes sense that the company would offer a great sales lead tracking template. What we love about this template is its flexibility — it can be used for Excel or Google Sheets, or as a PDF. What’s not so great about it is that while it is free, it’s gated, so you’re required to provide contact information to Hubspot’s marketing team to use it.
- Leads and Opportunities Tracking Dashboard Template: This sales lead tracking Excel template goes a step further than just the data — it comes prebuilt to turn your lead data into eye-catching graphs and charts that show projected revenue, opportunities by stage, leads by source, and other metrics. If KPI tracking is your top priority, this might be the sales lead template for you.
- Lead Generation Dashboard Template: This is another sales lead tracking template that’s made into more of a dashboard, allowing users to visualize the success of different lead sources. This is a great template to use if you want to identify your most successful lead channels and track their growth against sales goals.
Feed Your Sales Leads with Datanyze
Once you have a tracking and organizing system in place, all that’s left to do is keep it supplies with a steady stream of sales leads. To make that even easier, use Datanyze.
Datanyze is a free Chrome extension that lets you easily find direct emails addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn users. With just one click, Datanyze can also provide other valuable information — like the size of the company someone works for. New features are being added all the time that will further streamline the prospecting process and help small businesses source high-value new leads.
Ready to give Datanyze a try? Sign up free today.
