How to Track Inbound Referrals

So you have the whole tracking process down for analyzing Marketing Generated (Website, Advertising, etc.) and Sales Generated (Calls by Sales) leads.

And then some weird leads start popping into your reports that you are not sure how to analyze. You do a little analysis and find out these are referral leads. Where do these fit?

The Referral Lead

Let’s dive a little deeper into referral leads and the challenge with tracking them. For this post’s purposes, a referral lead is a lead that is referred to your Sales rep by another person.

For example, let’s say an inbound Google ad lead named Jon White requested an eval and is tagged as “Marketing Generated”. Marketing has invested in that lead and wants to track its success through the system. Now the tricky part…Sales calls the lead and is told Jane Smith is actually the best person to work with. Sales then enters Jane into the system manually which usually defaults to “Sales Generated.” Jane is then converted to an Opportunity.

In this scenario, the marketing investment tracking would be lost for future success since Jane is the person being worked. Jane is arguably miscategorized as “Sales Generated” when she is actually something else. Plus, Jon is orphaned from the success as he is tossed to the side.

The Solution – Set Process with the Sales Reps

Sorry, there is no great automated way to track these leads. You must establish a process and train your reps on what they need to do when a referral lead comes their way.

Here is one solution but feel free to customize for your own organization. The below is simple to implement and sounds straight forward. However, changing behavior for a Sales rep takes time.

  • For the newly created lead that comes from a referral, the rep must pick “Referral” as the Lead Source upon creation. This choice then brings up two dependent values in the CRM.
    • Generated Source: The rep makes a decision of “Marketing Generated” or “Sales Generated” based on the lead. In our example, Jane would get a value of “Marketing Generated” because the original lead came from Marketing. If the original lead came from an outbound calling campaign, the rep would enter “Sales Generated.”
    • Lead Source Details: The rep then fills in some information on how the referral came into the system.  For Jane, the rep would enter something like “Referred by Jon White-Google Adv.” You could try coming up with a naming convention for reps to follow but be happy if they fill in anything.
  • If an opportunity is created, the rep should also add the original lead to the opportunity in order to capture the influence of the Advertising contribution.

Your New Referral Insights

Following the above process properly places leads into the “Marketing Generated” and “Sales Generated” buckets. Additionally, marketing gains insight into how many leads are referred in this manner while also tying in the influence of the original lead.

If you find referrals are playing more than a minor part in your Sales process, you may want to take the next step of providing additional incentives for reps to build out accounts as part of an overall account-based marketing strategy.

Example: December Referrals

  • Referral by Jane Smith-Advertising
  • Referral by Cindy Black-Webinar
  • Referral by Tom Sullivan-Website

If you are tracking referrals differently, please share some of your best practices in the comments below.

Thanks to Jen Perkins over at Motus for submitting this question. If you have a question you would like answered, please email jcoveney@revenginemarketing.com.

The post How to Track Inbound Referrals appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.

Your marketing technology experts.

At Digital Pi, we use technology to connect revenue to marketing efforts. We fuse marketing strategies, processes, data and applications to make marketing technology solutions work for clients' businesses.

Learn More
Share this resource
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Tags

Cookies help us keep the site running smoothly and inform some of our advertising, but if you’d like to make adjustments, you can visit our Cookie Notice page for more information.