How to improve your CRM lead tracking

CIO - In almost any CRM system, there's a field in the leads object that indicates the source of the lead. In most systems, that lead source field is carried along as the lead is converted to a contact and an opportunity. Clean — simple — and wrong.

The reason? People and businesses don't buy because of one ad, or one Web site view, or one white paper. All transactions are the result of a sequence of interactions, and the most profitable deals will involve a complex series of e-mail, phone, and Web "connections" between you and the customer. So a single field with a simple text value can't represent that history. Whether you store the first "touch" (the source) or the last (the trigger event) in a lead source field, you're misrepresenting what happened and giving too much credit to whichever value you stored. Pipeline impact reports will give misleading or even silly results.

CRM Definition and Solutions

So a key first step towards real customer relationship management is to track each "touch" of the customer or prospect as a separate record. In the case of Salesforce.com, the record is called "campaign members," and most CRM systems will have a similar object. The campaign member object typically contains pointers to a campaign and to a lead or contact, and contain a few of its own fields (such as status and response date).

In B2B companies, it's not at all unusual to have at least one outbound e-mail a month to every lead or contact in the system. And hopefully there will be some customer response, such as registering for a Webinar or doing a download. Every single one of these actions or responses is recorded as a separate campaign member "event." If you've got long sales cycles or long-running customer relationships, a contact's campaign history can grow to 100 records or more. This gives your sales reps tremendous insight into the state of the customer's knowledge (and hopefully the evolution of their interest/attitude) before they pick up the phone.

More importantly, these records provide the basis for much more intelligent CRM automation. Each lead and contact will have a more detailed profile, so marketing can segment them better. You also have a record of what each individual has done over time, so your marketing automation system can do a much better "behavioral scoring" of the lead for filtering and prioritization. If you have a customer support solution-suggestion system, it will have much more complete keywords to narrow the documents it suggests in your customer self-support portal.

Since the right thing to do is move all your existing "lead source" information into the "campaign membership" object, you will need to have a campaign for every possible lead source. This is straightforward for things like e-mail blasts or advertisements which are already structured like campaigns. But what about lead sources like "customer referral" or "inbound phone call?"