How to track leads from every channel and know which ones pay

Every year, somebody from IndiaMART or JustDial rings about the renewal, and every year the owner of a small business makes a decision worth tens of thousands of rupees on a feeling. “The leads have got worse.” “We get a lot from Facebook.” “JustDial is useless now.” Sometimes the feeling is right. Often it is not, and there is no way to tell.

Knowing which channel pays is not complicated. It needs one habit — recording where every lead came from — and one sum done once a quarter. This post covers both.

Step one: tag every lead with a source

The source is the answer to: which piece of marketing brought this person to us? It has to be recorded when the lead arrives, because nobody remembers three months later.

Some rules that keep the data usable:

• One source per lead. If a customer saw your Facebook ad and then searched for you on JustDial, pick the one that brought them in first, and be consistent about it.
• Where they found you, not how they contacted you. A WhatsApp message is a way of contacting you. The source is whatever made them message — the ad, the listing, the neighbour.
• Keep the list short. Five to eight sources. “Google”, “Google search” and “website” as three separate labels will ruin the report.
• Ask phone callers. “How did you hear about us?” is a normal question. Ask it on every new call, and write the answer down.
• Keep the original source on repeat enquiries. A customer who first came through a referral and rings again a year later still came from the referral.

Leads that arrive automatically — from IndiaMART, JustDial or your website form — can be tagged without anyone typing, if they come straight into your CRM. The ones that need discipline are phone calls, walk-ins and WhatsApp messages. See connecting IndiaMART to your CRM for the automatic side.

Step two: record what each lead became

A source tag on its own tells you where enquiries come from. To know what pays, you also need the end of the story: did this lead become a paying customer, and for how much? That means marking leads won or lost, and putting a rupee value on the ones you win. If your team already keeps a pipeline, this is already happening; if not, tracking a sales pipeline covers it.

Step three: the quarterly sum

Here is the arithmetic, with an example. The numbers below are made up for illustration; your own will be different, which is the whole point of tracking them.

Imagine an AC sales and installation business in Hyderabad. Over one quarter it spent money on four channels and also got referrals from past customers:

Now divide spend by leads, and spend by customers:

What the example shows

Cost per lead is the wrong number to decide on

On cost per lead, Facebook looks as good as IndiaMART and three times cheaper than Google ads. On cost per customer, it is the most expensive channel by a distance. It produced the most enquiries and the fewest sales. And it has a hidden cost the table does not show: someone had to call 150 people to find three buyers.

Google ads look the most expensive per lead. Per customer, they sit close to IndiaMART, and the jobs they bring are larger. Judged on cost per lead alone, the owner would have cut the wrong channel.

Referrals deserve a budget of attention

Fifteen leads, seven customers, no spend. The action here is not to “do more referrals” in the abstract. It is to ask every happy customer, at the moment the installation is finished, whether they know anyone else who needs an AC — and to tag those leads properly so the number stays visible.

Check what counts as revenue

Revenue is the simple version. If one channel brings mostly low-margin work, compare gross profit instead. And if customers from one channel tend to come back for AMC contracts, their value is higher than the first invoice suggests.

Doing it without a spreadsheet habit

Most owners will not maintain a separate marketing spreadsheet all year. The minimum that works:

1. Tag the source on every lead, every day.
2. Mark leads won or lost, with a value on the won ones.
3. Once a quarter, write down what you spent on each channel — the invoices are in your accounts — and do the two divisions above. It takes half an hour.

Do it before any renewal date, and the renewal becomes a decision.

Tracking sources in Enkay CRM

Lead management in Enkay CRM records a source on every lead. Leads pushed in from IndiaMART, JustDial and your website enquiry form are tagged automatically. For leads you add by hand, you pick from the same list: IndiaMART, JustDial, Facebook & Instagram, WhatsApp, Phone call, Website form or Added by hand. Facebook and Instagram lead ads do not flow in automatically yet (they are waiting on Meta’s approval), so those enquiries are added by hand with that label.

The dashboard shows leads by source, and on the Business plan the lead sources report shows win rate by source. Spend is not stored in Enkay, and there are no custom source labels, so for finer splits — referrals as against newspaper ads, say — put the real source in the lead’s requirement or a note, export leads to CSV (available on every plan) and do the quarterly sum in Excel.

Frequently asked questions

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