You will be able to keep a sheet that shows where your leads come from and which sources lead to meetings.
Count your leads by source at each stage of the sale, then move your prospecting time towards the sources that turn the most contacts into real conversations. A small spreadsheet is enough to do this.
Most sellers can tell you confidently where their best clients come from, but few can prove it. Memory favours dramatic events, such as a big deal that came out of a trade show or a weekend spent calling through a list. It forgets the quiet sources that send a steady trickle of good clients all year. A lead source scorecard is a small spreadsheet that counts your leads by source at each stage, so you work from a count and stop relying on memory. After a few months it shows where your time is paying off and where it's being wasted.
Make one row for each source you use or have tried. Typical rows are referrals, your network, website enquiries, events, a particular list, LinkedIn outreach and walk-ins. Keep sources separate if they behave differently. "Events" is too broad if one industry meetup works for you and general networking doesn't, so give each of them its own row.
Across the top, add five columns in this order:
Found: every name the source gave you. Contacted: how many of those you actually reached out to. Replied: anyone who answered at all, including a polite no. Met: had a real conversation about their situation, by phone, video or face to face. Bought: became a customer.
Each column should be equal to or smaller than the one before it. If a number goes up from one column to the next, you've counted something twice, so go back and check that row.
Go back three months. Use your CRM if you have one. If you don't, work through your email and messages, and use memory only when nothing else is available. A rough count is fine, and an estimate such as "About twenty from my network, maybe four meetings" is far more useful than an empty row.
Mei is a seller, and one of her sources is food and beverage events. She spent half an hour going through her inbox and calendar and filled in five rows. These are her numbers (invented figures, and not a benchmark for your own market):
Referrals gave her 6 found, 6 contacted, 5 replied, 4 met and 2 bought.
Her network gave 25 found, 20 contacted, 9 replied, 4 met and 1 bought.
Website enquiries gave 18 found, 18 contacted, 12 replied, 5 met and 1 bought.
Food and beverage events gave 15 found, 12 contacted, 5 replied, 3 met and 1 bought.
A bought list gave 300 found, 120 contacted, 4 replied, 1 met and 0 bought.
Add a sixth column for met divided by contacted. This met-per-contacted rate is the share of people you reached out to who turned into a real conversation. It's the fairest way to compare sources of different sizes. Judging sources by how many leads they produce can mislead you, because a source that produces many leads but few meetings takes up the hours you meant to save by using it.
Mei's rates put referrals first, with 4 meetings from 6 contacts, about two in three. Website enquiries come next with 5 from 18, a bit under one in three. Events and network are close together, at 3 from 12 (one in four) and 4 from 20 (one in five). The bought list produced 1 meeting from 120 contacts.
Ranked by leads found, the bought list looks like her best source. Its 300 names are more than four times all her other sources put together, which total 64 (6+25+18+15). In practice it took the most time, 120 contacts, and produced one meeting and no sales. Referrals produced only six leads, and four of those six became meetings.
With numbers this small, treat each rate as a hint. Mei's four meetings out of six could easily have been two. Before you act, look for a clear gap, such as one meeting from 120 against four from twenty, and give little weight to a difference of a few percentage points between two sources.
None of this means Mei should stop everything else. She has been getting referrals by accident and needs to ask for them on purpose, and Lesson 2.2, "Referrals as a lead source, briefly", shows how to do that.
Under the sheet, write one sentence naming the source you'll do more of and the source you'll drop or cut back. Mei wrote: "More referral asks and faster replies to website enquiries; stop using bought lists."
Set a recurring monthly calendar reminder to update the counts and reread the sheet. Each month, move effort towards the two sources with the best rate of meetings. Also keep a small amount of time for testing one new source, because without a test the scorecard can only confirm what you already do.
Later you can add columns such as hours spent or revenue per source. Start without them, since five counts and one rate are enough to make a better decision than most sellers make.
A finished scorecard has one row per source and five counts per row, going down from found to bought. It also has a met-per-contacted rate, three months of history, and one sentence naming the source to grow and the source to drop, and the whole thing fits on one screen.
The activity below asks you to build yours now and fill it with your last three months. You'll reuse these numbers in module 7, when you work out how much activity your target needs each week.
Set up the scorecard in a spreadsheet, fill in your last three months, and write one sentence saying which source to do more of and which to drop.
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