You will produce a sheet that shows where your leads come from and which sources turn into meetings.
Ask most sellers where their best clients come from and they will answer with confidence. Ask them to prove it and they go quiet. Memory favours the dramatic: the big deal from a trade show, the weekend you spent calling a list. It forgets the quiet source that sent a steady trickle of good clients all year.
A lead source scorecard replaces that memory with a count. It is a small spreadsheet, and after a few months it tells you where your time is paying off and where it is leaking away. In this exercise you build it, fill it with your history, and make your first decision from it.
Open a spreadsheet. Make one row for each source you use or have tried: referrals, your network, website enquiries, events, a particular list, LinkedIn outreach, walk-ins. Keep sources separate if they behave differently. "Events" is too broad if one industry meetup works and general networking does not, so give each its own row.
Then add five columns, in this order: leads found, contacted, replied, met, bought.
Found is every name the source gave you, and contacted is how many of those you actually reached out to. Count anyone who answered at all as replied; a polite no still counts. Met means you had a real conversation about their situation, whether by phone, video or face to face, and bought means they 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, something has been counted twice.
Go back three months. Use your CRM if you have one, your email and messages if you do not, and your memory when nothing else is available. A rough count is fine. "About twenty from my network, maybe four meetings" is far more useful than an empty row.
Here is Mei's sheet after she spent half an hour with her inbox and calendar. The figures are her example, not a benchmark for your market.
Referrals: 6 found, 6 contacted, 5 replied, 4 met, 2 bought Network: 25 found, 20 contacted, 9 replied, 4 met, 1 bought Website enquiries: 18 found, 18 contacted, 12 replied, 5 met, 1 bought Food and beverage events: 15 found, 12 contacted, 5 replied, 3 met, 1 bought A bought list: 300 found, 120 contacted, 4 replied, 1 met, 0 bought
Add a sixth column: met divided by contacted. This is the share of people you reached out to who turned into a real conversation, and it is the fairest way to compare sources of different sizes.
In Mei's example, referrals turned 4 of 6 contacts into meetings, about two in three, while website enquiries managed 5 of 18, a bit under one in three. Events and her network sat close together at one in four and one in five. The bought list produced a single meeting from 120 contacts.
Now look at the bought list again. On the "found" column it is the biggest source on the sheet by far: 300 names, more than four times everything else put together. If Mei judged her sources by how many leads they produce, it would look like her best. In practice it took the most time of all, contacting 120 people, and produced one meeting and no sales. So a source that produces many leads but few meetings eats the hours you meant to save with it.
Referrals are the opposite. Only six leads, but most of them turned into meetings. The lesson for Mei is not that she should stop everything else. It is that she has been asking for referrals by accident, and lesson 2.2, Referrals as a lead source, briefly, shows her how to ask on purpose.
With small numbers, treat the rates as hints. Four meetings out of six could easily have been two. What you are looking for is a clear gap, such as one meeting from 120 against four from twenty, not a difference of a few percentage points.
Write one sentence under the sheet: which source you will do more of, and which you will drop or cut back. Mei's reads: "More referral asks and faster replies to website enquiries; stop using bought lists."
Then put a recurring monthly reminder in your calendar to update the counts and reread the sheet. Each month, move your effort towards the two sources with the best rate of meetings, while keeping a small amount of time for one new source you are testing. Without a test, the scorecard only ever confirms what you already do.
Over time you can add columns, such as hours spent or revenue per source. Start without them. Five counts and one rate are enough to make a better decision than most sellers make.
A finished scorecard has one row per source, five counts per row going down from found to bought, a met-per-contacted rate, three months of history, and one sentence naming the source to grow and the source to drop. It should fit on one screen.
The activity below asks you to build yours now and fill it with your last three months. You will reuse these numbers in module 7, when you work out how much activity your target needs each week.
Build the scorecard in a spreadsheet, fill in your last three months, and write one sentence on which source to do more of and which to drop.
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