You will be able to record where each meeting and deal came from.
Wei Ling's manager asked her a simple question at her quarterly review: "Where are your new meetings coming from?" She knew she'd had more meetings this quarter, and she believed both the LinkedIn work and her referrals were helping. But when she looked at her CRM, every new contact was simply marked "new lead," and she couldn't prove any of it.
Without knowing where each lead came from, you can't tell which of your activities is worth the time. This lesson shows you how to record the source of every meeting and deal, with as little effort as possible.
The fix is one field in your CRM or spreadsheet: source. Every new contact gets one value for where they first came from. Keep the list of values short:
Post: they found you through one of your posts. Comment: they first noticed you through a comment you left on someone else's post. Direct message: a conversation you started by direct message after some other engagement, where you can't tell the original trigger. Referral: a client or contact introduced them or gave you their name. Event: they met you at one of your events, either as a client or as a plus-one. Other: anything else, such as cold outreach, a company enquiry or a chance meeting.
Six values is enough. More than that and you'll spend time deciding between them, then stop bothering. If your CRM already has a lead source field, check whether its values cover these, and add any that are missing rather than creating a second field.
Some contacts touch more than one source. A referred contact might also have read your posts. Record the first thing that brought them to you, and add a note if something else clearly helped.
You won't always know the source. Someone who has read your posts for months without ever reacting might message you out of the blue. Your records would mark them as "other," which would undercount your content.
So ask. Early in a first conversation, a simple question does it: "By the way, how did you come across me?" Most people are happy to answer, and the answer is often a surprise. Arjun found that several clients he'd marked as "other" had been reading his posts for months before they got in touch. One said she'd been forwarded a post by her sister, who wasn't even connected to him.
Record the answer in the source field, in the buyer's words if it doesn't fit neatly. Then pick the closest value.
One month of source data tells you very little. A single referral or a lucky comment can swing everything. Over three months or more, patterns appear.
Wei Ling found that referrals brought her fewer contacts than social activity, but more of them turned into meetings and deals. Another seller might see posts bringing in plenty of contacts and few meetings, with comments doing the reverse. Events sometimes produce almost nothing directly while half the referrals come from clients who attended one.
Those patterns tell you where to spend your time, which is the subject of lesson 8.3, Your monthly review and 90-day plan. They're also the answer to the question Wei Ling's manager asked. At her next review, she could show that a meaningful share of her new meetings came from referrals and comments, with names and dates to back it up.
The biggest risk with source tracking is making it too complicated. A field with twenty values, a second field for sub-source, a third for campaign, a rule that every contact must be tagged before you can save it: all of these feel thorough, and all of them lead to the same place. You stop updating it, or you pick values at random to get past the form, and the data becomes useless.
One field, six values, filled in when you first record a contact. That's it. If you need more detail on a particular contact, use the notes.
The goal is a habit you'll keep for months, because the value only shows up over months.
You don't need to wait for new contacts to start. Your last ten new contacts are already in your records, and you probably remember where most of them came from. Tag them now. Where you're not sure, check your messages, your tracker from lesson 4.4, Run your comment-to-meeting pipeline, and your referral tracker from lesson 6.4, Build your referral system.
In the activity below, you'll add a source field to your CRM or spreadsheet and tag your last ten new contacts.
Add a source field to your CRM or spreadsheet and tag your last ten new contacts.
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