The 80/20 Guide to Using Lead Sources Effectively

Of all of the topics I have spoken on and taught about over the years with Infusionsoft, Lead Sources and using them effectively, is still my favorite topic. Why? Because of how powerful and impactful it is in your business, but also because it is so brain dead simple to do!

Another big reason why I love teaching and talking about it is because so few Infusionsoft users are doing this right! I have audited 100’s of Infusionsoft apps over the years and I can tell you I’ve not found even 2% of them that do this correctly.

Why is that so important?

Because we’re talking about ROI and knowing your numbers — the two most critical things you must understand as an effective marketer and businessman (or woman). If you don’t know your ROI of your advertising and don’t have objective, reliable data in place to track your numbers, then you’re flying your business blind and that is a recipe for going out of business.

I know that, in this marketing world we live in, people want to know the “hacks” and the “shortcuts” and the clever ninja tricks that will make them money while they sleep, yada, yada… so why am I writing you about the most boring subject possible in Infusionsoft?

Simple. Because it will make you money, and, after all, isn’t that the sexiest of all hacks?

If I were CEO of Infusionsoft for a day…

The very first thing that I would do would be to require that every web form you ever created would have to have a Lead Source on it — it would be a required field. 

Why?

Because Lead Sources should be required! The single most important step you can take towards understanding what is and what is NOT working in your marketing, is to use Lead Sources properly and actually tracking their ROI. There’s absolutely no excuse with Infusionsoft for not knowing exactly what your leads are costing, what your customer acquisition cost is and which advertising platforms work the best for you.

Sorry to be candid, but that is the truth. Infusionsoft has all of the tools built in to give you push button realtime ROI reporting — you simply have to implement them. Let’s continue and you’ll discover how.

The second thing that I would do is to remove the annoying behavior where Infusionsoft automatically puts the referring website into the Lead Source field if you don’t specify one, creating a huge mess for you to have to deal with later! Look, you must understand this simple principle — garbage in, garbage out. If you allow garbage lead source data to enter into your system, then there is no way you can expect to have beautiful and accurate reports coming out — life just doesn’t work that way.

So you have to understand how Infusionsoft works. It’s actually trying to help you. Infusionsoft makes the assumption that if you didn’t put a lead source on your web form, that you really wanted one and so it tries to give you the best information it has — the referring site — and it automatically creates a new lead source and uses it. Ugh. Thanks Infusionsoft, but no thanks… I wish we could simply turn that behavior off, but we can’t.

So, how do we keep it all clean?

It’s pretty simple. We need to inventory our lead sources first and get them organized the way we want — that’s a whole separate blog post in and of itself. But, once they are cleaned up, we want to make sure that every web form has a lead source on it.

Then we want to monitor our leads coming in for a couple of weeks and make sure that they all have appropriate lead sources. The easiest way to do this is to simply setup a dashboard widget that shows you today’s leads. Then you can simply click on it, pull up the leads, and spot check them to make sure they have a lead source set properly.

A better, more automated way to do it…

You know I’m an automation geek, so check it out, here’s a much more elegant way to do it.

  1. Create a Hook It Contact Helper with MyFusion Helper. This is a brand new Helper that we released that notifies you whenever a new contact is created in the system from any source — even manually added contacts and API created contacts.
  2. Create a decision diamond that checks if there is a lead source. If there is, great, do nothing. However, if no lead source exists, then have it send you an alert.

By putting this simple little check in place, you can monitor that everything is working properly after you first get things set up. There’s nothing worse than spending a couple of days getting things all cleaned up and then forgetting about it for a couple of weeks, only to come back and check and see another big mess.

By monitoring it like this, you’ll be able to nip it in the bud and keep your lead scores and tracking dialed in from day one!

Okay, this concludes part one of this guide. In next week’s continuation, I’ll go into detail of how to use Lead Sources to give you push button ROI reporting. If you’re not already, make sure and subscribe below so you don’t miss out on the next installment of our Tuesday Tips!

Nick Kulavic
 

Nick Kulavic is the Co-Founder of MyFusion Solutions and the Lead Developer. Basically he's the wizard behind the curtain of all things MyFusion! :-)

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