Show notes
Where are your best leads coming from? It's an important question, because if you don't know, then it's impossible to know where you can go to get more.
David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the topic of where are your best leads coming from? Welcome back, Jay.
Jay: Thank you. And I'm just going to answer the question. I don't know. (laughing) I'm just...
David: Short podcast. Thanks for listening.
Jay: Yeah, I'm just going to say it straight up.
I mean, I do have some systems. We do try and use Google Analytics and things like that, and that helps a little bit. But I've never done a deep dive yet on this is the source, this is the well or the font of where my best leads have come from. So I'm looking forward to this discussion.
David: This is really a good one to look at and to dive into a bit, because I've always maintained that if you don't know where your best leads are coming from, then you don't know where to go to get more of them, and when you are able to identify it, everything else gets a whole lot easier because now you can go fishing in the same ponds, rather than just trying to put stuff out to anyone and everyone, which is very expensive to do.
You can really tune in and focus in on what people are doing, where they're coming from, how they're hearing about you so that you can go find more of them. In addition to... well, a number of the businesses that I've been involved in over the years, one of them was a retail mail order catalog business that I owned.
And in a business like that, it's absolutely critical to know where your best leads are coming from.
Jay: Mm-hmm.
David: We would run magazine ads and we would get people out of different magazines. We had ads running on television that were designed to get leads for our catalog business.
And every single one of the ads we ran had some sort of mechanism to let us know where they were coming from. If it was calling an 800 number, we had one primary 800 number, but we would give them an extension to ask for. So we'd say, call this 800 number extension 214. Right? And 214 meant that it was coming from this particular TV station or whatever.
If they were seeing something online, there would be specific links that they would click through that would tell us where it was coming from. If it was a magazine ad, it was a similar kind of thing on the back of the magazine, it would say, call this number, dial this extension, or go to this web address, and there would be a slash with a suffix on the url..
Jay: Mm-hmm.
David: And that would tell us where it came from. And when people would call in, one of the first things that our people were required to ask them is, "where did you hear about us?" And there was a box there that they would fill out. Where did you hear about us? Oh, I saw your ad on such and such a magazine, or, I saw your ad on such and such a TV station.
And so we would have the data that the computer said based on what they came in and said, and then we would also have the data corresponding with whatever the person said. So I was pretty pathological about it, and to this day I'm still very pathological about determining where leads come from. Even now when, you know, at the end of this podcast, when you say, how do people find out more?
And I give out a link that link tracks back to the podcast, it lets me know that the people who register on that link, Came from the podcast. And if they're coming from some other ad, then it's going to have a different code and that sort of thing. So it's not that hard to do when you discipline yourself to do it.
And most people don't do that until and unless they realize how m...
David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the topic of where are your best leads coming from? Welcome back, Jay.
Jay: Thank you. And I'm just going to answer the question. I don't know. (laughing) I'm just...
David: Short podcast. Thanks for listening.
Jay: Yeah, I'm just going to say it straight up.
I mean, I do have some systems. We do try and use Google Analytics and things like that, and that helps a little bit. But I've never done a deep dive yet on this is the source, this is the well or the font of where my best leads have come from. So I'm looking forward to this discussion.
David: This is really a good one to look at and to dive into a bit, because I've always maintained that if you don't know where your best leads are coming from, then you don't know where to go to get more of them, and when you are able to identify it, everything else gets a whole lot easier because now you can go fishing in the same ponds, rather than just trying to put stuff out to anyone and everyone, which is very expensive to do.
You can really tune in and focus in on what people are doing, where they're coming from, how they're hearing about you so that you can go find more of them. In addition to... well, a number of the businesses that I've been involved in over the years, one of them was a retail mail order catalog business that I owned.
And in a business like that, it's absolutely critical to know where your best leads are coming from.
Jay: Mm-hmm.
David: We would run magazine ads and we would get people out of different magazines. We had ads running on television that were designed to get leads for our catalog business.
And every single one of the ads we ran had some sort of mechanism to let us know where they were coming from. If it was calling an 800 number, we had one primary 800 number, but we would give them an extension to ask for. So we'd say, call this 800 number extension 214. Right? And 214 meant that it was coming from this particular TV station or whatever.
If they were seeing something online, there would be specific links that they would click through that would tell us where it was coming from. If it was a magazine ad, it was a similar kind of thing on the back of the magazine, it would say, call this number, dial this extension, or go to this web address, and there would be a slash with a suffix on the url..
Jay: Mm-hmm.
David: And that would tell us where it came from. And when people would call in, one of the first things that our people were required to ask them is, "where did you hear about us?" And there was a box there that they would fill out. Where did you hear about us? Oh, I saw your ad on such and such a magazine, or, I saw your ad on such and such a TV station.
And so we would have the data that the computer said based on what they came in and said, and then we would also have the data corresponding with whatever the person said. So I was pretty pathological about it, and to this day I'm still very pathological about determining where leads come from. Even now when, you know, at the end of this podcast, when you say, how do people find out more?
And I give out a link that link tracks back to the podcast, it lets me know that the people who register on that link, Came from the podcast. And if they're coming from some other ad, then it's going to have a different code and that sort of thing. So it's not that hard to do when you discipline yourself to do it.
And most people don't do that until and unless they realize how m...