How To Track Customer Acquisitions:

There are six stages:

1. Visitor. This includes everyone who lands on your website.
2. Prospect. When a visitor signs up for a free trial or downloads something, they become a prospect.
3. Activated user. This stage is activated by delivering the core value unit for the first time.
4. Customer. A prospect/user becomes a customer when they pay.
5. Active customer. An active customer regularly uses your product and receives value and installs habits of using your solution.
6. Loyal customer. When a customer renews or signs up for additional features.

Questions for your sales funnel: 

• How does your team prioritize leads? 
• How does your team nurture prospects? 
• What prospect actions correlate higher with closed deals? 
• How long does it take for your SDR team to reach out to leads that reach a qualifying lead score? 
• How long is your sales cycle? 
• What metric best describes the efficiency of moving prospects from one stage to the next? 
• When and how do your team hand off prospects in the funnel? 
• Do you have an onboarding plan? 

• Outbound leads are carefully targeted accounts that may have never heard about the company. Cold calls, direct mail, sending messages on social media are all part of the outbound channel.
• Inbound leads are created when prospects submit information in exchange for an asset or sign up for a free trial.
• Marketing qualified lead (MQL). Lead nurturing campaigns can help the marketing team qualify leads.
• Sales qualified lead (SQL). Use the BANT framework for the qualification process. (BANT= Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe)
• Opportunity. A lead becomes an opportunity after the BANT approach. 

Marketing-to-Sales Handoff. 

Marketing created tons of leads but sales complains about the quality. 

• Prioritize leads via lead scoring
• Ensure feedback loop between marketing and sales teams
• Experiment with SDRs reporting to the VP of Marketing

Sales-to-Customer Success Handoff.

The customer success team should have a clear customer onboarding plan.

• Bring customer success team to the sales process.

• Agree on definitions. Your customer acquisition playbook should highlight the definitions and terms.
• Agree on the process/workflows. For example, a prospect that hits a qualifying leads score should be contacted by SDR in 48 hours.
• Track, measure and optimize handoff.

Content strategy is vital for the customer acquisition process. The more you educate prospects about their pains, possible solutions, and how your product solves their problems, the more likely you'll close the deal.

• A common mistake is creating too much awareness content. Not enough educational, selection, and training content.
• A balanced approach to content creates greater demand and a shorter sales cycle.
• Educational content impacts almost every step in the customer lifecycle and sales funnel. 
• Your sales and customer success teams should be involved in content strategy. 

• Content strategy is only for the marketing team. Involve the whole company, especially sales and customer success.
• Not creating a clear positioning and story.
• Starting with content before creating target customer profiles. Understand the target customer's goals, daily activities, problems, and values.
• Focusing too much on awareness content and not enough on educational content.
• Not taking content distribution seriously. Build a simple content distribution plan that stretches over 7-14 calendar days.
• Giving up too soon. Ask how to measure content effectiveness? What metrics to track?