How To Track Customer Acquisitions:

There are six stages the customer has to go through: Visitor->Prospect->Activated User->Customer->Active Customer->Loyal Customer.

• Each stage that a customer goes through is preceded by a specific action.
• The effectiveness of each stage needs to be tracked and optimized with conversion metrics.
• For products that have free trials, it’s crucial to track ‘Activated Users’. This metric is an important checkpoint for measuring intermediate steps between the ‘prospect’ and ‘customer’ stages.
• Companies need to know how often customers use their product/solution and how much value they derive from it.

Whereas the customer lifecycle is driven by customer actions and tracks how they experience the product and company, the ultimate goal of the sales funnel is following specific actions, processes, and workflows to track and optimize the sales process effectiveness.

Questions that your sales funnel has to answer:

• 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?

• The common mistake companies make is creating too much awareness content and not enough educational, selection, and training content since it requires more resources.
• Educational content impacts almost every step in the customer lifecycle and sales funnel. 
• While marketing should own content strategy, it is critical to have your sales and customer success teams participate in the content strategy formulation and content creation. As you noticed, content strategy spreads through each step of the customer lifecycle and the sales funnel.

• Content strategy is only for the marketing team
• Not creating a clear positioning and story
• Starting with content before creating target customer profiles
• Focusing too much on awareness content and not enough on educational
• Not taking content distribution seriously
• Giving up too quickly.