It seems as though the fight between the marketing team and sales team is never ending.

However, there is a simple way to bring these teams together and it has to do with a waterfall.

A waterfall graph, that is.

A waterfall graph compares your actual daily lead flow to your daily lead goals. This allows everyone to see lead progress on a daily and monthly basis. Plotting your actual progress against your sales goals allows you to see if you are reaching or falling behind your lead goals.

Read our ebook “10 Reasons to Hire and Inbound Marketing Agency” to learn how an inbound marketing agency can help create and track your lead progress.

Steps to Creating a Waterfall Graph

Define your goals:  It is very important that the sales and marketing teams meet to go over previous sales goals to establish realistic future sales goals. If you know your visitor-to-lead and lead-to-customer conversion rates from the past you can set realistic goals and expectations each month. Once you establish your monthly goals, take the total number of sales goal for the month and divide it by the number of days in the month to predict how many sales you should make daily.

When discussing goals, make sure to talk about not only how many leads you are targeting, but what defines a qualified lead as well. The marketing and sales teams should be aware of which leads develop into qualified leads to push down the sales funnel.

Decide what you are going to measure: Now that you have specific goals in mind you can measure the quantity of leads that you generate, the quality of each lead or both. You can track how many visits and contacts come from your content, as well as how many leads and qualified leads you gain.

Set your goals: Since the marketing team has discussed with the sales team their definition of what a “true lead” is and which leads “count” towards your goal you can figure out your specific sales goals and conversion rates. Setting a goal for the total number of leads is simple. For example if 5% of your leads become customers and you need 10 new customers next month then you need 200 leads to reach your goal.

Create a daily leads Waterfall Graph

Now you have defined the leads you are targeting and have the numbers you need for your business to strive monthly. The next step is to track the progress you are making to reach these goals by creating a Waterfall Graph.

Put the days of the month on the x-axis and the percentage of leads goal you have attained on the y-axis. Graph your ideal leads line and then track your actual lead flow daily on a new line. If you are a HubSpot customer, this graph is automatically created for you. If you are not you can use an Excel template to create and maintain your graph.

How to Interpret your Waterfall Graph

The waterfall graph will show you where to focus your marketing teams attention. The goal line shows what the sales team needs in order to meet their goals and make sales and the actual line shows how well the marketing team is doing at generating leads for their sales team.

If your actual leads line falls under the leads goal line then you are not meeting your goal and are at risk of letting down your sales team. When this happens you need to invest time into generating additional marketing offers, produce more blog content, increase your social media engagement and overall increase the amount of inbound marketing you are doing.

If your actual leads line falls above the goal line you are ahead of your sales goals! This allows time to plan for future plans. Take this time to create content for future months. If you already have things scheduled you may want to save them for the next week or month in case your numbers start to decrease.

Create Your Own Waterfall Graph

Are you interested in creating your own waterfall graph to track the leads and sales your company is making. Contact IMPACT and learn how we can help!