Awesome 17hats Features - Part One: Lead Sources

I love 17hats. I use it to run most of my day to day business operations. I have also helped so many of my clients to set up and optimize their 17hats accounts.

But even as an experienced user, there are still features I discover or learn more about all the time!

One newer feature that you may not be taking full advantage of is Lead Sources. I recommend setting this up, because it can be a great marketing tool for your business!

Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting it up and using it to benefit your business:

Listen to the audio:

Why should I use 17hats Lead Sources?

Whether you are new to 17hats or you are an experienced user, Lead Sources is a fairly new function that you may not know about or you may not have taken advantage of yet. 

So what exactly is this function? When you go into your 17hats account, under Leads you will now see a Reporting function. This is where you can add your Lead Sources. 

In the past, as part of your lead capture form or maybe as a question that people were filling out when they were booking an online scheduling appointment with you, you may have had a question about how they heard about you and your business. 

The way that these questions were set up previously is that you would manually add in the different options for ways they might have found out about you and then this would populate to the referral source in their contact. 

Lead Sources is a more sophisticated way to do this, and it comes with reporting. 

Instead of manually setting up those lead sources when you create the question in your lead capture form or your online scheduling form, now you're going to create set Lead Sources for anything across 17hats and 17hats is going to track which contacts connect to which lead source, so that you get a report. 

This report is really handy, because it's going to tell you where your leads are coming from, so you really know where to focus your attention, where your marketing is working, and where you might either want to rethink your marketing strategy altogether or beef things up a little bit. 

You may find that there are referral sources that aren't doing anything for you at all, so you may not want to use them anymore. Or you may want to pay special attention to certain areas. You may find out that most of your leads are coming in via word of mouth, so you may want to work on other referral sources that are more consistent. 

These reports give you so much information that you can use for marketing and promoting your business. 

The nice thing is you set up the Lead Sources once, you just add this question to your lead capture forms or your online scheduling. 17hats automatically populates the information so that you don't have to manually add in all of the options every time. 

You can always go in and edit the Lead Sources at any time if something changes. 

Set up Lead Sources yourself

So, want to know how to set these up yourself? 

Start on your 17hats dashboard and click the arrow next to Leads on the left.  

You'll see you've got your Leads, your Lead Capture forms, and Reporting. We're going to go to Reporting. 

If you have not set up your leads it will be blank like this and we're going to add a source (see image below).

You can name them whatever you like, according to what makes sense for your business. This could be things like “personal referral”, “web search”, or “social media”.

You can make these Lead Sources as specific as you’d like. For example, if you want to track leads coming from a specific event, you could add that as a source.

Let’s say you are in a specific Facebook group, a particular directory, a networking group, etc. - you can use any labels you’d like. Get as specific and creative as you want to with this. 

You could break social media down into specific sources, like Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.I choose to do “social media” as one category, but that’s just what works for me. Choose the number and specificity of Lead Sources that work for you. 

It really depends on how specific you want the information to be and how many Lead Sources you want on there. I would generally recommend six to eight at most, because at that point it just gets overwhelming for the person scrolling through it. However, do what's going to work best for you and your business. 

More Lead Sources features

You'll see that you also have Inactive Lead Sources and Archived Lead Sources.There's little dots to the left of each of the sources you just set up. This means you can click there and drag them. So you can drag a source and make it inactive or you can drag it and archive it. 

For example, let's say that there is a particular conference that you attend every year and you get leads from it. You will want that Lead Source to be active around the time of that conference, but then maybe you don't need it again. You could move that to inactive and then you can move it back to active when it's that time of year again. This way it won’t appear in your Lead Sources list when you don’t need it.

However, let's say you are running a one-time promotion or something like that. You want to track the leads from that source and then you're never going to use it again. Then you could move it to archived when you're done with it. 

Using Lead Sources reports

Once you have your lead sources set up and you have actually been using them for new contacts, your reporting will show up here on the main Lead Sources page. 

It will show you your acquisitions by source, so basically where your new contacts are coming from. You can also adjust the date range if you want to look at a specific month or a specific period of time. If you use Quick Select, 17hats will let you select from common date ranges like monthly or quarterly. 

Now, you'll see here that there's also a Referral List tab. Using the instructions in that tab, you can track specific people who are referring new leads to you. These would be personal referrals or word of mouth referrals - whatever term you want to use.

(I do this by opening the contact created for the new lead. Under referral source it will say “personal referral”. Next to “personal referral” I add the name of the specific person who referred them. This then shows up in the report in the Referral List tab in Lead Sources). 

This allows you to know if past clients or other people in your network are giving you referrals, in case you want to send them a thank you, a gift, etc. 

It’s also great just to know who is actively promoting your business, because those are people you want to maintain a good relationship with! 

Lead Sources and your lead capture forms

How do you set up these lead sources in your actual lead capture forms? 

Go to your lead capture forms and either edit an existing form or create a new one. Once you have your Lead Sources set up, when you go to add a new question to a lead capture form, you will see that Lead Source is a new question option. 

Whatever Lead Sources you set up are going to automatically populate as the options for this question. If you need to change any of the options for this question, you will have to go back to Lead Sources and change it there.

You will also see that you can add a specific contact tag or project tag for the different Lead Sources if you wish.  

Add the question that you would like associated with these Lead Sources. I usually use something like "How did you hear about us?" 

I also like to make this a required question, because I want to know how people heard about my company and whether my marketing is working, but that is a personal preference. 

Once you are finished setting up this question and any other questions on your lead capture form, hit Save and the form is now ready to go. Leads filling out this form will be shown the different Lead Source options and pick the one that best applies to them.

Using Lead Sources with online scheduling

If you were setting up a new service in online scheduling, it's going to be the same as adding Lead Sources to a lead capture form. 

You would create your service as normal and then you would add a service question and select Lead Source (as shown below). 

If people are booking an appointment with you, such as a consultation, and they are NOT filling out a lead capture form, this is a good place to ask this question so that you are still getting this information. If they are already filling out a lead capture form before they book an appointment with you, it is not necessary to have this question here, because they will have already answered it. 

I hope this has helped you understand how to set up Lead Sources for your business in 17hats and why they are useful for you to have. 

If you have any questions about setting this up or using it, please let me know down in the comments or feel free to reach out.