Last week I met with a potential B2B client who has been fortunate to have her product accepted by a major distributor in her category. Phone calls and new orders have begun to come in, which is very exciting! However when I asked her how most people were finding her, she did not know the answer. So I suggested the most basic, most inexpensive research she could do: Keep a list. The few data points a week she’ll be able to gather won’t be immediately useful. But over time the information will help her begin to see patterns and learn things about her business and the effectiveness of different business development efforts. I recommended that she keep it simple and make a spreadsheet with columns for things like: – Date contact received – Person’s name – Company – What they were interested in – How they found out about her product – How the lead came in (phone? email?) I’ve done lead tracking for Argentum using this methodology since 2006. Naturally, it took 11 months before I could calculate a rolling 12-month average of leads in, but after almost 8 years, I have a really robust data set! And along the way this simple spreadsheet has enabled me to get a strong sense for where my leads come from, and that helps me better focus my business development activities. Are there any basic metrics you track for your business?