Lead source vs. lead action - the saga continues

When we last left our hero, she was talking about the importance of tracking the true source of leads. Often I find that B2B marketers confuse the "how you found me" with the "what did you do once you did," resulting in lead source values such as GoogleAdwords and Webinar. Now I don't know about you, but generally I don't randomly show up for a Webinar unless I:

1) Saw a banner ad
2) Received an email or printed invitation
3) Cruised someone's website and found the listing
4) Received some kind of information from a friend or colleague

So it seems to be that a Webinar attendees true lead source would be one of the above. OK, now let's move onto the "what they did when they found you" aspect, or what I like to call Lead Action.

Lead action is a handy field which I use to track what someone did once they came in contact. That can be a Webinar Registration, Whitepaper Download, Contact Request, ROI Calculator, or even a Quote Request. If you're using salesforce.com for campaign and lead management, you can easily create a custom field on the leads tab to track this.

You can either make this a field that isn't to be over-ridden with new data, or make it a multi-select field so that each time they do something new, you can update that field. This would enable you to run reports to see of leads with converted information, which lead actions had they completed which could be very useful when determining which types of demand generation offers to go with for your next marketing campaign.