How to track lead source in your CRM

Tracking lead source means one field on every enquiry, chosen from a short fixed list, filled by the system wherever possible and by a person only where it cannot be. That is the whole design. What makes it fail is the walk-in nobody logs and the call answered on a personal mobile. Then three people fill the field freely, until the biggest value in the report is Other.

One field, a fixed list, no free text

Use a dropdown with ten to fifteen values, not an open box. Free text produces "Google", "google ads", "GADS" and "Google Ad Words" as four separate sources, and no report can repair it afterwards.

Keep three things in three fields rather than crushing them into one:

Source is where the person came from: Google search, Google Ads, Meta, IndiaMART, JustDial, referral, walk-in, hoarding, exhibition, existing customer, telecalling, WhatsApp.

Campaign is which piece of work it belongs to, with a month in the name, such as 2026-09-dasara-offer.

Detail is the specific thing: which hoarding, which exhibition, which staff member gave the referral.

One person owns the list of allowed values. Everyone else picks from it, and new values are added by asking rather than by typing.

Capture it automatically for the three channels where you can

Website forms. Hidden fields on every form capture the campaign tagging from the address, the page the person landed on and the page they submitted from. The customer sees nothing. Nobody has to remember anything. If you run Google Ads, capture the click identifier in the same way so orders can be sent back to the platform later.

Phone calls. Give each medium its own number, and let the CRM record which number was dialled. This is the only honest way to attribute a hoarding, a radio spot, a pamphlet or a van campaign, and it costs very little. The number on the hoarding must not be the number on the website.

WhatsApp. Use a separate click-to-chat link per channel, each with its own pre-filled first message. When the message arriving says "I saw your offer on the Magadi Road board", the source has attributed itself.

Everything captured this way is worth more than everything typed by a person, because it does not depend on a busy afternoon.

The ones you have to ask for

Walk-ins, referrals and calls to the main line carry nothing. For these, ask once, early, and make it easy to answer.

At the reception desk or on the intake form, put the same short list on paper and ask the person to point at one. Ask at the start of the conversation, while the customer is still filling in details, and not at the end when everyone wants to leave. A clinic that asks a patient at registration gets a usable answer. The same clinic asking after the consultation gets "internet".

Keep that answer in a field called reported source, separate from the tracked source, and never let one overwrite the other. When the two disagree, you have learned something: it is how you find out that the hoarding is producing searches that the search report is claiming as its own.

Lock the first source, and stop people editing it

The single rule that prevents most of the damage: once a record is created, its first source field is read-only for everybody.

Without that rule the field drifts. A salesperson reopens an old enquiry for a second order and changes the source to "existing customer". A manager retags a batch during a review. A new record is created for a customer who already exists, and the original source disappears from the count.

Add a separate last source field that updates freely if you want to see what the person touched most recently. Report on both. A business that reports only on last touch will eventually cut the outdoor and social spending that was creating the searches it is congratulating itself on.

Duplicates are a lead source problem in disguise

The same buyer fills your form on Tuesday, calls on Thursday and walks in on Saturday. Three records, three sources, one customer, and your cost per enquiry now reads a third of the truth.

In India the practical key is the mobile number, because email addresses are missing, shared or typed wrongly far more often. Set the CRM to flag a match on phone number at creation. Then write one merge rule everybody follows: the surviving record keeps the earliest first source and the newest contact details.

Why Other grows, and the ten minutes that stops it

Once a month, count enquiries by source and look at two things: the share sitting in Other, and any value that has appeared for the first time.

Other above roughly a tenth of your enquiries means the list is missing something real. Read the last twenty of those records and the missing value is usually obvious, such as a channel partner's staff passing enquiries on, or an old pamphlet still in circulation.

A new value appearing means somebody was allowed to type. Fix it while it is twenty records rather than at year end when it is two thousand.

What this field pays for

With it, you can say what an order from each channel cost and stop the one that is expensive. You can tell the sales team which sources are worth calling back twice. You can answer the question that decides next year's budget: where did our best twenty customers actually come from, by name, rather than by anyone's impression.

Without it, every media argument in the business is settled by whoever speaks with most confidence.

Lead capture and lifecycle management is the service that sets this up, including the hidden fields, the numbers and the merge rules. The free audit looks at whether the CRM can be trusted in the first place, which is a fair question in most businesses and an uncomfortable one in a few.

What to do next

Open your CRM, group last month's enquiries by source, and count how many are blank or Other. That percentage is the honest size of your reporting problem, and it is usually the reason two people in your business have completely different opinions about which advertising works.