Sales Lead Management as a Tool for your Lead Management Process
Lead Matching: Most lead management processes in indirect sales focus on lead generation and lead scoring. What is often forgotten: The best leads are a lost labor of love if they don't find their way to the right partner. A plea for accurate lead matching mechanisms in lead nurturing.
The correct allocation of leads in Lead Matching
Not all people are the same! This also applies to sales partners. There are large organizations with several hundred employees - or the lone fighter. Both are important for the manufacturer: The small ones, because they usually work with fewer manufacturers, are grateful for every lead and can work extremely agile. The large ones because they can handle customers with complex challenges and have more resources.
"Soft" sales criteria
And yet it happens regularly: leads go to the wrong partner. A concrete example? Anyone who has ever configured a car online and then sent a request for a test drive is familiar with this: after a long time, a car dealership gets back to you - if at all. But it doesn't have the desired car available for a test drive at all. A classic case of false lead matching!
Therefore, it is even more important to categorize partners according to certain criteria before lead distribution:
Partner size: How many and what resources are available to the partner?
Area: How big is the area he "works"?
Experience: How good is he at upselling or cross-selling your products?
Certification: What training or certifications has he received?
"Hard" sales criteria
In addition to these "soft" criteria, there are the "hard" sales criteria. In short: How strong is the respective partner in terms of sales? And how likely is it that he will close the deal? You can roughly identify three partner groups:
The high performers are those who turn about 15-20% of your leads into customers. For them, you are an important strategic partner. You have intensive and established contact with them and maintain it regularly.
The moderate performers: They have lower conversion rates, but the potential to achieve more. Contact with them is rather casual.
The weak performers: They have low conversion rates. They hope for easy "take-home" business and cannot or do not want to invest more in collaboration. Contact with them is rare.
Of course, these categories are not rigid. But still, almost in all indirect sales organizations 20% of the partners make more than 80% of the sales.
Why Lead Matching is the key to your success
Partners change, grow or reorient themselves. Your task remains to distribute requests to the perfectly fitting partners. A ten-man company overwhelms a huge global project. A small project with little sales expectation, on the other hand, will not be taken seriously by a large sales partner or probably not even touched. In both cases you are the loser! Because only very rarely does the customer remember the "wrong" partner, but almost always the manufacturer.
So there is not only the risk of losing the business, but above all of producing image damage.
That's why it's important to "route" leads by profile and performance data. Each lead should have a profile (industry, company size, required skills, location, etc ....) and each partner (skills, partner level, close rate, etc.) should have a similar profile.
Only requests that match each other are offered to the partner.
Only those who distribute their leads via digitally measurable methods can also react automatically to threshold values. Partners who are particularly active and successful could, for example, receive more or better leads. This requires integrating partners into their lead management process. Which lead could be developed into a customer? What caused the deal to fail? How quickly did it close? In this way, real-time control is possible. And by control, we don't just mean knowledge of the return on marketing investment (ROMI), but knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of each sales partner. Thanks to this knowledge, each sales partner can receive customized marketing and sales support from the manufacturer. This creates a closed loop!Your leadtributor team