6 steps to Managing leads with sales partners.

Posted on 23. Nov, 2011 by Duncan Macdonald in Channel partners, CRM, Lead Management, Lead Management Blog

If you are using an indirect sales model, utilising reps, dealers and distributors then you will be familiar with the problem of managing leads within this channel.

- Leads issued to the wrong person or wrong partner

- Poor response times

- Lack of follow up

- No link between marketing and bottom line sales

For these reasons sales channels are often left wanting, and no one knows what marketing investment and the leads produced deliver as a return.

Yet with a planned approach and the right tools it is possible to dramatically increase the effectiveness of your sales channels – Here is a 6 step guide to managing leads with an indirect sales channel.

Step 1 – Define sales goals for the channel

Knowing and agreeing what you want to achieve is an important step but should be more than a top line figure. You should agree with the sales channel what the goals are and get it written down.

• What is the overall goal of the program?
• Increased sales? Obvious and certainly key but should not be your only goal
• Exposure to new markets?
• Exposure to new territories?
• What is considered success? Increased lead quantity, quality, opportunities created or sales volume.

Step 2 – Understand what defines a Channel lead

Unless you only sell through a sales channel then you’ll need to define what a channel lead looks like. There are 2 sides to this, one of which will be based on your view of what constitutes a lead worthy of sales involvement and then of those, what determines channel involvement.

• What is considered a Lead worthy of sales involvement?
• How will the lead be qualified?
• How is the lead graded?
• What profile of leads go to partners and which are managed direct?

Step 3 – Create business rules to allocate leads

In order to ensure the best return from your leads, ensure that the effort in creating leads is not wasted, you will need to have an understanding of what your sales channel can do for you. You need to create a profile that includes:

• What rules will dictate the leads they are responsible for?
• Geographic
• Product specialists
• Market specialists
• History with certain accounts
• Who within a channel partner will take responsibility for the leads?
• Previous success within markets or accounts?
• Volume of leads they can be expected to reasonably handle?

Step 4 – Workflow/expectations

Agreeing what is expected and how it will be done will provide a workflow for sales partners – without, sales channels will drift, do what they have always done and leads will go cold.

Equally important is communicating the expectations with the channel. Make sure you have the following covered or it will not get off the ground.

• What response time to a lead is expected?
• What follow up is expected?
• What feedback is expected from channel partners?
• When does a lead become a qualified opportunity?

Step 5 – Infrastructure

The nuts and bolts of supporting and managing sales channel leads comes down to how efficiently you handle the flow of leads from generation, passing responsibility to the partner and then creating a close loop..

Doing this by email, by spreadsheets is not going to cut it and with more than a handful of leads will become a logistical nightmare. The key is to set it and forget it, automate the process as much as possible by using lead management software that can address the following.

• How will the lead be captured?
• Can we set up automated lead distribution rules?
• How will the lead be distributed/sent to the channel?
• Can we provide access to the full lead details and history?
• How will the feedback be recorded?

Step 6 – Metrics and Accountability

Evaluate the success of your lead and channel programs, is an area that causes vendors much frustration. By hook or by crook most will be able to get the leads to their channel in some way. What proves difficult is getting the feedback in order to evaluate the relative success.

Part of this lies in having the infrastructure in place to implement the previous point but equally you need to define what is important to measure. Below is listed a range of metrics, but to start with it is sensible to select just 3 key areas to get you going.

• How many leads have been generated for the channel?
• How many have been followed up?
• How many converted to opportunities?
• How many were lost?
• What is the win/loss ratio?
• Why were they lost?
• What is the average time to close?
• What is the total Pipeline value?
• How many sales were made?
• What is the total revenue?

Where possible these metrics should be applied to each partner individually to see how they compare. That way you can see who is and who is not performing.

B12Leads is an online lead management tool to capture, distribute and convert leads. Everything you would expect from a CRM tool but with a focus on keeping track of leads and your sales teams. An affordable solution that has everything you need to take control of your sales pipeline.

Tags: Customer relationship management, Lead management, Sales process