The Life Cycle of a Lead: Distribution

Once you have a nurturing program developed, you are ready to distribute those hot and warm leads to your sales people. Determining who gets the leads is often a manual, time consuming task which tends to cause the wrong sales people to get the wrong leads.  Sirius Decisions has found that, on average, a company will distribute 15% of their leads erroneously. Due to the time it can take to get the right leads to the right people, potential customers feel they are being ignored and often find a competitor to buy from.

It’s important to target the distribution to the appropriate sales person or team, but the complexities of doing that work often force companies into only using geographic distribution, rather than developing a more intricate distribution system.

When distributing leads to your sales channel, you must:

• Check the quality assurance of leads
• Consistently qualify leads
• Distribute the lead to the correct sales person
• Notify the sales person of the lead
• Record timestamp of the initial viewing of the lead information

It is important, however, to realize that you don’t have to limit yourself to one piece of information in order to distribute. In a more advanced scenario, you may want to rank your dealers by their propensity to sell.  So, those who are ranked in the top tier get 3 times the leads as those in the bottom tier, giving incentive to track leads and push them through the sales funnel.  You may also want your leads distributed based on a combination of geographic region and vertical.

The best way to achieve all of these points is to maintain an accurate and up-to-date sales channel database.  This will ensure that leads are effectively routed and monitor your sales team’s activity.