Eight Steps to Proper Lead Distribution

Are you sending every lead to your sales team, dealers or distributors? That means the sales team is weeding through a stack of leads that could cause them to complain, “All of the leads that Marketing sends us are junk.” The result? Sales will ignore many of your leads. No wonder research published by Marketing Experiments says that 80% of leads sent to Sales are wasted.

If this is how your company distributes sale leads, it’s time to implement lead distribution best practices to send your sales channels only the leads that have been pre-qualified, ranked and declared “sales-ready.”

A sales-ready lead is an inquiry that has been qualified and ranked by criteria that both the Sales and Marketing departments agree on. A sales-ready lead is qualified and ranked by its likelihood to buy, and this is done before the lead is distributed to the sales team. A good lead management system can also track the product the inquirer was interested in, the media source that generated the inquiry and the length of the sales cycle for a product.

Follow these steps, and your sales people will make more productive use of their time and sales conversions will increase. These steps assume that you will be using a lead management system.

Step 1: Align Marketing and Sales to agree on what makes a sales-ready lead. Your marketing and sales managers need to get together to agree on the characteristics and criteria that define a sales-ready lead.

Step 2: Determine the criteria for lead distribution. Your lead management system should be able to distribute leads based on multiple parameters:

-      Geography: Country, state, county, area code, zip code, partial zip code, or a circumference around a dealer’s location

-      Profile of the lead: Type of product interested in, consumer demographics, job title, company size, budget

-     Sales region

-     Round-robin system

-     Rank/score of the lead: Lower-ranked leads may be routed to the contact center or inside sales for further probing and qualification, while higher-ranked leads go to senior sales people.

Step 3: Determine the number and type of people to receive the same lead. Some sales channels are complex. A sophisticated lead management system can be configured to distribute one lead to more than one party. For example, one lead can be sent to the regional sales manager while the same lead can be sent to a sales person who specializes in the specific product inquired about. Or, a lead can be sent to both a distributor and to the territory sales manager.

Step 4: Define how the lead owner will be notified of the lead. We recommend immediately and automatically notifying a sales person via email when they have a new lead in the lead management system.

Step 5: Define which leads to keep out of the system. There are leads that you don’t want sent to the sales team. These include competitors, your employees, inquirers that are clearly not in your target market or that don’t meet other qualification criteria.  Decide if current customers are potential leads or if their inquiry should be handled in a different way (perhaps distributed only to the sales manager).

Step 6: Re-distribute untouched leads. Define what happens to a lead if a sales person hasn’t touched a lead within a specified period of time. Should it be re-distributed and if so, to whom? What if a sales person rejects the lead — should it go back to Marketing for nurturing?

Step 7: Closed-looped feedback. An advanced lead management system provides management with a view of what happened to the leads and should answer these questions: Did each sales person contact every lead? How many leads were sold? Of those that sold, how were they ranked? Did the higher ranked leads produce more sales? If not, your lead management provider can suggest changes to validate and adjust your lead ranking system. Answers to these questions enable management to make informed decisions.

Step 8: Analyze data. The lead management system should be able to provide a wealth of data for decision-making. Examples: What was the media source of the leads that converted to a sale? Following the implementation of the lead management system, did the volume of leads worked by the sales team increase? If so, the number of leads sold should also increase. If not, managers can make adjustments.

Follow these steps and you’ll see sales increase, and your sales team, dealers and distributors may stop grousing about the leads they receive.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa (May 6, 2010) – SmartLead by AdTrack, a full-service lead management consulting firm, announced that Masco Retail Cabinet Group (MRCG), manufacturer of KraftMaid Cabinetry, has chosen the company to use its web-based systems and processes to manage KraftMaid’s sales leads and execute its lead management programs.

“We have investigated the capabilities and experience of a number of lead management suppliers to best meet our corporate needs and the needs of our dealers. We found AdTrack to offer the best, most comprehensive set of services, tools and expertise to help improve our lead conversion rate and assist our dealers,” says Steve Rogal, Director of Dealer Development, MRCG, Middlefield, OH.

“These days companies need technology coupled with expert advice to garner sales from as many prospects as possible. That’s why companies like KraftMaid choose SmartLead by AdTrack to efficiently capture, qualify, rank and distribute qualified leads to their dealers, and to deliver targeted messages to the right prospects at the right time in the buying cycle,” says Dan Rogers, chief executive officer of SmartLead by The AdTrack Corporation. (more…)