Distributor Dilemma: How to stop wasting time on leads

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As a distributor or channel partner, you work with dozens of different manufacturers — maybe as many as 500 — who send you sales leads in various formats on a daily basis.

Some of those leads arrive via email, others in spreadsheets. Your manufacturing partners might even ask you to log-in to their CRM to retrieve their lead data.

To make this lead sharing process even more cumbersome, the leads you receive may not be qualified — missing critical data such as work, email, phone or website information.

Does this hodgepodge of a system sound familiar? It’s no wonder that nearly 70 percent of leads are never contacted. And an uncontacted lead is an opportunity lost.

All told, the typical manufacturer-distributor lead sharing process is far more labor-intensive than it needs to be. The time required to reformat and qualify leads is overwhelming for distributors, especially considering the volume you may be dealing with. Imagine your sales staff spending more time nurturing leads and selling products, and less time trying to track down phone numbers and emails?

For one, you’d be able to contact each opportunity quicker. And we know that faster speed to contact rates lead to higher conversion rates.

So how can distributors make sense of the lead sharing mess that manufacturers often dump on them?

The answer is to develop a process and implement software that streamlines the entire lead management function. This enables your sales team to spend more time selling and less time following up on unqualified leads.

Here are four requirements of an effective and efficient lead management system for distributors:

  1. Data collection. Streamlining data collection is one of the time-intensive and inefficient steps of the process. It’s a lot of work to organize the myriad leads coming from your manufacturing partners. Partnering with a professional services team that can collect all the data from your manufacturing partners and organize them into a consistent database format is a significant time- and money-saver.
  2. Data append. Many of your incoming sales leads may be missing critical contact details as well as valuable market details, such as SIC code/description, company size, website, address, etc. With this information — make sure it’s quick and easy to access — your sales team will be armed with more customer knowledge, which leads to a higher win rate.
  3. Qualify and score. Each lead should be ranked or scored to determine its priority level. That way, your sales staff can quickly determine the highest-value leads that should be contacted first.
  4. Feedback. In your current system, can you quickly and easily share the status and/or quality of every sales lead in your funnel with its respective manufacturer? The ability to do so provides big-picture pipeline visibility and critical lead quality feedback so that both manufacturer and channel partner are working toward the same end.

By implementing a proven lead management platform like LeadMethod, this whole process is simple. When you organize, qualify, and score all your incoming leads in one streamlined platform, your sales staff spends more time closing deals and less time qualifying them.

Manufacturers: How to share more valuable leads with your channel partners

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In a typical B2B or B2C environment, an internal marketing department provides leads — ideally qualified ones — to its counterpart down the hall in the sales department. It’s well known and certainly well documented that the process of sales and marketing alignment is both a challenge and a great source of opportunity. Just try Googling “sales and marketing alignment.” The result is 1.3 million hits. In general, sales folks complain about lead quality and marketers tender to criticize the sales team for poor follow-up.

According to Marketo, alignment between marketing and sales is potentially today’s largest opportunity for improving business performance. When marketing and sales teams unite, they dramatically improve marketing ROI, sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth.

For manufacturers that work with distribution partners, marketing and sales teams face a greater divide — mainly due to the fact that they are not really on the same team.  And communication between these two separate entities during lead generation, handoff and nurturing processes doesn’t take place under the same roof.

Manufacturers generate the leads and pass them off to distributors. Distributors are then responsible for following up and nurturing the lead through the sales funnel. But because systems and process can vary dramatically from partner to partner — and your distributors likely work with numerous manufacturers, including your competitors — the potential for a lead-sharing disconnect is high.

What’s the current status of the lead? Did follow-up take place? When? Was it a quality lead, or does it need more context?

These are critical questions, and the answers can have a serious financial impact on your bottom line.  

A 2017 study by Aberdeen Group revealed that companies that optimize the sales and marketing relationship grow revenue 32 percent faster over those that don’t.

Here are three important steps you can take now to better align your marketing and sales efforts, and to get the most out of the leads you share with channel partners and distributors.

1. Qualify

Just collecting business cards at trade shows or email addresses from some other source is not enough. Qualifying leads requires contextual information to make the leads more actionable for your distributors. Even adding industry, location, or company size by employees or revenue goes a long way toward ensuring your sales partners have access to context.

2. Organize

Be intentional and methodical about how you share leads and how those leads are received and organized. The best case scenario is an integrated system that allows you to easily share leads, and receive feedback on the quality or urgency of a lead.

3. Adjust

Once you have a system established that allows for sales feedback to be easily created and shared, incorporate that information into both your lead generation program as well as revenue expectations and forecasts.  This closed loop information flow is essential, and allows you to continually tune and improve your lead sharing and qualifying process.

Incorporating these three fact-finding steps into your distributors sales model will result in higher win rates, fewer wasted leads and easier deal closing, as well as a happier relationship with your channel partners.

The good news is that they can be implemented with little disruption and, with the right channel lead management software platform, results can be seen in as little as 30 days.

Distributors: 3 fail-proof strategies to improve sales alignment with manufacturing partners

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If you’re a distributor that partners with manufacturers, odds are that a few of them generate and share sales leads with you.

This indirect sales distribution model has numerous benefits for both you and the manufacturer.

You obtain sales leads at little or no marketing expense, and the manufacturer enjoys expanded market share without the time and expense of hiring and training sales force.

Win-win, right?

What should be a symbiotic relationship with a manufacturer, however, can rapidly devolves into something much more chaotic, and much less lucrative.

Distributor-manufacturer relationships frequently struggle to operate within a defined process. Lead qualification criteria, two-way flow of information, and proactive engagement are often woefully lacking, which leads to end-of-quarter sales numbers that are less attractive than they could be.

Common communication-based hurdles like these create serious inefficiencies that can have a serious financial impact. When information for everything from lead status to lead quality isn’t easily seen as it happens by everyone involved — potential sales inevitably fall through the cracks and revenue gets left on the table.

Here are 3 ways to achieve better sales alignment with your manufacturers.

1. Define the process, and then standardize it. Think in terms of both how leads are shared from a single manufacturer as well as how you aggregate and organize them across multiple manufacturers. The key to prioritizing follow-up and tracking progress is a single view of all potential sales leads, regardless of the source.

2.  Determine your shared lead qualification process. Getting this right can be as straightforward as identifying certain industries, roles, or even contact information. Lead qualification can be further improved by enhancing generated leads with additional contextual information like zip code, SIC code, company size and other information that helps you better prioritize and engage the best leads.

3.  Maintain a two-way flow of information. Critical to manufacturer/distributor sales alignment is regular and routine feedback on the quality, status, and other action items on every shared lead. Without this closed-loop process in place, leads more easily enter  no man’s land, where pipeline visibility is nearly impossible.

But I work with dozens of manufacturers — all of which have different processes and systems for lead sharing and follow-up?

Exactly.

The way to bring multiple entities into a single process is to adopt a shared platform. This enables distributors and their manufacturing partners to rapidly and easily share leads and to communicate about lead status and quality.

This proactive engagement approach helps distributors sell more — much more, in fact. You might have heard that portals can bridge this gap, but in reality the opposite is true. A portal or similar “static” destination that requires a log-in typically suffers from underutilization and outdated information. It’s just one more burdensome task to add to the daily laundry list.

By contrast, a push-based notification system that leverages email is a rapid and easy way to communicate the acceptance of a lead or the creation of an opportunity. With it, you can build a hassle-free, and optimized, sales process where everyone benefits.

SaaS companies: 5 platform must-haves that maximize channel sales revenue

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When we think about companies that sell via channel partners, we often think of traditional industrial manufacturers who create a product and then sell that product through distributors or independent sales reps.

It’s not uncommon, however, for Software as a Service (SaaS) companies to operate using a similar model — partnering with value added resellers and other types of channel partners to sell their “product.”

For SaaS companies, leveraging an indirect sales force can be an effective model to both scale your business and to help you expand globally.

The indirect sales pipeline challenge

But no matter if you make tractors or software — the challenges all types of businesses face engaging with channel sales partners are the same. Poor pipeline visibility, disparate lead management systems, little or no communications on lead quality — all stand in the way of maximizing channel revenue.

Since you are not working from the same system, once a sales lead leaves the “four walls” of your business, you’re essentially flying blind — in the dark about the status of the lead, and crossing your fingers that you’ll hit your monthly or quarterly performance metrics.

A shared platform eliminates visibility issues

Whether your indirect sales partners are distributors located in your time zone or value-added resellers (VARS) located across the globe — the key to optimizing your relationship is a common system of communication.

On a shared platform, you can easily track pipeline activities for internal reporting as well as external channel enablement initiatives. You can also create a mechanism for direct partner feedback so you know exactly how “closeable” shared leads really are.

5 platform must-haves

Here are 5 platform requirements SaaS companies should consider when looking to bolster their channel sales efforts. Your platform should:

  1. Integrate into your current workflow
  2. Hide any complexity from your channel partner
  3. Deliver contextual information at the right time
  4. Integrate seamlessly with existing systems
  5. Provide accurate performance data in real-time

Time to value before the end of the quarter

SaaS companies undergoing rapid expansion and growth can benefit from leveraging channel sales partners, since it’s a faster and more economic approach than setting up a whole new shop in a whole new country.

When time-to-deployment is a critical factor, be wary of a large-scale, multi-month systems deployment and on-boarding program.

For companies that want to see a meaningful revenue impact this quarter, look for a platform that can go to work, and produce results, in less than 30 days.

In a channel sales environment, tracking every sales lead is critical to maximizing revenue. Does your current solution make the most of every lead in your sales pipeline?