Organizing the channel: sales strategy to optimize lead management

Does your existing partner database hold all of the information you need in order to service your sales partners? Many of our clients only have an accounting database that holds billing information and contacts, but this doesn't help sales or marketing. Which contact at the dealership is responsible for lead management? Who is your contact for sales literature? What if they have a warehouse that you ship to, but multiple locations for sales plus a showroom? You can put as much or as little information into our dealer/reseller database as is needed to fill any gaps in your current partner database and we'll integrate the two systems if necessary.

Lead management software requires data in order to process leads automatically. The three key data elements include territory management, lead/prospecting database and users. The dealer database provides the system users.

A few key features of the database include:

• A full text search allows users to find the location they are looking for and open the record to make changes (as allowed).
• Stored attributes (account type, sub-type, geography and role) that can aid lead distribution and proper ranking on a locator.
• Support of multiple contacts per location plus parent/child relationships that can be edited as needed to show relationships between locations.
• An approval process: all changes within a certain access level are held for corporate approval before they are posted to the locator file.

We offer consulting services with a goal of increasing reseller partner loyalty through a clearly defined channel sales strategy.