Managing Lead Distribution

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A simple lead is virtually anyone who became interested in what you were offering. With the use of a specialized software, this lead is collated along with other leads for further processing and analysis. A grading system is automatically applied to the leads after they filled up some forms or were called by customer support. Correct lead assignment will give you good customers who will be willing to pay for your goods in return to your great service.

Distribution

Statistics have shown that a lot of people bought answering machines so that they can accept messages while they were not around and to screen off frequent but unwanted calls from a telemarketer. This is actually what happens when a bad lead distribution system is used. You resort to extreme measures that will only drive away customers.

You will be amazed how an effective lead distribution system increases your potential and real sales. The customer was approached by your salesman and had agreed to try your products. Or, possibly, a prospective customer read your ad while surfing the Internet and thought that your products look interesting. Your system picks these leads and directs this to your customer service who will evaluate the leads with the help of your software. Your representative will then follow up on the customer’s interest on your product. Always, when the merchant is too eager to sell, he calls up the customer and bugs the latter to buy the product; definitely, this will have a very negative effect on your customer. This is not what would happen if you had a good lead distribution process.

With proper lead distribution procedure, the business, especially the sales agents, can accomplish the following:

1. Eliminate the possibility of having stale leads. This means that there will be no leads that will remain not called by the sales agents in the span of a week or more. Otherwise, you will not be able to build on the curiosity of your customers, particularly those who are highly interested, and you would lose them.

2. Set predetermined criteria for each. Each leads will be classified using the criteria or standards set by the company. Those that match closely will be the first ones to be called. Normally, these are the leads that are very easy to convince.

Routing

After you have identified your customer’s needs and followed up the leads, lead assignment will take you to the next very important level in your business process: lead routing. This will ensure that the customer will get his product on time. How so? If you have an effective lead routing system, you will automatically learn where your prospective customer is located. Identifying from which state he is located can help you direct his calls to the nearest support team available. The team will be able to handle his queries fast. This is because the lead routing process will allow you to set where to direct customers’ replies or orders to the correct key personnel.

Do you have a branch near your customer’s location? Lead assignment to that branch will add to their sales while making sure that what your client was supposed to buy can be delivered at the soonest time possible.

Also, with correct lead routing, you will know where in your process flow your customer and his product order belongs. This ensures that a product scheduled for sending to UK will not be sent to the United States; some of their states/cities might possibly have the same names. You can also track your lead and, later, his items. That way, when he calls, which he possibly do, you can tell him where exactly the sold item is at. Had it been dropped off for courier pick-up, or was it an invalid buy? Proper routing will let you know the details.

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Assigning and Distributing Leads: The Importance of Lead Distribution and Lead Routing

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When you talk about marketing strategies that work, generating leads is one of them. While this is indeed a tried-and-tested strategy for a lot of companies who wish to generate favorable results when it comes to marketing and generating revenue, getting the right leads to the right people at the right time can be somewhat tricky. Lead distribution can be a bit choppy if you do not know who to get the leads to and who should handle the follow up of such a lead. There are a few ways of going about lead routing or handing out leads to the right sales agents who will then use these leads to the advantage of the company or the client.

One of the most used lead routing techniques is the round-robin system. While this is the simplest of all lead assignment strategies, it is not the most effective by far. The round-robin system basically gets the generated lead to any of the available sales agents as soon as the lead gets in. This means that you may not be getting the lead to the most effective agent you have and thereby could waste the lead that was generated. This can also be the fastest way to get leads attended to but may not be the most sales effective way for you to go about it. The upside of using the round-robin strategy when distributing leads to your people is the potential of finding out who your most effective people are.

Another way you can do lead distribution is by using the FIFO and LILO system. First in, First out and Last in, Last out system of lead distribution is a process where you take care of the leads that came in first and have them handled first before you handle the next ones. This is a pretty cut-and-dried way of handling leads, and while there may be pitfalls in this technique at times, where you cannot distribute your leads efficiently and you may have to trim off the aging leads that your team cannot handle in the quickest possible time, this is still considered a very effective lead for a lot of companies.

Lead assignment techniques that are also being used by a lot of businesses also include giving out the bulk of the leads to your top producers or to your best agents. This is a pretty good technique to use when you are thinking in terms of revenue alone, but the downside of such a marketing strategy is the stagnation of some of your sales agents. This may become a sore point for your company and may be detrimental to the company’s welfare in the long run. The idea of handing out the most leads to top agents or the top performers of your team can lead to creating dead weight, whereby the agents who do not produce do not learn how to become top producers themselves. Mentoring or pairing off top producers with these rather slow-producing individuals can help create a more balanced workforce that is more effective and more income generating in the long run.

You can also use the hunt group method when handing out leads to your agents. This is similar in a way to giving leads to top producers with the difference being that the leads are handed out to the first agent that finishes a previous lead handling job. This also shows who the faster agents are, although not necessarily the most effective. You may need to monitor the success of the agent during the transaction to determine if the number of leads they handle is equivalent to the number of successful leads they handled.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com