Lead Distribution - Lead Management Architecture

Leadorganizer and Lead Management software , we talk about linear lead flow process in our first post and in second post we talk about Lead Generation and Lead Acquisition and Distribution as lead managment software. To continue our talk about leadorganizer and lead management software with reference to our lead flow, we talk about Marketing & Sales Operations and also Communications and Analytics as important part of leadorganizer and lead management flow.

Today we are going to talk about Lead Distribution as part of leadorganizer and lead management software architecture or lead flow.

Lead Distribution

As larger vendors work with partner organizations such as distributors (see distribution (business)), resellers, brokers and other channel partners, those vendors often distribute leads to their respective partners to provide a local contact to those prospects and also 'feed' partners with new business opportunities. Today there are two major methods for distributing sales leads to partners: Push or Pull.


PUSH The push method sends leads to specific partners assuming that those partners will follow up and work on those leads. The challenge with 'push' is the fact that oftentimes the local sales people may not be able to react immediately for various reasons: not available, busy, on vacation... Many large vendors report disappointment when asked about their lead follow-up rate through partners after the leads where pushed out to those partners.

Pull The pull method was invented and patented by a German Engineer, Axel Schultze, who was frustrated with the lead follow up results of the push method and decided to let the available and motivated sales people 'pull' leads from an online available system. Patent was granted by the US Patent Office in May 2006. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=09514997&OS=09514997&RS=09514997

The pull method became widely accepted in the high tech industry where thousands of resellers from companies including Avaya, Nortel, Juniper and others distributed leads that way. The PULL Method became superior over the PUSH method, and lead closure rates grew on average by 300% as white papers from BlueRoads indicate.


Ref: Lead Distribution Software, wikipedia

Leadorganizer-Lead Management Software-1

Leadorganizer as Lead Management Software we have to talk here. Before we go to Leadorganizer.net as Lead management software, let us understand what is Lead Management first. I found follow notes at wikipedia.org.

Lead management creates an orderly architecture for managing large volumes of customer inquiries, or leads. The architecture must be able to organize numerous leads, at various stages of a sales process, across a distributed sales force. In order to understand this process it is helpful to examine a simplified linear lead flow process, such as the following:

• Advertising
• Customer inquiry
• Inquiry captured
• Inquiry filtered
• Lead graded
• Lead distribution
• Sales contact
• Lead nurturing or retention
• Sales result
  

The lead flow process can become enormously complex as customers and sales professionals begin to interact. These various interactions and subsequent actions can create a variety of scenarios, both productive and counter-productive. This exponential number of scenarios can provide for numerous opportunities to mishandle leads in such a way as to reduce their value. Managing these scenarios is the function of lead management.