Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience
Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience

The Right Customer To The Right Support Staff

Step One

The first step in the leads integration and management process is to get the customer to the right support staff.  You start this process by identifying the sales coverage for every known account.  Identify these customers by Company name, company email domain, and physical location.  Your reporting system will harvest these direct account coverage lead events and ship them directly to the sales organization for follow up.

 

There is a caveat to this hand off where you need to have an agreed upon threshhold where a contact event becomes a lead.  You may have an obvious stage where a contact becomes a qualified lead where your sales team will yank it out of your hand but if not, be sure to work through the details and agree with your field team what consititutes a qualified lead.  The basic concept is to filter your events and follow up engagement until you reach a level of confidence on the leads that you gather.  Those that exceed this threshhold are passed on to sales with the expectation that they will be followed up.  The level of this qualification can be reached through many ways (emails, purchases, verbal contact) but the choice of what has a high enough level of confidence has to be agreed with field management so they will follow through quickly on these engagements.  There is nothing worse than identifying a valuable customer, providing it to a sales person, and then having the sales person ignore the customer, losing the potential sale.

 

Step Two

Next, understand who in sales owns the physical territory accounts.  These are the accounts that are not large enough to be covered by dedicated sales but are covered through some combination of regional sales and distribution.  Here the key issue is to keep regional sales in charge of the delegation of the qualified leads to their regional distributors.  This will give regional sales control and help them benefit from the ownership of this marketing information stream.

 

Step Three

The final phase is to identify which of your distributors are best in each physical territory.  This one can be the toughest.  Most distributors will have a centralized call center resource for lead follow up and qualification.  They will want all of your leads poured in there for efficiency purposes.  I have seldom seen success from this approach.  I prefer gather the customer contacts and to enable each regional sales person to identify which one of their local distributors is the best lead pursuit partner on a quarterly basis.  Reward that distributor with the leads for the quarter.  Track and metric the progress on these leads to the regional sales manager.  They will make the most of this "carrot" each quarter and will use it to keep their distributors working aggressively for you.  This gives it a bit of a contest appeal and the lead flow is a reward for good support.



 

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This Web site is aimed at capturing some of the basic concepts I use when creating integrated marketing programs and leveraging the internet.

 

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