What can it mean?
- 78% of buyers purchase from the company that responds to them first.
- You are 21 times more likely to qualify a lead within the first thirty minutes
- However, the average B2B response time is 42 hours, and around half take up to 5 days to respond!
It sounds simple enough; if I get my partners to increase their lead velocity I’ll win. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. How do you ensure that the lead is actioned in a manner that meets your KPI’s you strive for when it comes to a partner engaging with a lead?
Lead Velocity
Lead velocity requires it to be in the hands and actioned by your partner. If you are using email and spreadsheets to get leads to partners you’re already starting from a deficit as we discussed above. If you’re trying to extend your CRM to your partners, not only are you paying for it you’re probably aware they don’t want another piece of technology to adopt, but we’ll also talk about that later.
Your partners thrive on receiving leads but only to a point. Leads that are qualified as sales ready should be identified as such and carry a sense of urgency and hence a faster velocity KPI should be implemented. Leads that are considered marketing qualified still require a reach out will have a more nurturing velocity.
But here’s the thing – velocity is both action-based, and perception-based. What we mean by that is the act of lead acceptance itself should have a sense of urgency as well the action of attempting to contact the prospect.
Creating a sense of acceptance urgency is key, and from experience, we can tell you that a spreadsheet with a list of leads does not create acceptance urgency. Acceptance urgency is created by ensuring an agent commits to a lead you provide to them by accepting it. If they do not within a given time, the lead needs to be offered to another agent either within the same partner or with another partner entirely.
Capturing Real-time Field-level Pursuit Data
This is a marketer’s and channel manager’s dream. Get real time feedback from the partner agents pursuing the leads that you generate. It’s one of the key pillars to success and achieved by providing an automated mechanism to obtain pursuit feedback from initial contact, stage of pursuit, to closing and lost lead analysis.
Direct field agent feedback in real time allows you to hone your marketing programs and understand the value of each dollar your spending based on sell through and quality, increase your competitive advantage with your partners, and provide pipeline visibility now – not 3 months later.
Too often program success is determined by canvassing partners post program completion and largely manually. If your partner provides updates electronically, again it’s usually post program. The right PLM platform will track field level pursuit success by campaign and lead type ensuring you have the entire picture as the program proceeds.
Automated pursuit capture that is easy and non-intrusive is critical. With Lead Assign we do this be creating simple action items that are triggers for field input customized to each lead type and sales cycle. The feedback capture is literally a couple clicks and highly intuitive. And we can guarantee your partners will provide you the pursuit data.
Ensuring your Partner Ecosystem uses your PLM
Every company, including your partners have existing technology and software stacks. Their own CRM, their own apps, all with logins and different access protocols. Adding another to their current stack to handle your leads can be a challenge. That’s why Lead Assign’s lead offer and acceptance platform uses standard tools they already use – a browser, SMS, and email. There is no login required or app to download. This architecture decision and implementation was critical to ensuring adoption.
There is another adoption “secret sauce” strategy that is specific and exclusive to Lead Assign and how you can ensure not only adoption but granular Partner Performance Tracking. We call it the Partner Performance Score.
Knowing the importance of your leads, the value you attach to them, and the trust you put in your PLM decision we built a proprietary algorithm to ensure that all your leads are intelligently routed to the best partner. The components that make up the Partner Performance Score are:
- Acceptance
- Pursuit data provided
- Adoption
Using the Partner Performance Score to determine who should receive your leads is 100% configurable setting for your deployment. It can be used from the start or at any point in the program’s life or not at all. The built-in dashboard gives a high-level overview of your sales reps’ activities. It shows managers and directors their agent’s current performance score based on leads that were either accepted, declined, or ignored, and the status of the conversion tracking feedback.
Enabling your partners sales to close sales successfully is no easy task.
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