Lead management is the process of capturing leads, tracking their activities and behavior, and educating, qualifying, and engaging them until they are converted into loyal customers. Prospects can fall out of the funnel at any time, for any number of reasons, meaning you wasted energy. Lead management is a critical tool to limit the amount of leakage and increase the ROI of your partner marketing campaigns. In this blog, we will explore the significance of lead management from a PRM perspective and discuss some of the must-have lead management features of a good PRM software platform.
Distributed CRM Integration – Make sure your PRM software platform integrates with your CRM application, so that users can share and manage the contacts between both platforms. Remember, partners won’t use tools or resources that are inconvenient to use.
Lead Generation Tools– No matter how much a prospect may show interest, you need to make it easy for them to take the next step. In many cases, they won’t do it on their own. Lead generation tools, such as landing pages, lead-capturing forms, emails, and print brochures, are avenues you can provide to make it easy for a prospect to take that next step.
Opportunity Management Tools – Once your channel network has generated a sizeable number of leads, you will need a way to separate high and low-quality leads. Within your pool of high-quality leads, you will need a way to distinguish ‘sales-ready’ leads from those still in need of nurture and engagement. Makes sure that your platform gives partners an easy way to flag sales opportunities while giving the channel vendor an easy to analyze these opportunities at a glance.
Lead Nurturing Tools– These tools can help you stay in touch with leads through every stage of the sales funnel. They analyzes lead behavior, estimate levels of interest and engagement, and then assign leads to the most appropriate nurturing campaigns.
Lead Routing Tools – This refers to the assigning of a lead to a partner based on pre-set parameters specified at the corporate level. These parameters include location, zip code, expertise, partnership levels, or other attributes as specified by the company. Remember, assigning a lead to the partner most familiar with their particular needs and expectations increases the likelihood that the lead will close.
By recognizing the importance of lead management within the broader PRM framework, vendors can help partners drive more revenue, faster.
