Generating leads is only half the battle – the other half is to connect them with the product or service they are looking for while sending them on the conversion path. Whether web or call leads, your consumers will only bring you profits if you distribute them to the best-matching internal sales rep or advertiser.
Phonexa’s lead distribution software does exactly that – it matches leads to whoever can help them best based on the customer data collected throughout the customer journey and your customized lead distribution strategy. As a result, all your leads receive tailored experiences, granting you more conversions.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before elaborating on the value of lead distribution software, let’s shed light on the intricacies of the lead distribution process.
Lead Distribution 101
As strangers land on your website, you ask them to provide personal data – for example, a phone number or email address – in exchange for value (for example, a free subscription). Those accepting the offer become the leads you must tackle ASAP.
Why ASAP?
Well, timing does matter. Contacting a web-submitted lead within the first five minutes is 2,000% more efficient than reaching out to the same lead in 30 minutes.
This is when lead distribution kicks in!
- A lead distribution system connects leads to your internal sales department or a third-party company – an advertiser – based on the customer data, your lead distribution criteria, and the buyer’s requirement (the required type and number of leads, price per lead, etc.).
Lead Distribution Methods
Lead distribution isn’t the same with all companies, having enough flexibility to reflect the needs and wants of the involved parties: the lead, the lead buyer (advertiser), and the lead seller (publisher).
- The lead is willing to instantly connect to the product or service they seek while getting tailored experiences.
- The advertiser is willing to purchase leads of a specified type, quality, price, and amount.
- The publisher is willing to sell leads at the best price to a relevant buyer (relevancy matters: publishers won’t risk their reputation in exchange for immediate profits).
If you generate leads for yourself, the distribution process involves your sales reps only and other departments your leads might be willing to contact.
Proper lead distribution means configuring the optimal conversion path for your leads. In practice, you will proceed from your customer segmentation and business capabilities when developing the routing system for your leads.
Here are the most popular lead distribution methods:
Availability-based (round robin):
Connecting a customer immediately with an available sales rep makes the most sense for a homogenous audience (for example, if you sell car insurance in Florida to Floridians). For heterogenous leads, though, the availability-based distribution may hamper the quality of service.
Performance-based:
Prioritizing your top agents is a great distribution strategy for your most profitable leads, as you will likely convert more of them than using any other lead routing model. At the same time, you will have to sacrifice the progress of other agents and may even face a risk of discord in your sales team.
Location-based:
For national and international businesses, distributing leads based on location – for example, country or state – can increase the conversion rate, as leads will always get a knowledgeable agent on the other end. The other similar lead distribution models include language-based and timezone-based distribution.
Buyer’s size:
The buyer’s size can become a factor if you sell leads to several advertisers or an affiliate network. That said, you must also consider the buyer’s relevancy not to risk your reputation.
Free pick:
Letting your sales reps or advertisers cherry-pick the leads they want to get creates an open market where participants compete for your leads. All things equal, whoever offers the higher price gets the lead.
More often than not, it makes sense to combine several distribution methods, especially for large businesses. For example, you may use a different lead distribution strategy for late hours to give your top-performing agents extra rest if needed.
The Role of Software in Lead Distribution
There are only two ways to distribute leads – manually and automatically – with the latter being the only viable one in the current business realities. If you have more than a few customers daily, you need lead distribution software to connect your leads to the right sales reps and provide the latter with customer insights so they can secure the purchase.
Lead distribution software usually comes as part of a lead management system that includes lead tracking and analytics. Via real-time data exchange, such a system enables close-to-perfect lead management at all touchpoints, smoothly moving customers to conversion.
The Advantages of a Lead Distribution System
| Scalability | Distributing leads instantly to the most appropriate sales rep keeps your pipeline running no matter how many leads you process at any given time. With a well-designed lead distribution system, your agents will always be able to handle the offered leads. |
| Automation | Automating your lead distribution process saves time, increases customer engagement, enables timely communications, and opens upselling opportunities. Likewise, automation eliminates distribution mistakes, ensuring your leads get where you want them to. |
| Sales Reps’ Performance | Unlocking valuable customer insights – demographics, psychographics, history of purchases, and more – timely put an agent in the driver’s seat of the conversion process while saving the consumer’s time. |
| Fair Lead Market | A lead distribution system ensures all parties of a lead market get a fair deal by enabling multiple ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ filters. For example, as a lead supplier, you can choose what type of leads you want to sell to what advertisers and how much you want to get per lead. |
| Reliability | Assigning leads to the right agents consistently, timely, and without mistakes will grow your reliability in the eyes of your customers and business partners. |
| Unification | By giving each department access to real-time insights on customer interactions and purchases, you can coordinate the efforts of your marketing and sales teams, resulting in personalized customer experiences and more sales. |
Improve Your Business With a Lead Distribution System
Incorporating leads distribution software into your CRM or lead management system will allow you to deliver customers to the destination point – your sales team – faster while increasing the quality of service. Likewise, you will tap into untapped markets quicker, collect more data on your prospects, increase sales, and develop long-term value-based relationships with consumers.
The bottom line is that lead distribution software does exactly what you can do manually, but quicker and incomparably better.
