Leads

Where are my leads?

Imagine this scenario: You're the Channel Marketing Director. Two months ago, you company attended a new exhibition where you had splashed $100K in sponsorship, booth and marketing gizmos. You also spent $20K in co-op with two of your largest partners also present at the show.

Fine, you're a marketer and your job stops there. Wait a minute… your VP Europe knocks on your door and asks you to justify this cost (a bit late, right?) because he's got pressure from corporate. Well, your initial response is to justify this cost by "increased brand awareness" reasons and when you saw him frown, you talked about leads that his sales team did not follow upon.

Tell me, does this sound familiar?

Now, if you had deployed an online closed-loop lead management solution, you would have been able to give your VP a real-time view your lead pipeline associated with the leads you collected at the exhibition. You would also have been able to show him how many leads had been accepted and qualified by your partners, how many were won or lost and why they were lost and how many were still worked on by your partners. Furthermore you would have been able to give your VP the complete revenue forecast for these leads.

Should you have deployed this lead management system within a more robust and complete Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution, you would have also been able to give your VP Europe the following:

• A complete ROI analysis for the exhibition and co-op activities
• The list of your top 50 partners that closed their leads the fastest or closed the biggest deals
• An assessment of the impact of this exhibition in your partners POS data, especially for those in which you invested additional co-op funds
• The rate of investment (spent in training, marketing, incentives, etc. vs POS data) for these partners.

In addition, you would have been able to change the co-op fund allocation for your partners (give more to those who closed more leads!), increase your training requirements for those who lost the most leads and pro-actively communicate to all the deal-winners about the next exhibition…

EuroLAN Research believes that effective PRM tools bring vendors closer to the channel success they seek and that "partner extranets" no longer need to be marketing toys but can become the most reliable sales tools money can buy!

EuroLAN Research would like to offer you a free high-level business PRM assessment that will answer the following questions: � Is PRM relevant to your organisation and business model? � Are your partner management processes well defined and effective? � What business processes are/ could be supported by your IT infrastructure?

Complete our EuroLAN Research Online PRM Survey and, within 5 business days, we will send you, via email, your PRM Assessment. Do not miss this opportunity! For more information, please call us on +44 (0)1202 670 170 or email us at info@eurolanresearch.com