Sales Lead Distribution – A Primer for Beginners

Sales Lead Distribution takes various connotations with various constituents. If you are completely new to the Lead Management domain, I would suggest that you take a look at the Wikipedia page on Lead Management. Once you have some basics in mind, you will come up with more questions!

If you are in business or a marketing professionals, then you know how various terms and definitions are used. There is no one ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ usage. Hence understanding the variations will help you doing research on the Internet, discussing with your peers in networking events or talking to your lead management software supplier.

Also, the experts use “Sales Lead” instead of using just “Lead” in order to minimize the confusion and increase the clarity. Some marketers also use terms such as “inquiry” and “opportunity”. Again, these terms might be interpreted differently. However, internet marketers generally use the term “lead”. Another term used is “prospect”.

Hence the following phrases may represent the same; or differ slightly depending on who you talk to! I will be using these terms without any major differentiation.

• Lead Management
• Prospect Management
• Inquiry Management
• Opportunity Management

However Contact Management is different from the above. You may use software applications such as Outlook, ACT or Goldmine for Contact Management.

Lead Management is also much wider in scope when compared with Lead Distribution. Since businesses and marketers use these two terms in a similar fashion, we will also expand the scope of the Lead Distribution i.e. the scope of this web site.

Again, several terms such as Lead Routing and Lead Assignment are widely used to refer to Lead Distribution. Let us explore the subtle differences in the terminology in future posts.

Lead Distribution can be defined as the process of assigning responsibility to a specific sales entity for the purpose of following up with the prospect and convert the lead to a customer by completing the sale of a product or service. The process may involve the application of simple or complex business rules based on the nature and complexity of the business.

The sales lead distribution can be carried out manually (as was done traditionally by small business professionals) or automated using a lead distribution software solution. If you are using internet for generating and capturing leads (directly or indirectly), it may not be feasible to carry out the process manually. In other words, you may not be really leveraging the advantages of the internet leads.

As mentioned earlier, depending on the nature of your business operations, you will be looking at the functions and requirements of the lead distribution software differently. Let us look at the various permutations and combinations of lead distribution on these pages in future.