Sorting And Distributing Leads

Your company has just completed a trade show and needs to distribute leads to the sales team. Here are a few thoughts that might be helpful

Most trade shows distribute the list of attendees in and visitors in some form of text file and this information can be imported into a sales pipeline. Remember that you can use constants to fill in some of the fields. For example if you have a field for the lead source you can enter the trade show name as a constant.

Desktop Sales Manager allows a sales rep to easily combine two sales pipelines – so providing them with only their leads from a trade show in a sales pipeline file means they can easily merge new leads from the trade show into their ‘work in progress’ pipeline. While pipelines can be combined, one of the best ways of distributing a new sales pipeline of leads is through the Sales Data Center.

Sorting leads into the proper sales territories is always a problem. With all of the leads from a trade show imported into one sales pipeline file you can cut and paste the right leads from the trade show pipeline into a sales pipeline file for each sales territory.

A relatively simple technique can be surprisingly powerful in sorting leads and making it easy to cut and paste them into a new sales pipeline file. Let’s look at a simple example where sales territories correspond to states. In other words all the from Texas would belong in one sales territory. Clicking on the “State” column in the list area automatically sorts for sales pipeline by state. This makes copying and pasting the Texas leads easy.

Filtering can also help you sort leads into sales territories. Filtering allows you to see only a subset of a sales pipeline. For example if your sales territories are based around zip codes you might filter out everything except the ones in postal code 787XXX. With only those leads visible it is easy to copy and paste them into a new sales pipeline.