Lead generation: Whose job is it anyway?

Sales lead generation is the responsibility of both the vendor and its partners, and channel companies that rely too much on vendor leads will perish, according to attendees at CRN's Channel Roundtable.

In addition, communication between vendors and their channel partners is key and vendors need to be consistent in their approach to dishing out leads to the channel.
All attendees at the Channel Roundtable agreed that smaller, more targeted lead generation programs will get the best results.

'Distributors need to communicate with vendors and come out with more programs that are localised. To have a program that fits all, which is what everybody is trying to do, doesn't work,' says Daniel Lee, managing director at distributor LAN 1. 'There's no bullet-proof formula here. Vendors need to create regular and consistent channels,' he says.

Mohammad Kandeel, national IT channel manager at LG Electronics, says it is up to the vendor to create the demand and promote their own product and it is up to the reseller to promote their services and why they are different from each other, rather than focusing on price.

'From my perspective as a channel manager, if a deal is going down somewhere I get called by at least five distributors or resellers saying: "We want special pricing."
'At the end of the day, it's an LG order - so the price shouldn't be a differentiator, it should be what your services are and what you offer as value-add for the customer, rather than just saying "I can sell it for $2 cheaper", he says.

Vendors must pick the right partner with the right area of speciality when it comes to passing on leads, adds LAN 1's Lee. 'I still think that [with] lead generation, a lot people still try to have one big plan and expect to get results; I don't think that's the case. I just hope the vendors would concentrate on smaller programs rather than one big program and that's the way I look at it,' Lee says.

Both vendors and their channel partners are jointly responsible for generating and closing sales leads, says LG's Kandeel. 'I believe it's a bit of both - we do a lot of co-op marketing things with our channel which generates the leads, and also do our own branded marketing as well. Resellers need to get behind [the vendor] and assist us generating more leads as well rather than being just one-tracked. It really just works both ways,' he says.

'What you want to invest in is your sales resource. We've got a BDM who's going out and bringing back qualified opportunities back via the channel. And vice versa - when the BDM's of our resellers or SIs go out and qualify opportunity we expect them to call us in to assist and work together in closing those deals rather than them going out on a limb. It comes down to the level of loyalty and support between the vendor and the reseller,' he says.

Safa Joumaa, general manager, sales and marketing at Altech, adds: 'We all want our own sales department to generate leads. We don't want them to rely on the vendors to say: "We've got a lead for you". That's what our sales department is there for - our marketing department backs them up with the right marketing tools for our sales department to attract these leads and turn them into prospects.

'Our vendors do help us out when they have a lead. For example, LG might say there's a tender out there at the moment, they want 100 monitors - do you want to sit on the meeting with us? We don't rely on those,' he says.

Andrew Mclean, area sales manager at Intel Australia, warns that vendors have to be careful about who gets a sales lead in a big tender situation. 'If we go into big tender situations - we might have three, four, five manufacturers who come in. You have to be careful about how we should go about doing it,' Mclean says.

'Sometimes we will get invited into an opportunity but I think what we're trying to do more and more is go into those key end-users environments ourselves, and say: "This is the Intel story - go and work out who can supply that to you".'

Paul Colley, technology and training manager, mobile network products and network marketing group at Sony Australia, says the vendor is often quite selective about which channel partner gets a particular lead.

'If they come to Sony for that lead and they're steered to someone that actually doesn't service them properly, that tarnishes Sony's reputation,' he says. 'You have to be selective to a degree.'

Domenic Torre, general manager at D-Link Australia and New Zealand, adds that the networking company stays relatively independent in tenders, and when it comes to leads, the company has no preference as to which distributor or which reseller the product is actually purchased from.

'There's always a danger that you may upset someone. But corporates, SMBs - these guys are smart enough to know who they're getting good service from,' Torre says.
'There is another aspect - that is vendors and resellers having a better understanding of what markets we are each working in. An example might be the education market. We work in the education market directly in Victoria and it was the Education Department that said: "We deal with this, this and this. Do you have any relationships with these people?"' he says.

Torre says leads are fed out fairly and the company does not specifically point to one channel partner. Altech's Joumaa asks: 'How do you distribute them fairly?' Torre says the company does not name names. 'We don't actually specifically say go to a particular reseller. We say these particular resellers in your area can service you,' he says.

For Leading Edge general manager Ross Whitelaw, leads coming through from vendors are the icing on the cake. 'If I wanted to switch roles - as a vendor I'd be very careful to whom I gave any leads because they cost me a fortune to get in the first place, and how many people have given out leads to resellers that have never had any follow up.

'I'd be putting a gold star next to people in certain areas, and saying, I know whenever I give these people a lead they'll do something with it. And whenever anybody else whinges, as they do regularly, you just have to point out, "I've given you three leads and never seen a sale back, they're so hard to get",' he says.

Adam Connor, proprietor at North Sydney-based Apple reseller Total Recall Solutions, says he has seen some 'positive steps' by Apple when it comes to generating leads for its resellers. 'We have one location and it's both an AppleCentre and a Pro reseller. The biggest problem within Apple is they segment their markets into one or the other - there's not many that are both - which means that the Pro people think we're an AppleCentre and the AppleCentre people think we're a Pro.

'The most memorable case of that is when we were dropped off an AppleCentre flyer that went to a million homes,' he recalls. 'However, these days Apple has business development managers who find opportunities, and match them up with their own skill sets or send the lead off to an appropriate reseller. And we've been on the receiving end of most of those and it worked very well,' Connor says.