Partner Relationship Management: Why Lead Management Needs to be a Mobile Application

If you are selling through the channel, chances are your partner relationship management framework has some sort of a lead management program. It doesn’t matter whether you are in insurance, real estate, telco, technology or finance—the entire purpose of your channel is to drive sales and, in many cases, to provide service.

Whether you are driving marketing to generate leads (in national franchises or insurance or investment brokerage firms, for example) or co-marketing with partners (as in industries like automotive, technology, telco and manufacturing), today successful partner relationship management requires a mobile approach towards lead management.

Why do I make that claim? The answer is relatively simple. In today’s business world, salespeople live in their mobile devices, whether it’s a smartphone or tablet or a thin laptop—or all three. It’s all about having productive access via any screen, anywhere. So, if your partner portal is not mobile friendly and doesn’t provide lead management on the go, you are handicapping your indirect sales team and making effective partner relationship management more difficult than it should be.

In addition to providing on-the-go access, a mobile device is simply a natural fit for lead management activities. Almost everyone today has their contact database synced in the cloud and, with the click of a button, can instantly call a client. However, if you are not able to enter notes, perform key tasks and update relevant information from a conversation in the lead management system during that call, it’s likely you will either forget to do so altogether or enter wrong or incomplete information when you get around to updating the client profile at a later time.

To understand the importance of mobile in lead generation, all you need to do is visualize a sales person at the airport. He or she is wearing a Bluetooth headset, is busy talking to a client, and at the same time is looking up all relevant information for that account on a mobile device and immediately sending relevant sales assets, product specs and other information directly from that device.

This is not a futuristic scenario. This is how partner relationship management is supposed to work. The use case is real and can be addressed today with ZINFI’s “mobile first” Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform.