Lead Ownership and Sales Team Resources

A market is typically organized into territories that include customers and prospects. Marketing is closely aligned with sales, and marketing activities are launched to generate leads and maintain the strength of the sales pipeline. This topic explains lead ownership and sales team resources.

When the lead doesn't have any owner, the sales representative can accept the lead which makes him or her the lead owner. All resources who are given access to leads get full access. Full access level allows the user to update the sales lead team by adding or removing individual resources. Hence, territory resources, sales team members and lead owner and resources in their hierarchy, all get full access. Territory team members inherit the access level of the territory. All members of sales territories assigned to the lead have full access to the lead. Ancestor territory owners of all sales territories assigned to the lead also have full access to the lead. Resources who access leads have different roles such as:

• Operations

  Support an automated process to capture leads, prioritize leads for sales engagement, and distribute the leads to appropriate sales or territory team resources.

• Marketing and lead qualifiers

  Monitor leads, reassign leads, and continually review and adjust the lead quality.

• Sales and territory teams

  Enable lead qualification, perform follow-up lead activities, and convert leads to opportunities.

This topic includes these sections:

• Lead, Sales, and Territory Resources

• Assignment of Leads to Marketing and Sales Resources

• Sales Resource Role

Lead, Sales, and Territory Resources

Sales resources are organized into flexible teams and are associated with the sales territories. These sales territories are then assigned to customers, leads, and opportunities to carry out the sales process. The lead follow-up team can include a lead team made up of individual sales resources who are predominantly active during the lead qualification stage. All sales resources who are assigned to the territory team can view and follow up the lead.

Assignment of Leads to Marketing and Sales Resources

Qualified leads are assigned to a sales team based on sales territories. Unqualified leads are assigned to individual lead qualifiers either manually or based on rules defined in the assignment manager engine. Users can be assigned to a lead in one of several ways:

• Ownership through lead creation

• Territory-based lead assignment

• Rule-based sales team member assignment

• Manual selection of resources

Sales Resource Role

Here are some of the activities performed by sales resources.

• Review quality leads that are augmented with sales collateral, marketing content, customer contact interactions, and references.

• Qualify and assess the lead quality further with the help of user-defined or company-defined assessment templates.

• Use the resource drop-down list to manually select a resource to add to the team.

  Include a description to indicate what role the resource has on the sales team. Many sales team members can access each lead, and each team member is identified as either an internal (sales force), or an external (channel partner sales force) resource. Each sales team member can be associated with a specific resource role to indicate what capacity the member has on the lead.

• Add additional contacts and products to the lead as the lead moves further down the sales cycle.