salesVP80

VP Sales

Best practice request for referral-partner-generated website demo/contact requests

Sorry for the long title ...

Our referral partner team does a great job of making it easy for referral partners to submit leads directly through our partner portal.

However, some prospects go rogue and submit a demo request to our website which routes to our inbound team. These leads should go to our partner team... obviously.

Does anyone have best practice advice either through questions in the request form, lead routing or any other idea I haven't thought of?

Thanks!

📚 Resource

✌️ Growing Pains

💽 CRM

14 comments

Sort by:

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

you could always add a field in your demo request form that aks something like "did you hear about us from ______ insert partners name" and if they select yes then you can route it to the partner team.

im sure this will still have some fall through the cracks but hopefully it can reduce it.

activity

Politicker

VP, Business Development

I agree. Add additional fields that would cut down on the amount that slip through the cracks.

salesVP80

Opinionated

VP Sales

Our Marketing department is hesitant to add more questions to the request form as they claim it will reduce submissions - is there validity to this?

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

Sales Rep

That’s a legitimate objection. Yes we can say “What’s one more question?” But after that, what’s stoping someone else to adding “just one more” than another than another

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Exactly. If something looks time consuming it will be skipped. 🤷‍♀️

salesVP80

Opinionated

VP Sales

What about a non-required field? "**If you were referred to us, we want to thank them" (or something similar) with an open text box for them to drop in the partner's name

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

i KNEW that was going to be their response!!! god its so annoying.

so there is validity to the fact that too many questions could stop ppl from filling out a form.

BUT

if they have true buying intent then the number of questions will not matter (within reason you know?) If they cant fill out a demo form because it has "too many questions" then do you really think they will spend the time to do a discovery call, demo, pricing call, legal review, ect to buy your product? probably not.

Also, marketing CAN use enrichment tools to fill in certain answers. and help the prospect out but i bet they dont do that ether.

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

then i bet they dont have enough intent to actually buy. i dont want to fill out a 100 question form BELIVE ME, but i doubt its THAT bad.

Its another stupid objection marketing has because they are too focused on "leads" and not driving ppl that WANT to buy to come to the website.

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

if it was me? I would make the FIRST question on the form a REQUIRED OPEN TEXT BOX that simply asks "how did you hear about us"

Then company email address

and maybe ONE qualifying question like "how many locations od you have" or what ever is pertinent for your industry.

If you have their email address you should be able to get name, company name and location from that. no need to have those also be boxes to fill out.

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

Sales Rep

Agree with @TennisandSaleswith having part of the request ask if where they have heard of X product.

Is the partner portal integrated with the crm, so you can see when a partner puts in a lead, and check the date to see if was before the inbound came in?

It can be simple, or depending on the company painfully difficult, to just have a clear rules of engagement of partners having x months ownership after a referral even in the case of an inbound

salesVP80

Opinionated

VP Sales

We have a dedicated partner referral link/portal that routes properly in SF and it's very easy for them to submit referrals today. This process would be to catch those that circumvent this process (or when the end user hits our site prior to the partner having time to submit the referral).

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

What’s the process of leads coming through Partners? Do they submit a form that creates an account in the CRM?

salesVP80

Opinionated

VP Sales

Yes

Pachacuti

Politicker

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

I take it the partners take priority over the inbound/direct sales team? If that's the case, it should be easy to deal with this. And if this happens often, you need to have a Sr. Mngt provided policy on this.

If direct sales takes priority, then you need a way to let down partners easily or have a "referral bonus" for partners so they walk away with something instead of nothing.

Bravado is a community of trusted sales professionals endorsed by their customers.

Products

The War Room Jobs Salary Guide Tech Sales U

Company

About Us How It Works Blog Bug Bounty

Contact

Press Careers

If you are hired as a contract sales rep by a Bravado customer, we may ask you to prove access to the employee email account provided to you by that customer. This data will be shared with customers to track your sales productivity; customers can use this data to confirm you meet the minimum activity requirements to pay out your ramp stipend and commission.

salesVP80

Best practice request for referral-partner-generated website demo/contact requests

14 comments

Related posts

For all you mail mergers out there, do you see more success emailing one DM or all DMs on a custom thread? I've noticed that putting all relevant DMs on one campaign that is 100% customized to their business has a much higher response rate (28% meeting sucess)

Should HOT inbound leads (demo request, contact us, etc.) go straight to the rep or through to the BDR first to book?

Demo request prospecting