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Now that we have seen an overview of Partner Channel Management - Channel Marketing and Campaign Management with Channel Partners, we are now in the sales/presales step of our story..

The Storyline

Let's recap what we have done so far. We have created and executed a campaign with our partners. The next step is to generate and manage leads.

Lead Management with Channel Partners

Once a campaign has been executed, we can expect customers to respond to the campaign via a multitude of channels such as calls to your customer support center and visits to your partners. Each of these customer enquiries are potential leads and SAP CRM's powerful lead management capabilities allow you to create, manage, distribute and track leads within your organization and with your partners.

Here is how the lead management scenario works in the context of Partner Channel Management.

Step 1)

Customer enquiries are pouring in to your call center as a result of the campaign. The call center employee creates a lead (for one of the callers) that needs to be processed by your channel partner. Questionnaires, parties involved, notes, qualification of the lead and priority are some of the data that can be collected within a lead.

 

 

Step 2)

Now the lead can be distributed to the appropriate partner automatically, semi-automatically or manually. In order to perform semi-automatic or automatic lead distribution, rules need to be set up in the system via an easy to use Rule Policies application in CRM Web UI. An example would be to route all leads originating from customers in a particular zip code to be routed to the partner in that zip code.

 

Step 3)

The partner employee finds the lead in his workflow inbox (or in his email inbox), from where he can choose to accept the lead and work on it.

Alternatively, lead distribution and processing can be done via Adobe Interactive Forms (sent as attachment in emails) which allow partners to process the lead offline. Once processed and updated, partners can "Submit" the Adobe Interactive Form which will trigger an email to be sent to the SAP CRM and result in an automatic update on the system.

 

Next blog

In the next blog, we will look at how to create an opportunity from a lead.