IndiaMART lead management: sorting buying leads from browsers

A paid marketplace listing buzzes the phone all day, and every buzz sounds the same. One lead is a purchasing manager with a drawing and a quantity. The next is a student after a project report. The one after that is a trader collecting rates for a list of their own. Sort each lead, within about an hour of arrival in working hours, into one of four buckets: buy now, buy later, price check and not for us. Each bucket has its own follow-up rule, and the sort takes about a minute a lead. It decides whether your best salesperson spends the next hour with a buyer or with someone filling a spreadsheet.

Speed of reply and the quotation itself are covered in the note on converting IndiaMART leads. This one is about the sorting that comes first.

What a paid listing brings in

A listing sends everything that matches a keyword. That means buyers with a purchase order in hand, students, traders, agents who will resell your quote, and the occasional person who wants a product you do not make. They share one inbox and one alert sound. Treat them alike and the newest lead gets the attention, while the best lead, which arrived an hour earlier in a long list, gets a call on Thursday.

The triage sheet

One row per lead. Eight columns:

Arrived (date, time) | Buyer and company | Product asked (item, size,
grade, not just the category) | Quantity stated (a number or "none") |
Match (yes / partly / no) | Bucket | Owner | Next step and date

Quantity and match carry most of the weight. A lead with no quantity and a vague product is not worthless, but it stays in a lower bucket until the buyer answers one question. Also test whether the company can be found anywhere else, such as a website or a registered address; a name that exists nowhere is a warning, not a verdict.

The four buckets, each with its own rule

Buy now. A specific product, a quantity, a company that exists, often a request for a quote or a sample. Call as soon as you can, send the written quote the same day and message again on the next working day. If the quote has been opened, call. This bucket gets your best salesperson and the full process.

Buy later. The need is real, the timing is not: "planning for next quarter", a catalogue request, a first enquiry from a new factory. Send the catalogue and one qualifying question, write down the date they gave and put a follow-up on the calendar for that date. Do not chase before it.

Price check. A one-line "rate?" with no detail, or a buyer asking ten suppliers. Send one reply with your range and the single thing that decides price (quantity, grade or delivery town) and ask for it. If they answer, move them up. If not, leave it. Never call twice.

Not for us. Wrong product, wrong region, a quantity far below your minimum, a reseller you do not serve. Close it with a short reply and a reason code. The reason is worth more than the reply, as the next section shows.

Write the rule on the first tab of the sheet so nobody improvises. The salesperson should not decide, lead by lead, how much effort a lead deserves; the bucket decides.

Keep a short list of reason codes

For every "not for us" lead, pick one code from a list of five or six you write in advance: wrong product, wrong region, below minimum, reseller, student or project, other. Free-text reasons turn to noise within weeks. After a few hundred leads, count the codes. A cluster under one code is more likely a listing problem than a buyer problem: the title, the tags or the photographs are attracting people you cannot serve, and you are paying for each one.

A rubber gasket maker in Vapi

This is an invented example, and every number in it is made up. A small maker of industrial rubber gaskets and seals in Vapi pays for a marketplace listing and gets a few dozen leads a day across several keywords. Two people answer them.

The owner believed the listing worked because leads kept arriving. When the owner began to record a reason code for every "not for us", a pattern stood out. A large share asked for silicone and food-grade seals, which the unit did not make, because the listing title used a general word that drew them in. The owner rewrote the title and the product tags, and the "not for us" bucket shrank while "buy now" grew, visible on the sheet with no report. In the first month, of about 600 leads roughly 190 were coded "not for us", mostly silicone and food-grade. After the title change the next month had about 600 again but only about 110 in that bucket. "Buy now" rose from about 40 to about 55, not the jump the owner had hoped for, and the listing still draws students.

The first routine had a flaw. The owner sorted the leads on a phone at night, so a buyer who wrote at ten in the morning waited until eleven in the evening, by which time two other suppliers had replied. The sort moved to two fixed points in the working day, the morning one given to a salesperson at the desk. Reply times stopped depending on the owner's evening.

Where this falls short

With a handful of leads a week, a sheet with buckets is more process than you need. Call them all. The sort is also weak if the team cannot reply fast: it helps you spend effort well but cannot rescue leads left unread for a day. And the buckets are judgements. Look at ten "price check" leads now and then to see if any should have been "buy now", and move the line if so. For a trade-specific version of the same sorting, read the post on foundry component enquiries on IndiaMART.

Sort yesterday's leads by hand

Paste yesterday's leads into the eight columns and place each in a bucket. You will see at once which bucket your listing mostly fills. Do this by hand for a week, because the reason codes will tell you whether your problem is the listing or the follow-up. The sheet is the first piece of how you manage sales, and if the daily sorting needs a person you cannot spare, IndiaMART and marketplace lead management is the service for it. To talk it through, tell us what you need.