Passing enquiries from the website to the right dealer

Picture an enquiry arriving through your website from a buyer near Sambalpur. You forward the number to the dealer in the district, and nothing more is heard. Three weeks later the buyer has bought elsewhere and the dealer says the lead was cold. Both may be telling the truth. The weak point is the stretch between "forwarded" and "called", where nobody on your side is looking. Fix that stretch with a routing rule, a fixed message, a check on the buyer's side and a fallback for silence.

Give each enquiry exactly one owner

Before any rule about pin codes, settle the principle: at any moment an enquiry belongs to one dealer or to your own team, never to two. Shared leads do damage. Two dealers call the same buyer with two different prices, and the buyer concludes that your brand cannot be trusted on price.

Keep a single column in your sheet called "with" and fill it before you send anything. If that cell is blank or holds two names, the enquiry has not been routed.

The routing rules, in the order you apply them

Write them as a short cascade and stop at the first rule that fits.

1. The buyer names a dealer and that dealer serves the pin code: send it to that dealer.
2. The order is for an institution, a tender or a quantity above the ceiling you have agreed with dealers: your own team takes it, and the area dealer is told.
3. The pin code has one dealer: send it to that dealer.
4. The pin code is shared: send it to whichever dealer your territory note names for that product, otherwise take turns and record whose turn it was.
5. The pin code has no dealer: your own team takes it.

Pin codes beat town names because the buyer types them on the form, a sheet can match them exactly, and a mismatch is visible. If your form takes a town name only, add a pin code field before you do anything else.

The ceiling in rule two needs to be in the dealer agreement, along with what the dealer receives when your team closes a large order in the dealer's area. Without that, the first big enquiry you keep becomes a grievance.

The message the dealer receives

A dealer should not need to ring you for details. Send the same layout each time, by WhatsApp or email, filled from your sheet.

New enquiry for your area
Name and mobile:
Pin code and locality:
Asked for (product, quantity, use):
Wanted by:
Came from (form, brochure download, call):
Reply tonight with one word: Called / Not reachable / Bought elsewhere

The last line gives the dealer a task with an end. A bare forward is noise, and dealers learn to leave it.

If the same buyer fills the form twice or downloads a brochure after enquiring, merge the entries before you route. Otherwise rule three fires twice and the dealer calls a buyer who has already been called.

Ask the buyer, not only the dealer

Some dealers will report accurately. Some will forget. Some may write "called" because it is the quickest reply. Do not depend on the word alone.

The same evening, message the buyer: "You asked us about steel sheds. Has [dealer] from [town] been in touch? Reply yes or no." Keep two columns in the sheet, the dealer's word and the buyer's. When they differ, you have found the problem without an argument.

Handle a "no" as help. To the dealer, say "the buyer says there has been no call yet, can you call today?". A dealer who feels accused may stop answering your messages altogether.

What to do when the dealer is silent

Fix the fallback in advance and tell the dealers about it.

If there is no reply by the next morning, your team calls the buyer, introduces the dealer by name and tells the dealer it has done so. Count each case. A dealer who misses several enquiries in a row loses the pin codes not being served, if the territory note says so. If you have not written those rules, start with how to set dealer territories without fights.

An invented example: a steel-shed maker in Cuttack

Take an invented maker of steel sheds and prefabricated structures in Cuttack, whose website draws enquiries from farmers, small factories and cold-store builders across Odisha. It had three dealers and a belief that web leads were poor.

When the owner phoned fifteen recent enquirers, several said two different people had rung them with different prices. The cause was a buyer who had downloaded the brochure, then filled the form two days later. The sheet treated those as two enquiries and sent each to a different dealer, because the brochure form had no pin code.

The owner made four changes. The brochure form gained a pin code field. Entries from the same mobile number were merged before routing. The cascade above went into the sheet, with the "with" column. The evening message started going to buyers.

After a few rounds the buyers who heard from two dealers stopped appearing, and the owner could see which dealers called the same day. One dealer stayed slow and was reminded most weeks, which showed in the buyer column. The leads themselves were no better; the route was.

When a dealer should not get the enquiry

An institution, a tender or a project for a government body goes to your own team. So does any enquiry where the dealer has been silent for several rounds and you have not yet said why. And skip routing altogether where you have no way to check, because forwarding without a check is only giving leads away.

If dealers dislike the buyer's message, take that seriously and explain that it checks the route as much as the dealer.

Start with the pin code list

List your pin codes against dealers, add the backup in a second column, and send the seven-line message for the next five enquiries. Add the evening check after that. Channel opportunity generation and follow-up is the service that sets this up with your dealers, and the rest of our sales work sits under sales. To start, tell us what you need.