Dealer and distributor networks
Routing to businesses you do not employ
A misrouted enquiry inside your own company is an inefficiency. Inside a partner network it is a phone call about favouritism, because the partner who did not get it has no way to see why. The fix is not better routing. It is routing that explains itself to people outside your building.
What makes a partner network different
- Exclusive and non-exclusive in the same map
- Some partners bought a protected area. Others share one. A routing tool that only understands one of those makes the other a manual exception, and manual exceptions are where favouritism gets alleged.
- The lead the partner never saw
- An enquiry goes somewhere. If a partner cannot see why it went there instead of to them, the reasonable assumption is that somebody decided, and the conversation stops being about geography.
- Coverage that nobody owns
- Between the areas partners actually cover there are gaps, and enquiries from them are the ones that quietly go nowhere. A network usually discovers its gaps from a complaint rather than from a map.
An answer a partner can be shown
Every decision comes back with its reasoning: which areas contained the address, which one won, under which rule, and whether the winner could actually handle the enquiry. It is not a log somebody has to go and find afterwards. It is the answer itself, and it is the same answer your team sees.
That turns a difficult conversation into a short one. Either the rule did what the network agreed it should, or the rule is wrong and can be changed, and both of those are better than an assurance that the system is fair.
Seeing the gaps before a customer does
Coverage assembled from what partners say they cover has holes in it, and the holes are invisible in a list. Drawn as a map they are obvious, which is why the coverage tool is free and needs no account: it takes the list you already have and shows you the shape of it.
A gap you know about is a recruitment target or a named fallback. A gap you do not know about is an enquiry nobody answers.
What it does not do
It does not manage partner agreements, margins or stock. It decides where an enquiry should go and says why, and everything about the commercial relationship stays where it already is.
It does not rank partners by performance. Routing on who converts best is a legitimate thing to want and a different product; conflating it with geography would mean a partner losing leads for a reason the map does not contain.