Manufacturers with a dealer network: how to find out what happens to the leads you send your partners
The manufacturer pays for the ads and the dealer closes the sale. How to get visibility back over the leads sent to the network, with the Aritco case.
The manufacturer spends on advertising. The lead arrives. It is sent to the dealer for that area. And that is where the information stops.
Did the dealer call? When? Was there a visit? Was there a sale? At what price? The manufacturer, who paid for the ad, does not know. The dealer, who has the answer, has neither the reason nor the tool to share it.
This is the most common measurement problem among manufacturers with an indirect sales network. And it can be solved.
The Aritco case
Aritco manufactures home lifts and sells through dealers. It generates leads with campaigns on Google and Meta and distributes them across its network.
When its history was reviewed, the number was this: 5,221 leads sent to dealers with no trace. No status, no outcome, no value. Thousands of contacts paid for with advertising about which nothing was known once they had been passed on.
The problem was not the quality of the leads, nor of the dealers. It was that there was no place where a dealer could say “this lead is at the visit stage” or “this lead bought” and the manufacturer could see it.
The partner portal closed that gap. Each dealer logs in with their own access, sees only their own leads, and updates their status. The manufacturer sees the whole picture. The trail stops going cold at the handover.
Why email does not work
Most manufacturers send the lead to the dealer by email. It is the easiest option and the one that works least well:
- Email has no status. You do not know whether it was opened or acted on.
- The dealer has no incentive to reply “closed, €18,000” to an email from two months ago.
- Asking each dealer for a monthly report produces different spreadsheets, incomplete and late.
- With no data coming back, the manufacturer cannot know which campaign brought sales and which brought form fills.
The result is what showed up at Aritco: the manufacturer optimises campaigns for form fills because that is all it can see.
What the manufacturer needs and what the dealer needs
The two have different interests, and both have to be covered.
| The manufacturer needs | The dealer needs |
|---|---|
| To know what happens to each lead | To get the lead fast and with context |
| To compare dealers on the same criteria | Not to have to learn a new tool |
| To measure campaigns in sales, not form fills | Not to share data about their business beyond what came from the manufacturer |
| To send the signal back to Google and Meta | Updating a status to take under a minute |
A portal that only serves the manufacturer fails, because the dealer will not use it. One that only serves the dealer does not solve the measurement problem.
How a partner portal works
The portal is a view of the manufacturer’s CRM, restricted per partner.
Each dealer has their own login. They log in and see only the leads assigned to them. They do not see other dealers’ leads or the manufacturer’s internal data.
The lead arrives with context. Name, contact details, location, which product they are interested in, which campaign it came from. The dealer does not have to ask twice.
Updating takes one click. Contacted, visit, quoted, won, lost. With a value if won. With a reason if lost. No long forms.
The manufacturer sees everything. By dealer, by area, by campaign. Which leads have not been touched, which dealer takes longest, which campaign ends in the most sales.
The signal goes back to the platform. When the dealer marks “won”, that fact travels to Google and Meta as an offline conversion. The manufacturer’s campaigns start optimising towards leads the network closes, not towards leads the network receives.
What you find once it is open
After a few weeks of use, three kinds of information appear that did not exist before:
Differences between dealers
With the same kind of lead, some make contact within hours and others within days. Some qualify 40% and others 10%. That lets you reassign territories, train whoever needs it, or revisit agreements. It used to be a hunch. Now it is a number.
Differences between campaigns
At Aritco, cost per lead on Meta was €25 and on Google around €1,400. Only the truth from the CRM, kept up to date by the dealers, tells you which of the two channels qualifies and sells. Without the portal, that comparison was impossible.
Leads lost in the handover
Leads sent to a dealer who no longer covers that area. Leads with no dealer assigned. Leads duplicated across two partners. The portal makes them visible and lets you fix the routing.
Common objections
“The dealers will not use it.” They will if it is easier than email, if the lead reaches them faster through the portal than any other way, and if the manufacturer actually looks at it. All three are down to the manufacturer.
“The dealer does not want to share their sales.” They are not sharing their sales. They are sharing the outcome of the leads the manufacturer sent and paid for. It is a distinction worth putting in writing in the distribution agreement.
“We already have a CRM.” The portal does not replace the manufacturer’s CRM. It is a layer on top of it. Nexus connects it to HubSpot, Zoho or its own built-in CRM.
What to do first
- Count how many leads have been sent to the network over the last twelve months and how many of them have a known outcome. The difference is the size of the problem.
- Define the statuses the dealer has to be able to set. Five or six, not twenty.
- Agree with the network what is shared and what is not.
- Pick two or three dealers to start with and adjust before opening it to everyone.
If your company manufactures and sells through third parties, the diagnostic reviews how leads reach the network today, what information comes back, and what it would take to measure campaigns against the sales your dealers close.