The larger and more complex your sales and business development organization is, the more difficult it is to properly route leads. As your technology stack gains layers of complexity with scoring, sequencing, and territory considerations, routing takes on a life of its own.
Do you automate lead routing or do you rely on manual assignment?
Increase contact rates, conversion percentages, and marketing ROI without producing additional leads by implementing automated lead routing. Read on, we’ll show you how.
Why you need to automate lead routing
Time is money. If you’re running paid campaigns, that new lead could have cost you $25, $50 or more. You’ll want to squeeze every drop of conversion potential out of these leads to get as high an ROI as possible from your paid campaigns. The same mindset should be taken with inbound organic SEO leads (from Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc). Even though there isn’t a direct price tag attached to each organic lead, a lot of time and money is spent generating the content and backlinks needed to rank and earn that inquiry.
The faster your sales team can attend to inbound leads, the more likely they are to both get ahold of the prospect and to convert them. The rule of thumb is that inbound MQLs should be touched in under 5 minutes from when an inquiry is submitted.
Be honest — Is this happening at your company?
If you’re not making any other changes, simply calling more quickly could be the biggest improvement to your marketing ROI.
Making an improvement on speed to lead doesn’t have to be a manual process. Today’s technology can streamline this with ease.
How to automate lead assignment and routing
My preferred method for automated lead assignment involves using Salesforce and Outreach.io. These tools seamlessly integrate, creating new Outreach prospects from leads in Salesforce.
Once the prospect is created in Outreach, you’ll need to build multiple rules (or what Outreach calls triggers) to tell Outreach what to do with that lead. Below are the steps for building Outreach triggers to automate lead routing, though based on your Outreach and Salesforce setup, the process may vary slightly. You’ll need to repeat this process and create a trigger for each sales rep.
- Step 1: Create a trigger for each sales rep that is part of the routing. Trigger event: Prospect Created or Updated.
- Step 2: In the prospect conditions section, use the state field to apply the two-letter abbreviation for each state in the rep’s territory. If your state field uses the full state name (or you have a mix of both), you’ll need to create an additional prospect condition for the full state name (i.e. one for FL and one for FLORIDA).
- Step 3: If you have a field to denote that a lead is test or spam, or a lead score field that you want to use to prevent leads from being routing until they hit that score, add an additional prospect condition to each trigger.
- Step 4: If you are using Pardot or another marketing automation tool that updates existing leads, you’ll want to check for a condition that indicates that this prospect has just become an MQL. This can happen when a lead downloads a piece of top of funnel content and then later submits a demo request form. This could be a specific lead status or a custom field that stamped the date the lead became an MQL. My preferred method is to stamp the date of inquiry in a Salesforce custom field called MQL Date, and add a formula field in Salesforce to denote whether or not this is “TODAY”. Call this field “MQL Today”. Map both fields to Outreach, and add this as a trigger condition (MQL TODAY = “TODAY”).
- Step 5: Add a trigger action to assign this prospect to the correct sales rep.
- Step 6: If you have a pre-built inbound sequence, you can add the prospect to this sequence with an additional trigger action.
And that’s it. Every lead will now automatically assign to your sales rep.
If you are interested in implementing a lead routing automation strategy for your business or have questions about lead routing, contact us at Second Eclipse today.