Every business dreams of a steady supply of leads. But knowing how to treat those leads — especially when each has diverse needs – can be tricky.
That’s where lead routing comes into play. It pairs leads with the right teams and provides them with the assistance they need to solve whatever challenge they face in converting that prospect into a customer. Keep reading to learn more about lead routing and how automation tools can transform the B2B sales cycle and maximize the sales pipeline.
What Is Lead Routing?
Lead routing involves systematically directing prospective customers expressing interest in your products or services to the most suitable sales representatives. The goal of lead routing is to connect each lead with a representative who possesses the optimal skills and knowledge to convert that lead effectively into a successful sale.
Lead routing is essential in the B2B sales cycle for businesses of any size. While some companies still handle this process manually, scaling lead routing efficiently without automation is difficult. Businesses adopt tools like customer relationship management systems (CRM) or marketing automation software to address this problem. These solutions automatically assess and route leads based on various criteria, such as online interactions, location, or readiness to purchase. This data-driven approach empowers businesses to customize sales strategies that optimize efficiency and maximize pipeline.
Different Ways To Automate Lead Allocation
Automated lead routing can be tailored to suit your business’s specific needs and structure in various ways. Here are some common approaches:
Round-Robin Method: Leads are distributed evenly and sequentially among team members or based on team member availability. Sales-focused CRMs like Salesforce often have out-of-the-box, round-robin assignment rules, making this approach easy to implement.
Location-Based Routing: Leads from one part of the world may be routed to a team based in the same area. This keeps leads and sales reps in similar time zones for easy scheduling and communication, which is essential if in-person meetings are part of the sales process. A lead’s region typically is identified by a marketing automation platform based on web activity, or the lead self-selects their location in a website form.
Custom Use Case Assignment: In specialized sales processes, leads can be assigned automatically to a sales representative with the most relevant knowledge and experience. While customizing the lead-routing process can be challenging, marketing automation tools simplify the task by assigning prospects to use cases based on website activity and engagement. An integrated CRM can then seamlessly route the leads, making the overall process more manageable.
Potential Pipeline Value: In certain scenarios, leads are routed based on their current or anticipated deal value. For example, if a lead is expected to generate significant revenue, it may be assigned to a more seasoned representative capable of addressing their needs and persuading them to purchase. This assignment can hinge on factors such as product interest, form-fill data, or integrated tools like ZoomInfo that offer insights into a potential customer’s operating budget.
Key Benefits of Lead Routing
Effective lead routing is a pivotal strategy in any sales-driven organization. It goes beyond lead distribution by aiming to optimize the sales process and reshape how sales teams operate and engage with potential customers. Now, let’s take a look at the detailed benefits of lead routing:
Boost Closed-Won Rates: Effective lead routing aligns leads with sales reps possessing the most relevant skills, experience, or geographic proximity. This targeted approach ensures a more rapid response, improves interaction quality, and caters to the lead’s specific needs and preferences. This results in personalized customer experiences, heightened engagement, and a greater likelihood of successfully closing sales.
Improve Satisfaction: Automated lead routing, which directs leads to the most suitable sales personnel, enables businesses to provide highly personalized assistance, assuring leads that their needs are understood. This commitment to timely and tailored support creates a positive experience, converting leads into customers and laying the foundation for a lasting relationship.
Enhance Sales Team Efficiency: Automated lead routing prevents individual sales reps from becoming overwhelmed with lead volume and experiencing burnout. Better capacity management also improves sales performance and efficiency across the entire sales team.
Increase Lead Intelligence: Lead routing systems can finely optimize the lead assignment process by utilizing detailed information about leads, such as real-time intent data gathered from their online behavior. These insights contribute to a more precise allocation of leads and empower sales reps to improve decision-making and refine sales strategies based on specific customer behaviors and preferences.
Common Challenges in Lead Routing
Lead routing is beneficial for several reasons, but teams may still encounter bumps in the road. Lack of communication between marketing and sales teams can be one of the biggest stumbling blocks when routing leads.
Inefficient lead distribution methods can also cause trouble. Be sure to develop a solid system for routing leads, allowing for timely alerting and communication so that teams can respond to requests or inquiries as soon as they arrive.
Automation and application integration are crucial to effective lead routing, and organizations that lack these processes may find it difficult to manage leads.
5 Ways to Improve Lead Routing
If you’re struggling with your current lead routing process, don’t panic. Here are some improvement tips:
- Enhance Team Communication: Ensure seamless coordination and information sharing by fostering clear communication between teams involved in the lead routing process.
- Optimize with Lead Scoring Tools: Utilize advanced lead scoring and distribution tools to efficiently prioritize and assign leads based on their potential, aligning them with the most suitable sales reps.
- Leverage CRM Capabilities: Take advantage of the features offered by CRM systems like Salesforce to centralize lead information, streamline workflows, and enhance overall lead management efficiency.
- Strike a Balance in Lead Routing: Find the sweet spot between routing leads to the most qualified sales reps and maintaining swift response times, preventing leads from losing momentum and going cold.
- Invest in Business Intelligence Tools: Employ tools to analyze and refine your lead routing process, ensuring a personalized experience tailored to each potential customer’s unique needs, ultimately improving overall effectiveness.
Explore how Dell Technologies used the Boomi Salesforce integration to unify its global sales force with a consolidated view of open opportunities to drive cross-sell revenue.
Best Practices for Effective Lead Routing
Implementing effective lead routing optimizes sales processes and maximizes customer engagement. Here are key best practices to ensure successful and efficient lead routing within your organization:
- Assign Leads to a Specific Person: Ensure leads are allocated to a dedicated contact, whether a sales representative for potential clients or a customer success manager (CSM) for existing ones. This guarantees personalized interactions and consistency throughout the sales journey.
- Evaluate Your Sales Representatives’ Strengths: Evaluate and learn your sales reps’ strengths and expertise. This will help guide strategic lead assignments for maximum impact in specific areas and industries.
- Establish Criteria To Route Leads Appropriately: Connect leads working for companies with pre-existing relationships to the corresponding account’s CSM, leveraging established connections. For new prospects, assign them to a Sales Development Representative for qualification.
- Assign Leads Based on Location: Consider geographical or time zone routing to ensure prompt responses and convenient meeting scheduling for representatives.
- Use Forms To Collect Crucial Data: Implement well-designed forms requesting essential details like name, company, size, location, and phone number to enhance your lead generation strategy.
- Establish Backup Protocols To Reassign Leads: Implement lead reassignment protocols for scenarios where optimal sales reps are unavailable within an acceptable time frame. This ensures prompt redirection to another suitable individual, considering factors like response speed and industry-specific expertise.
- Leverage Technology: Use an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), such as the Boomi platform, to notify salespersons via email or Slack when a lead is assigned. This integration enhances efficiency, particularly in platforms such as Salesforce.
- Avoid Complacency: Regularly reassess and adapt lead routing procedures to align with evolving sales strategies and changing customer needs as your company expands.
Discover how Boomi helped Smartsheet integrate Salesforce and NetSuite, allowing sales reps to respond immediately to customer inquiries, eliminate a two-day wait for customer invoices, and double the volume of sales orders.
Boomi for Optimal Lead Routing
Based on real-time insights and interactions, Boomi automatically directs leads to the most appropriate sales reps. With Boomi’s extensive 300,000 application connections – including NetSuite, Salesforce, Slack, and more – your sales reps can leverage existing systems to gain comprehensive visibility into a lead’s context. This context is informed by interactions with marketing, support, and sales teams, enabling your reps to identify every opportunity to close deals effectively. By eliminating inefficiencies, this integration ensures your sales team can spend more time closing deals.
Boomi provides a comprehensive set of features:
- Robust Integrations: Connect leading sales and marketing applications seamlessly with Boomi Integration to ensure smooth workflows.
- Flexible, Low-code Automation: Empower sales teams to self-build and customize high-quality lead context views with flexible, low-code automation.
- End-to-End Analytics and Reporting: Gain insights from unified master data, fostering trust between sales and marketing in analytics and reporting.
- Real-Time Updates: Receive immediate updates for complete transparency into the sales cycle, enabling anticipation of customer needs through upsell/cross-sell data.
- Scalability: Scale with your business expansion, ensuring productivity despite an increased workload.
- Workflow Automation: Streamline repetitive tasks and processes systematically and efficiently through workflow automation.
- Customization: Adapt workflows to specific business requirements without heavy coding, providing customization and flexibility.
With Boomi’s detailed lead context and an effective lead routing strategy, sales teams can accelerate the sales pipeline, efficiently managing multiple leads simultaneously.
Explore Boomi’s capabilities for your sales automation processes, contact us today for a free demo, customized for your organization.