In this post, I’m going to share seven tips to help you improve lead routing for more sales. Setup rule if a qualified lead is not opened/edited by the assigned rep within 24 hours, they get a reminder message from their manager. Tip 2: Qualify that people actually want to talk to a sales rep before routing Use your potential customer’s and your sales rep’s time well. Help your salespeople spend their time connecting and selling rather than building content and messaging. Create a few emails and some talking points to help them connect with the motivation of leads based on their interest. Tip 4: Schedule appointments for the sales team — Help cut “telephone tag.” Here are three potential ideas you can test to optimize your lead routing for more sales: Route leads based on sales skill Use lead grading to rank what level of expertise leads need based on the need. Route leads based on location of remote employees If you have a large distributed field team, you likely route leads via territories or regions. Who do you route this lead too? You can monitor and measure lead routing in the following ways: Stage of the sales pipeline Industry vertical and initial interest Salesperson responsiveness (time-to-open/edit and initial follow-up) Territory performance (benchmark and compare performance) Marketing campaign or lead source Lead scoring and grading Forecasted revenue and time-to-close For more ideas, read 6 Metrics That Will Get You an Edge and Your CEO Clarity Tip 7: Use a checklist to make sure no leads get lost or missed Airline pilots, portfolio managers, surgeons use checklists so why not marketers? You can use the following list of steps to help you focus where you need to improve lead routing now: Get buy-in from sales team on your “sales ready” lead definition Provide qualification information for each sales lead Centralize the lead qualification process with a clear lead definition Document the lead hand-off process and accountabilities at each stage Qualify and Distribute sales ready leads immediately Communicate lead hand off to salesperson using automated rules and human oversight Measure sales pursuit on leads (If not followed up will leads get pulled or reassigned) Sales management must also audit and track rep follow-up Close the loop on marketing-generated leads -what gets measured gets done Train your salespeople on how to follow-up and give you feedback Get close-loop feedback from the sales team on leads Share best-practice lead generation follow-up across the sales team Conclusion In sum, you can get a boost to your lead generation ROI without any extra spending by improving how you route leads.
Have you intentionally managed and optimized your sales lead routing and assignment process? If not, you could be leaking sales, marketing ROI and not realize it.
Let me explain.
LeadData’s new report, The State of Lead Management, based on a survey of 527 B2B sellers and marketers found an average 25.5 % of marketing-generated leads get assigned to the wrong account owner.
Did you catch that? Over 25% of marketing-generated leads get assigned to the wrong person.
This means individuals who expressed interest are not getting the attention they deserve.
LeanData also discovered sales and marketing leaders also have different opinions on lead follow-up effectiveness. For example, the chart below shows 30% of marketing leaders believe that sales will always follow-up on marketing-generated leads compared to 61% of sales leaders.
Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/b2b-marketers-and-salespeople-point-to-problems-with-lead-management-76968/
There’s room for improvement.
In this post, I’m going to share seven tips to help you improve lead routing for more sales.
Tip 1: Set up a service-level agreement on lead routing with sales
Do you have the following things documented with your sales team?
- Written criteria for lead routing (territories, vertical focus, product interest, etc.)
- Sales time-to-follow-up expectations (2 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours,)
- Management support to help keep sales team accountable?
- Clear process flow from form completion to sales hand-off?
I helped a client develop a service level agreement to improve lead routing and increased their leads-to-opportunities by over 200%.
Here’s how.
- Developed a universal lead definition which influenced how they score leads. And field sales agreed to engage all marketing-qualified leads within 24 hours.
- Qualified all leads with inside sales and distributed within two business hours.
- Used a checklist to update territories often to keep up with changes.
- Routed leads via automated rules in Salesforce.com. The workflow notifies the salesperson and creates a task with a deadline.
- Setup rule if a qualified lead is not opened/edited by the assigned rep within 24 hours, they get a reminder message from their manager. And if a sales lead goes more than 48 hours, they get a call to see if that contact needs to reassigned or if they need help.
It takes some time to plan the process and collaborative work with sales. But it’s worth it. Using this approach, they converted 200% more leads to opportunities.
Tip 2: Qualify that people actually want to talk to a sales rep before routing
Use your potential customer’s and your sales rep’s time well. When someone downloads a single piece of content (like a white paper), are they ready for a sales rep to call? Not likely.
The key to lead routing to match readiness of the lead (i.e., future customer) with expectations of your sales team. If you don’t do this, you’re starting them off with an immediate disconnect.
First, you need to qualify each lead to see they are “sales-ready” which means they want to talk to a salesperson. You can find this ideal point by using lead scoring and lead qualification. There is only so much information that you can get off a Web form or that someone will volunteer in an email.
For more, read: Lead Qualification: Stop generating…
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