According to the Harvard Business Review, contacting an online lead within one hour of receiving a query makes having a meaningful conversation with a key decision-maker seven times more likely to happen. Given that contact of this nature must precede converting a prospect into a customer, the value of responsiveness becomes readily apparent. However, short reaction times are difficult to maintain on a consistent basis when your sales team is routinely mired in administrative tasks, when they should be talking to prospects.
This is where best practices including implementing automation such as an Asana/SalesForce integration can pay dividends. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the best practices for routing leads.
Clean Data is Essential
As essential as leads are to the sales process, inaccuracies in them can drive your team off a cliff. It is imperative to ensure the prospect’s name, phone number, email address, physical address and interest are solid before routing that intel to a rep.
It’s also important be certain a prospect has yet to be contacted by anyone within your organization, lest you risk appearing as if your right hand has no idea what your left hand is doing. And, while you might be going, “Well duh,” right now, that problem is a lot more common than you might think. People often make mistakes or take shortcuts when filling out forms online.
Automation can help solve this problem.
Form Completion Automation
Platforms capable of mining databases to fill in blanks can help resolve form abandonment and missing data issues. In fact, the best automation solutions can take basic contact information and expand upon it to deliver a contact’s job title. The department in which they work, as well as their decision-maker status can also be provided—in real time. This enables your sales team to craft a pitch based upon that person’s most likely pain points.
Assigning The Right Person
Automating your lead routing process with a set of pre-defined parameters can take the randomness out of your lead routing processes. You can be certain no one salesperson has more than a set number of leads at any given time. You can ensure a full pipeline for fledgling sales reps and that the rep most likely to close a prospect—based on the available data—gets the lead.
Different reps have differing styles. For example, some may have more success when talking to people from certain kinds of businesses than others. Some may be more productive when communicating with people holding certain job titles than others.
However, before any of this happens, you might be better served in some situations if a sales development rep contacts the prospect before they do an account executive. Such a situation could be, for example, the first time someone from your company contacts an organization.
Conversely, if the lead is from a firm that’s already a customer, they should be routed to a customer success manager instead. Other considerations might include the size of the organization, the nature of department, or critically, the time zone or geographic location in which the prospect is located.
In Summary
Accuracy and timing are essential to sales success. This is truer now than it has ever been before. Ensuring that the basic data is accurate, mining that data for additional information, and routing the resulting lead to the salesperson best suited to close that prospect will amplify your success significantly. To that end, each of the lead routing functions outlined here can be automated, shortening the time between query and first contact drastically.
