The marketing-sales cycle is unique to every company and is constantly evolving.
Whether it’s outbound or inbound marketing, cold-calling, print or digital media buys, or building out a layer of SDRs or BDRs, each company has its own fingerprint when it comes to marketing and sales.
That said, today’s businesses are grappling with problems that wouldn’t have been an issue years ago. Digital marketing combined with effective marketing automation tools is providing a steady stream of new leads in various channels: web, social, email, search, and more.
With this new influx of leads, a major problem appears when sales reps have to sort through each lead and manually assign them in Salesforce. Assigning leads manually has traditionally been the only way to deal with potential mis-assignment due to duplication, existing accounts and missing regional info.
It’s time to evolve your lead assignment technology to match the speed of marketing automation—by using an automated lead matching system. Check out 3 key advantages below.
Speed
If you use an automated lead matching system, your sales reps will be able to trust the leads assigned to accounts and spend their time thinking about the account rather than fishing around to figure out where a lead belongs. Speed is so critical to the lead qualification process that the Harvard Business Review reports that responding within an hour increases your odds of lead qualification by seven times.
“Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead … as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that wait 24 hours or longer.” – Harvard Business Review
Ensure you’re giving your sales reps and business the best chance at qualifying the lead quickly instead of messing around with manual lead assignment in Salesforce.
Scalability
We’ve seen it over and over – as the business grows, the lead management and assignment process gets more and more complicated. Whether you’re separating by geography, company size or another factor, it becomes critical to ensure that leads aren’t being duplicated. How many times has a junior sales rep accidentally re-contacted an already qualified lead? Or mis-assigned the lead to the wrong area?
What happens if your business expands even further? Your marketing team expands and your lead firehose starts to gush. Are you going to continue to force sales reps to yell at each other across the aisle and spend precious time on more and more leads coming through the pipe?
Automate it. Let the software do the work and let your business and sales team scale gracefully.
Assignment Clarity
Often, your sales team have rules about which leads belong to which reps, and your reps are manually checking whether a lead is new or already belongs to an existing account. This creates delays and frustrations for SDRs who get excited about an influx of leads only to find they need to be assigned to another account.
An automated lead matching system can create rules that automatically check whether a lead matches an account or other leads, and ensure that it is given to the correct account manager or team. That way, sales reps can focus on the leads coming into their inbox and how to sell rather than wasting time worrying about assignments and duplicates. Whether you want to assign leads based on account data, specialized assignment rules or a round-robin style assignment, a lead matching system will simplify this process so your reps can get moving on what matters: selling.
Marketing automation is evolving fast. It’s time to consider matching that speed in your lead assignment technology and processes. Give automated lead matching a shot with Lane Four today.
