Every sales and marketing professional understands the importance of responding quickly to leads. After all, response speed can be critical to winning a deal—particularly in a competitive SaaS market.
But when you’re running a sophisticated account-based strategy, speed can be tough to achieve.
Account-based strategies introduce complexity into your data model. For example, account-based sales usually combines inbound lead data, acquired lists of leads, and intent data on accounts. On top of that, you likely need to assign several distinct lead types with your target account list in mind.
Layer on a complex territory model, and you can be dealing with dozens of routing decisions before an incoming lead gets assigned. At scale, handling these decisions manually (even in part) is simply unmanageable.
That’s why lead routing software is becoming the status quo to make sure leads get to the right reps quickly—and to make sure these leads are contacted in a timely fashion.
What Does a Lead Routing Tool Do?
A good lead routing tool will automate critical steps in your account-based strategy:
- Matching incoming leads to existing accounts
- Lead de-duplication
- Converting qualified leads into contacts based on your company’s own criteria, and automatically create corresponding account records
- Assigning leads in real time according to your unique territory model, including round robin capabilities
- Managing users easily when someone is promoted to a new role, goes on vacation, or leaves the company—including re-assigning their leads to another user
- Implementing service level agreements—keeping your leads flowing quickly with timed SLAs on assigned leads, and reassigning leads that reps don’t work fast enough
Should I Build or Buy?
There are several lead routing products on the market today. But many of these products amount to a black box—existing separately from Salesforce and interacting with your CRM only through an integration. These tools can be great if their built-in capabilities match exactly what you need to implement. However, for those who have carefully customized Salesforce CRM, these solutions may not do everything you need them to. On top of that, purpose-built solutions can be cost prohibitive.
On the other hand, if you’ve invested in Salesforce, it’s technically possible to build your own lead routing engine. Salesforce’s built-in features like matching rules and the flow designer make it your most valuable tool for executing account-based strategies. But many companies lack an admin with the skills required to automate these functions, or simply lack the time to build it themselves.
A more realistic approach for many organizations leverages the CRM that you’ve already invested in, and closes the gap with pre-built automation. Lane Four’s 100% Salesforce native lead management tool is a good example of this approach. This suite of tools functions as a seamless, and highly customizable, part of your CRM. As a simpler solution to lead routing, this option is both cost effective and flexible.
Whatever your situation, consider how automating your lead routing processes might save you time, better accommodate your account-based territory model, and ultimately increase your conversion rates.
