6 ways to manage lead routing like a boss

Getting sales leads to the right people quickly is at the top of every company’s to-do list. After all, without leads, you can’t have customers. That’s why we at Openprise depend on the best lead routing management solution we know of—our own. So we thought we’d give you some lead routing tips and best practices for how we do lead routing using the Openprise RevOps Automation Platform, so you, too, can route leads like a boss.

1. No pressure, but you’re racing the clock.

   Do you know how fast a hot lead gets cold? A recent study showed that if a sales rep can contact a lead within one hour of the initial interaction, that rep is seven times more likely to engage in the meaningful conversations that lead to a sale than those contacted in the second hour.

   That means there’s no time to lose—that inbound lead needs to be accurate, and it needs to get to the correct SDR or AE within just a few minutes. However, a valid, hot lead is the end of a pretty long funnel, so you need automation to speed its journey. And that journey begins with cleansing the data.

2. Accurate lead routing depends on clean data.

   Just like mom said, hygiene is essential. Whether you’re scrubbing behind your ears or scrubbing data, you must do a good job. Leads can end up anywhere if the data isn’t clean. Before you whisk a lead to a sales rep, make sure that it contains accurate information—that is, a correct name, phone number, email address, physical address, and interest. Ensuring that the contact isn’t already in the system and that the lead isn’t talking to someone else in the company helps keep the customer-facing reps looking professional.

   All of that may seem obvious, but it’s trickier than you may think. People aren’t always great with filling out form fields, especially from a mobile device. Marketers have come to understand that and have shortened “contact us” forms to just a few taps, but that abbreviation comes at the cost of gathering less information. So how do you get around it? The answer is enriching the data through automation, which is the next step in the funnel.

3. Finishing incomplete forms is a lead routing superpower.

   At Openprise, we put our inbound leads through an enrichment process that pulls data from elsewhere in the database to complete information that might not have made it to the form. For example, we might have a name, phone number, job title, and an email address—and that’s it. With just that information, we tap into our reference sets to infer the state from the phone number, which happens in the cleansing phase. From the email address, we’re likely to get a company name. That’s why we don’t worry about missing data, form abandonment, or forms that are too short to be meaningful for lead routing.

   A job title provides even deeper information. Let’s look at an imaginary lead, Jane Lind. Jane listed her job title as Senior Director of Digital Marketing. Using the automated segmentation process and rules we specify, the platform identified that she is in the corporate marketing department, filling in the sub-function field. Her primary function is marketing, and because she is at the director level, her buyer persona is a decision-maker.

   The cleansing, deduplication, enrichment, and segmentation process fills gaps in the form and provides more accurate and advanced information to help us target the right buyers with the best messaging for them. Then, the platform routes the lead out to the SDR or AE best equipped to help them—and it all happens in real-time.

4. Make sure you’re routing the right leads to the right people.

   As you probably already know, there are as many lead routing methodologies to get the right person as there are leads to send. How you prefer to do it may depend on the size of your sales staff, you might send new leads randomly, use a Round-Robin format, or route by seniority. Automating that process with pre-defined rules lets the system make the split-second decision and send leads out within a minute.

   But how do we choose who gets a lead? At Openprise, we balance the sales team’s workload so that no single rep has too many or too few leads. For example, if we decide that each agent should have no more than 100 leads at a time, we can set the rules to reflect that. We can make sure that we fill the pipeline for a new sales rep and, simultaneously, farm out one lead to a representative sitting at 99 and ten leads to an SDR with 89. That way, the lead routing process is fair and equitable.

5. Be ready to change the rules.

   A wise man once said, “The only constant in life is change, so you must never lose your wisdom.” Nowhere is that truer than in sales ops. It seems almost every day, something is different. Territory assignments change, reps leave, get promoted, new people come in—the list goes on and on. We kept our wisdom, knowing this would be an issue for every company—and designed multiple ways to change the rules on the fly. At Openprise, we create our rules on a Google Sheet, and when there’s a change needed, we can make it in Google. We don’t need to go into the Openprise platform, and there’s no coding involved.

   If you’re working on a vast overhaul, like realigning complex territory structures, the process might take up to 30 minutes to input new revenue targets and segmenting rules, and Openprise takes care of the rest. (You see, our RevOps team doesn’t want to work weekends, either.) Though our chosen method is Google Sheets, the Openprise platform works the same way with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or wherever your company’s source of truth may be.

6. Think of lead routing as an automated process, not a series of tasks.

   Lead routing may comprise many specific actions that take the lead down that long funnel, but that’s analog thinking. Manual processes take too long and separating all the tasks with different solutions defeats getting clean, accurate leads to the sales team within the first hour. If you can get everything done on a single platform, the lead routing process will be faster, smoother, and more accurate.

   Unless data is cleansed, standardized, deduplicated, enriched, and segmented correctly, it’s nearly impossible to ensure that the correct lead will land in the right person’s inbox without a good deal of manual intervention.

   We call the complete process within a single platform—The Openprise RevOps Automation Platform™—data orchestration. Orchestrating the data as soon as it comes in and making sure it’s pristine sets the stage for more advanced strategies, like lead scoring, attribution, and lead routing—all of which can also happen within the Openprise platform.

Openprise lead routing is no secret at all. We challenged ourselves by creating some complex rules and processes, and we made the solution. We did it for ourselves, and there’s a good chance we can do it for you, too. At Openprise, we like to say, “If you can write it down, we can automate it for you.” We welcome the challenge.

Listen to the accompanying webcast, Openprise lead routing edition: the art of agility and accuracy and gain even more insight!

Recommended resources