How routing issues are a data quality problem

Welcome to another installment in our blog series designed to complement The trailblazer’s guide to marketing, sales, and RevOps excellence. In previous posts, we discussed how improving account data can resolve many ideal customer profile (ICP) issues, manage duplicate accounts and records, and improve segmentation through RevOps data quality.

In this blog, we dive into lead routing accuracy. By focusing on routing, we demonstrate how quality data can significantly improve your sales success by ensuring leads are quickly routed to the right reps.

The importance of RevOps data quality for lead routing

So, maybe it’s not your lead routing; it’s your data quality hampering sales success.

Teams are always looking for ways to route leads faster. It’s well documented that the faster a rep responds to an active, interested, engaged prospect, the more likely it is for the prospect to turn into an opportunity and, from there, into a customer.

Challenges in lead routing

But the Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, and RevOps teams at many companies are often drowning in complaints about misrouted leads and, worse, discovering much later that high-quality leads weren’t followed up on because they went to the wrong rep.

The impact of misrouted leads on sales reps

Sales reps are rewarded based on the opportunities they create and the deals they close, not on how many misrouted leads they get into the right hands. The result is that misrouted leads often end up in black holes. How does this happen? More often than not, it’s not about the speed-to-lead; it’s about getting the lead to the right person in the first place.

Example lead routing rules

Say the routing rules for the U.S. look like this:

A lead comes in. She has the following information:

Because there’s no state data, Barbara doesn’t get assigned to a rep. She’s stuck with a default or generic owner, like Marketing or a catch-all, because the state data wasn’t available when the routing rules triggered.

The role of data cleaning process

Shortly after the lead is routed, which happens right away because of the speed-to-lead urgency, the data cleaning processes act on this lead. Now the data looks like this:

Data enrichment and lead routing

With this additional data, the enrichment processes can find a match, which happens immediately after the cleansing processes:

Consequences of delayed lead assignment

It turns out that Barbara should have gone to Em Dickinson, but the lead routing rules have already been triggered, and it’s too late for those. Unfortunately, because Barbara didn’t hear back soon enough, she’s already considering competitive products because those companies responded right away. She didn’t like the lack of follow-up from Em’s company, so they are no longer being considered as a vendor.

The value of improved RevOps data quality

If the data had been available before the lead routing rules triggered, then Barbara would have ended up with the right lead owner. Em would have gotten the lead and followed up, and the sales team could be working towards an opportunity, all because of the improvement in data quality.

Want to learn more about improving your lead routing? Download The GTM guide to data quality to ensure your data is prepped so you don’t miss an opportunity, or watch a minute on lead routing.

If you’re ready to take the next step, schedule a demo today!

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