Marketing Foundations: Lead Routing 101
In our Marketing Foundations series, we’ll define and explore today’s most important marketing topics.
This series is designed to help marketing leaders understand the latest trends, and each article is packed with helpful tips for bringing these topics to life for your company.
What is lead routing?
Lead routing is a critical process for businesses that want to manage their leads efficiently and effectively. It involves the strategic and systematic distribution of leads to the right person within an organization, based on specific criteria.
Configuring your lead routing process correctly will increase the chance of conversion and reduce the risk of lost opportunities.
This not only helps improve the efficiency of the sales process but also ensures that customers receive a better experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Furthermore, by tracking the performance of the lead routing process, businesses can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize their lead management strategies.
Lead routing examples
To ensure that new leads are contacted as quickly as possible, it is crucial to set up the right lead routing process.
Here are some common examples of lead routing setups that can be used to achieve this goal.
Lead Routing by Territory: Routing leads by territory is great for sales teams that target multiple regions. If a lead comes in from Canada, always route it to the person responsible for that region.
Lead Routing by Use Case: Send qualified leads to the reps who are experts in the product or service.
Lead Routing by Deal Value: Send your most valuable leads to your top closing agents by routing leads based on the value of the potential deal. Let’s say you’re selling software as a service (SaaS) and company A wants five seats, while company B wants twenty. Send company B to the sales agent with more experience, maximizing your ability to close more deals.
Lead Routing by Lead Score: Lead scoring is a marketing technique that aims to assess the quality of leads in a database, with the goal of identifying the most promising prospects. The process of lead scoring typically involves evaluating various aspects of a lead's profile, behavior, and engagement with the brand. Two of the most common types of lead scoring are demographic and behavioral scoring. Read our full article on Lead Scoring.
Lead Routing by Availability: Great for teams that want to route new leads to the first available agent. This ensures new leads are touched as soon as possible.
Lead routing best practices
Lead routing can sometimes get complex, but you can keep it more simple by understanding of the business's sales and marketing goals and aligning the lead routing process accordingly.
To make things easier and more efficient, businesses should consider following these best practices when configuring their own lead assignment process.
Integrate your systems: Integrate your sales and marketing systems so that leads can be seamlessly transferred from one system to the other. This will help ensure that leads are not lost in the transfer process and that they are routed quickly and accurately.
Establish a clear handoff process: The marketing and sales teams need to work closely together to ensure nothing slips between the cracks. Define the criteria for when a lead is ready to be handed off and ensure that both teams understand and follow the process.
Use lead scoring: Prioritize leads based on their level of interest and readiness to buy. This will help ensure that high-priority leads are routed to the right salesperson or team.
Assign ownership: Assign ownership of leads to specific salespeople or teams to ensure that they are followed up on in a timely manner. Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team member to avoid confusion or duplication of effort.
Establish communication channels: Establish clear communication channels between sales and marketing teams to ensure that leads are being routed effectively. Regular meetings or check-ins can help ensure that both teams are aligned and working together toward common goals.
Monitor and optimize: It is important to regularly monitor and evaluate the lead routing process to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to optimize lead management efficiency and effectiveness.
The bottom line on lead routing
By following these steps, businesses can effectively manage lead routing across sales and marketing systems.
If your goal is to increase the chances of conversion and reduce the risk of lost opportunities, then leads must be routed quickly and accurately to the right people or teams.
It is also very important to keep teams closely aligned to ensure the best results.
