Inbound lead generation is a technique that has proven its worth time and time again, making it essential to every business. After all, it facilitates a steady stream of high-quality leads, driving your revenue consistently.
However, once the leads are in, what then?
You see, this is the stage where you need to navigate the minefield of assigning leads to the wrong team member or taking too long to respond. One wrong step, and you lose the deal and, by extension, the revenue.
To avoid blowing up into pieces, consider adopting lead routing to route inbound leads to the right team member.
Here, we discuss lead routing, its importance to sales, top-performing lead routing strategies, and, most importantly, 5 best practices to help you make the most of it.
What Is Lead Routing?
Lead routing is the process of assigning leads to your sales team based on predefined criteria. It involves planning, strategizing, and analyzing inbound leads and salespeople to drive closed deals.
Why Is Lead Routing Important for Sales?
It is a truth universally acknowledged when it comes to B2B buyer behavior: They expect quick responses from companies, and they handsomely reward those who do respond the quickest.
Consider this, a HBR study finds that responding to inbound leads within the first 5 minutes can increase contact rates by a whopping 900%. Unfortunately, less than 5% of the companies are able to make contact within this short window.
So, a lead routing strategy is a foolproof way to ensure the lowest lead response time. By having the right rep connect to the lead in the shortest time possible, you ensure that you’re capturing them at the peak of their interest.
Here are the benefits of lead routing:
- Improve Your Speed-To-Lead
Speed-to-Lead refers to how fast you respond to your lead. When it comes to sales, the quicker you respond to your lead, the higher the chances they’ll convert. Lead routing helps you reach your leads before your competitors do, giving you a chance to boost their experience and guide them to completing a purchase.
- Minimize Loss of High-Quality Leads
High-quality leads are purchase-ready individuals who fit your ideal buyer criteria and are highly likely to convert. By connecting them to the most suitable salesperson quickly, you increase the chances of conversion with timely, personalized engagement.
- Shorten Your Sales Cycle Length
Lead routing speeds up the sales cycles by assigning leads to suitable sales reps, ensuring quick and effective engagement. This efficiency reduces your team’s response time, helps them connect with leads before competitors, and allows them to guide leads better, shortening the sales cycle.
- Boost Your Sales Team’s Productivity
Lead routing boosts your sales team’s productivity by connecting leads to the most appropriate sales team members quickly. This targeted approach reduces delays and the chances of leads slipping through the cracks. Matching leads to the salesperson having the right expertise will improve better engagement and drive conversion rates.
- Optimizes And Enhances Revenue Growth
Lead routing optimizes and enhances revenue growth by connecting leads to the most appropriate sales team members based on aspects like expertise, availability, and location. This helps leads gain timely and relevant responses, improving their engagement, and maximizing their likelihood of making a purchase.
How Does Lead Routing Work? (5 Steps)
Now that we have covered the what and the why of lead routing, it’s time to look at the how of lead routing. Here are the steps that are typically involved.
Step 1: A potential customer visits your website
Your leads discover your website thanks to robust inbound lead generation methods such as SEO, social media marketing, and paid ads. If they like what they see and are interested in your offering, they follow the call to action and book a demo.
Step 2: They fill your website form
Next, they fill in particulars like contact details, convenient time for the demo, etc., on your website form and click submit. Once their request is registered successfully, they see a ‘We’ll get in touch soon’ message on their screen.
Step 3: Your CRM system creates a new lead
A CRM system helps you gather leads from multiple sources and track their progress through the sales funnel in a centralized location with ease, convenience, and accuracy.
So, any lead who fills out your website form has their information automatically stored in your CRM system, which can then be viewed by all teams in your organization, from sales and marketing to product development teams.
Step 4: You assign the lead to a rep
A CRM allows a sales manager to view all details regarding a lead, like company size, job designation, etc., to help distribute leads across the sales team. You can leverage specific predefined criteria, such as geography, product use case, rep availability, etc., to route leads to the most suitable sales rep.
Now, if your inbound lead volume is high, assigning leads manually to reps can be a challenge. So, consider automating it with lead routing software- we’ll be discussing this in detail soon.
Step 5: The rep reaches out to the prospect
Once the leads are assigned to your team, each rep will email or call their respective leads to book a meeting. Finally, the rep confirms a date and time for the virtual meeting, like a discovery call or demo, and sends a meeting link via email.
7 Examples of Lead Routing Strategies
How to route leads depends on you. While some sales teams might want to assign leads based on their lead score, others might want to do so based on salesperson availability. And there might be those that might route leads based on both.
To help you find the one that works for you best, here are 7 examples of lead routing strategies:
1. Geographic Territory
If your prospects are scattered across multiple geographies, routing your leads based on territory is a good idea. This ensures comprehensive coverage of all locations while preventing reps from overlapping efforts.
Assigning sales reps to specific regions like APAC, EMEA, or NAM will allow you to offer a more personalized and targeted approach to your leads. Reps assigned to the leads’ specific region will have a sound understanding of the local market, customer needs, regional preferences, and challenges.
Further, assigning leads to reps within the same time zone simplifies scheduling meetings and connecting at convenient times. It also facilitates in-person sales pitches, reducing the need for extensive travel and enhancing the overall sales process.
For instance, a sales rep assigned to the EMEA region will be able to manage leads in Europe, understand cultural references and nuances, and connect during the lead’s local business hours.
2. Company Size
Company size refers to how big a company is, and this is typically ascertained based on its revenue or employee count. Broadly speaking, they can be classified into:
- Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMB): Have less than 100 employees with an annual revenue between $5-10 million.
- Mid-market: Have between 101-500 employees and an annual revenue between $10 million and $1 billion.
- Enterprise: Have over 1000 employees and an annual revenue of over $1 billion.
Given the fact that each of these will naturally face unique challenges and pain points, you need to route them to leads who have the right expertise and experience in managing them. For instance, where SMBs might have to work with a restricted budget, enterprises might have an extensive number of decision-makers who need to sign off on the deal.
A rep who knows the challenges that come with running a mid-market company might not know how to navigate an enterprise-level company, jeopardizing the chances of closing the deal.
3. Industry Vertical
Another lead routing strategy is assigning leads to reps based on their industry vertical, such as automotive, SaaS, finance, manufacturing, etc.
Sales reps well-versed in the leads' pain points, motivations, goals, and industry realities can guide the leads more confidently and build a relationship of trust.
4. Product Line
This involves directing leads to sales reps who specialize in a specific product within your offering. This is especially beneficial if you offer a software suite that has a collection of programs and applications, each offering a distinct functionality.
Let’s take Google Workspace as an example. It comes with various offerings such as custom email for your business and collaboration tools like Calendar, Meet, Gmail, Drive, etc. In this case, a lead routing strategy based on the product line would mean routing leads to the rep who is well-versed in the relevant product.
A lead interested in Google Calendar will be assigned to a rep specialized in it, while another curious about the custom email for businesses might be routed to a separate rep knowledgeable in that particular product.
Doing this helps ensure leads receive detailed and informed guidance personalized to their individual needs. It leverages the expertise of specialized sales reps to highlight the value of your offerings and address lead queries effectively, improving engagement and conversion rates.
5. Use Case/Specialization
This involves assigning leads to sales reps based on your offering’s specific application or use case.
For instance, Trello is a web-based project management application that has several use cases such as website development, daily task organization, editorial calendars, etc.
In this case, routing leads based on use cases would translate to connecting leads interested in using Trello for website development with a rep specialized in this use case. Similarly, a lead curious about how Trello can help them in event organization would be connected to another rep well-informed on this particular use case.
This ensures your leads get targeted and relevant insight specially customized to their unique challenges and goals.
6. Lead Scoring
Another popular lead routing strategy involves lead scoring, or assigning quantifiable values to indicate how good your leads are for your business. This score is calculated by assigning value to actions taken by your lead or the characteristics they have. Doing this allows you to quickly decide which leads to pay more attention to and how to follow up with them.
In this case, you would assign leads with high scores to experienced reps, driving the chance of a conversion. Alternatively, a lead with a high score could also prompt you to assign them to the next available rep to shorten your response time.
7. Rep Availability
A study shows that inbound SDRs can manage an average of 15 leads per day. With this workload, they might not find time to get back to all leads, especially if the inbound lead volume is high.
In such a case, routing leads based on the availability of each rep in your team is a good idea. This ensures leads don’t go ignored and helps you maintain a high speed to lead.
5 Best Practices To Keep In Mind for Lead Routing
Lead routing allows you to connect leads with suitable reps instantly, in the process ensuring your sales pipelines run smoothly, generating steady revenue. That said, there are ways you can optimize your lead routing efforts.
Here are 5 lead routing best practices that will help you make the most out of this effective sales technique:
1. Balance Speed and Accuracy
A lead routing process that brings together speed and accuracy can help drive efficiency and conversions. After all, as we mentioned earlier, connecting to leads quickly can prevent the loss of high-value leads and drive conversions.
That said, leads are people with varying preferences, goals, and pain points. And so, while a straightjacket response might help you reduce response time, it can cost you meaningful engagement.
Depending on your sales process, it might be beneficial to prioritize accuracy over speed. Precision-routing leads to the most suitable and available reps ensures that each lead is matched with the best fit for their needs, even if it takes a bit more time.
Doing this is especially beneficial if:
- You have different types of customers.
- Your customers’ needs are detailed, or your sales process is lengthy.
- You function in a niche space or have a complex team structure.
Measuring your sales performance against your team’s response time can help you find a realistic balance between speed and accuracy.
2. Make Your Routing Process Robust
Effective lead generation is the bedrock of your sales pipeline. Creating a robust lead routing process can help boost this by ensuring every lead is assigned to the right sales rep. For this, factor in elements such as:
- Buyer Personas and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP): Creating well-rounded customer profiles can help you assign leads based on your ideal customer’s needs while also ensuring you don’t waste time on leads that don’t make a good fit for your product or service.
- Lead Qualification and Scoring Criteria: Qualifying and scoring leads helps prioritize leads effectively. Factors such as company size, budget, buying authority, and lead source can help score leads efficiently.
- Performance Tracking Tools: These help you identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, etc. You can leverage metrics such as lead response time, revenue-per-lead, sales cycle length, customer satisfaction, and conversion rates to analyze the process's effectiveness and make improvements wherever necessary.
3. Keep Lead Reassignment Rules Consistent
Reassignment refers to rerouting your leads when the most suitable sales rep can’t get to the lead in time. This is a very plausible scenario and must be factored into your lead routing strategy to ensure the process works effectively.
Analyze how much time should trigger a reassignment (30 seconds, 1 minute, etc.). Then, add it as a criterion in your lead routing software. Doing this will help you respond to leads quickly, allowing for faster conversion and an improved customer experience.
Alternatively, you can also consider sharing short introductions for each of your sales reps online and allowing the lead to access their calendars to schedule calls. This will allow them to select the sales rep they want to talk to and reduce instances of reassignment.
4. Review Regularly to Improve Your Routing
Keep checking in and re-evaluating your lead routing process from time to time. This is because your sales process will develop with dynamic customer needs and business growth. Reviewing your lead process periodically will help you edit or tweak it to ensure it remains relevant and effective.
Here are some benefits of regular revision:
- Helps identify inefficiencies in your lead management efforts.
- Helps optimize critical factors such as conversions, lead scoring, qualification, prioritization, and response processes.
- Helps ensure you’re leveraging the most relevant and effective criteria to route leads.
5. Use Lead Routing Software
Balancing speed with accuracy, optimizing your routing process, keeping lead reassignment rules consistent and reviewing your process on a regular basis will help you get the most out of your lead routing efforts. But it all works only when you automate them.
Executing all these manually will be time consuming and load up your already heavy day.
So, consider integrating a lead routing tool into your sales tech stack. This convenient software allows you to automate the assignment of leads to the right sales rep, promoting speed and efficiency while eliminating the chance of human error.
Schedule IQ by Klenty is a lead routing tool that offers flexible routing techniques, such as:
- Owner-Based Routing: Identifies when leads already have an existing relationship with your business and assigns them to the rep listed as the account owner in the CRM.
- Form-Based Routing: Analyzes leads’ form answers to assign them to sales reps based on tech stack, location, company size, and more.
- CRM-Based Routing: Leverages CRM insights on a lead or account to assign leads to the most suitable rep.
- IP-Based Routing: Grabs the lead’s location through their IP address to route them to the right rep.
In addition to these flexible routing techniques, Schedule IQ is also the only platform to offer a drag-and-drop workflow builder that allows sales teams to quickly visualize, review, and edit their lead routing strategy. You can make changes to your routing logic in seconds and easily see how your routing strategy looks.
Lastly, Schedule IQ offers capabilities like:
- Website Calendar Embed: Simply copy-paste the embed code to easily embed your calendar directly on your website with no hassle or developer assistance. This feature allows your visitors to book meetings on your website, enhancing its functionality by allowing them to schedule calls without leaving your platform.
- Calendar Integration: Integrate your Google and Outlook calendars with Schedule IQ to allow prospects to book meetings during your available hours.
- CRM Integrations: Gain bidirectional sync with leading CRMs such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM. Whenever a visitor books, misses, or cancels a meeting, Schedule IQ instantly creates a contact and registers the activity into your CRM. Further, it also updates existing contacts, ownership and relevant fields to ensure your CRM is always updated.
Long story short, Schedule IQ by Klenty can help you supercharge your sales pipeline and drive revenue by facilitating the seamless allocation of leads.
To check out Schedule IQ by Klenty in action, book a demo now!
