Companies that contacted leads within an hour of receiving a query were nearly 7 times as likely to turn them into opportunities as those that tried to contact them an hour later, according to a study by Harvard Business Review.
But when you have dozens of leads entering your sales funnel daily, how do you efficiently manage and distribute them to your sales team and ensure they don’t slip through the cracks?
By investing in Lead Distribution Software.
You can automate the process of prioritizing leads. This helps you to assign the right rep quickly, ensure fair distribution of leads, and save hours you spend manually assigning leads.
In this blog, we'll delve into what lead distribution software is, why it's essential, and present you with the 13 best lead distribution tools.
What Is Lead Distribution Software?
Lead distribution software automates the process of assigning and delivering leads to the most suitable sales reps. As this process of lead assignment is known as lead routing, the software can also be called lead routing software.
The tool takes inbound leads from sources like demo requests, online surveys, downloads of gated content like ebooks, and social media and fairly distributes them among sales reps based on predefined criteria.
Automated lead distribution ensures prompt action for every single lead, reducing the risk of losing potential customers due to delays or inefficient allocation.
Why Lead Distribution Software Is a Must-Have for Sales Teams?
Having reliable lead distribution software is not just a convenience—it's a necessity for today’s sales teams.
By automating the lead routing process, lead distribution software can boost conversion rates and help your sales team stay ahead in a highly competitive market.
Let's delve deeper into the key reasons that make lead distribution software a must-have:
a) Boosts Lead Response Time
88% of leads expect responses within 60 minutes of their initial request. However, the problem is that many businesses are slow in getting back to their leads.
With lead routing software, you can distribute leads among sales reps in real time. This helps you identify leads that need immediate attention and sends them to a sales rep who can respond promptly, keeping your leads satisfied.
You can set your own criteria and create a rule-based system to assign leads or switch them to the next available rep if there are any delays on your end, reducing the average response time.
b) Improves Lead Quality
You receive inbound leads from various sources, such as your website's contact form, social media, and email campaigns. These leads can vary widely in terms of quality. Some may be highly interested and ready to make a purchase, while others might be just browsing with no immediate buying intent.
A lead routing tool allows you to filter leads and score them based on various factors such as buying intent, demography, browsing habits, engagement with your content, and more. You can adjust your distribution logic based on lead scores to ensure that the most promising leads receive prompt attention and that leads with different needs are properly nurtured.
For instance, a highly-scored lead with a history of making purchases will be routed directly to your top-performing salesperson, while a browsing lead will go to a salesperson skilled at nurturing leads and providing information.
c) Ensures Efficient Lead Distribution
In a manual system, the leads might be assigned to sales reps based on factors like their seniority or workload. However, this method can be highly time-consuming and may even lead to biases or uneven workloads.
Lead management software helps in fair lead distribution by automating the process, ensuring that leads are assigned based on objective criteria, and maintaining an even workload among sales representatives. This leads to a more efficient and equitable sales process, ultimately benefiting both the sales team and the company as a whole.
d) Empowers Teams to Make Data-driven Decisions
Lead distribution platform helps by providing data-driven insights through the collection and analysis of information about leads and their interactions.
This software tracks data like lead source, conversion rates, and response times, making it easier to see what's working and what's not. These insights help businesses make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and optimize their sales processes.
e) Improves Customer Experience
Lead distribution software can capture and use data about a lead's previous interactions with your company. This helps in personalizing interactions with leads.
For example, if a lead previously had an assigned sales rep in the CRM, you can set the distribution logic in such a way that the lead will be routed to the same rep. If the previously assigned rep is unavailable, the software routes the lead to the next suitable rep without delay.
This ensures the customer deals with the same representative throughout their journey, promoting consistency and a seamless experience. This helps build trust and rapport, as the customer doesn't need to repeat their story or preferences to different team members.
13 Best Lead Distribution Software in 2023
Now that we've covered the importance of lead distribution software, let's explore 13 top tools available in the market today that can help supercharge your sales efforts:
1. Schedule IQ
Schedule IQ by Klenty is an all-in-one solution for scheduling meetings and efficiently managing leads. It's tailor-made to enhance the efficiency of your sales and customer success teams through one-click meeting booking. With Schedule IQ, you can effortlessly arrange, strategize, and allocate incoming leads, ensuring no potential opportunities slip through the cracks.
Key features:
- You can add the personalized meeting link to your website using the Website Embed feature allowing visitors to book meetings directly from your site.
- Users can create custom forms with Schedule IQ. This helps in gathering specific prospect information and refining sales strategy.
- Schedule IQ offers 3 customizable and advanced routing methods:
- Flexible Routing allows you to distribute meetings randomly.
- Strict or Equal Routing allows you to allocate equal meeting slots.
- Weighted Routing lets you route meetings based on predefined weightage to assign the right rep to each lead.
- With this software, you can further filter the leads by:
- Rule-based Scheduling: In this case, the tool will display the relevant rep’s calendar based on your prospect’s form answer.
- Lead-based Scheduling: Schedule IQ checks your CRM to find the right owner for the prospect, showing only their calendar. This ensures that your prospect talks directly to their point of contact, making their experience seamless.
- Users can see all their past and future interactions and events in one place. Sales reps can quickly view their calendars, use filters, and arrange items by dates, event types, or specific customers. This helps them plan their days more effectively and monitor their performance.
Pricing:
- Free: $0
- Meeting Booker: $12/seat/month (billed annually) and $15/seat/month (billed monthly)
- Lead Router: $20/seat/month (billed annually) and $25/seat/month (billed monthly)
2. Chili Piper
Chili Piper is a software platform designed to streamline and automate various aspects of the sales and customer engagement process. Lead routing is one of its key features, which helps businesses efficiently distribute, manage, and convert leads into customers.
Key features:
- Chili Piper supports account-based lead routing, ensuring that leads associated with specific companies or accounts are routed to the relevant account executives or teams.
- Users can gain insights into lead routing performance, including conversion rates and response times, allowing them to optimize their lead management processes.
- For businesses with a global presence, Chili Piper can route leads based on their geographic location, directing them to the sales or support teams responsible for that region.
Pricing:
- Instant Booker: $15 per user/month billed annually or $22.5 per user/month billed monthly
- Handoff: $25 per user/month billed annually or $37.5 per user/month billed monthly
- Form Concierge: $30 per user/month billed annually or $45 per user/month billed monthly
- Distro: $30 per user/month billed annually or $45 per user/month billed monthly
3. Calendly
Calendly is an online scheduling and appointment booking tool that helps individuals and businesses streamline the process of scheduling meetings, appointments, and events. It is particularly popular for its user-friendly interface and integration capabilities with various calendar platforms like Google Calendar, Outlook, and others.
Key features:
- With the round-robin scheduling feature, you can distribute incoming meeting requests evenly among team members.
- You can set up rules to control how leads are routed by specifying criteria like location, availability, or specific team members, ensuring that the right person is assigned to a lead.
- The account-based routing feature automatically matches and schedules known leads and existing customers based on real-time CRM account assignments.
Pricing:
- Basic: Free
- Standard: $10 per user per month
- Teams: $16 per user per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
4. LeanData
LeanData is a revenue operations and go-to-market platform. It primarily focuses on lead routing and management, providing a range of features to ensure that leads are properly distributed to the right sales and marketing teams, making the entire sales process smoother.
Key features:
- The platform supports owner-based routing by enabling the assignment of leads to account owners and allowing for personalized engagement with target accounts.
- LeanData helps identify and merge duplicate leads and accounts, ensuring clean and accurate data in CRM systems.
- Users can define and customize routing rules and criteria based on their specific business needs, helping tailor lead distribution to unique requirements.
Pricing:
- Standard: $39 USD per user license/month
- Advanced: $49 USD per user license/month
- Premium: $59 USD per user license/month
5. Revenue Hero
RevenueHero is a sales scheduling software that helps revenue teams schedule meetings quickly, and route leads to sales reps efficiently. With key features like instant scheduling, instant qualification, advanced lead distribution, and more, it aims to enhance the management of inbound and outbound leads.
Key features:
- ReveueHero enables you to set round-robin lead distribution logic and route leads based on territory, ownership, or predefined rules based on your sales process.
- For every step, the platform lets you automate notifications with full context to both the assigned sales reps and the lead.
- It automatically updates the lead data and meeting details in the CRM after a website form-fill or demo schedule.
Pricing:
- Inbound Essential: $25 per user/month billed annually or $35 per user/month billed monthly
- Outbound Essential: $20 per user/month billed annually or $25 per user/month billed monthly
6. Distribution Engine
Distribution Engine, developed by NC Squared, is a tool that is used to distribute leads and opportunities to marketing and sales teams, cases and tasks to customer service or project teams, and accounts and contacts to the appropriate owner.
Key features:
- Distribution Engine can distribute leads or meetings in a round-robin fashion, ensuring a fair distribution of workloads among sales or customer success teams.
- It sends reassignment notifications to reps of leads that need more follow-up.
- Distribution Engine allows you to control assignment balance by giving senior reps more records and limiting junior reps while they gain experience.
Pricing: $45 per user per month
7. Operations OS by ZoomInfo
Operations OS by ZoomInfo (formerly known as RingLead) is a company that offers data quality and lead management solutions to businesses. Their primary focus is on data quality, lead deduplication, and data enrichment.
Key features:
- The software allows you to create territory-based flows using geography, industry, tech stack, or custom criteria for leads.
- It offers account-based routing with automated prerequisite account matching and deduplication processes.
- You can coordinate routing with rep availability using time-off toggles and Slack integration. This helps you maintain workload balance in your team.
Pricing: Available upon request
8. Leadspace
Leadspace is a B2B customer data platform that helps businesses manage and enrich their lead and customer data for marketing and sales purposes. It also provides advanced lead routing features, helping businesses manage and distribute leads effectively.
Key features:
- Leadspace can prioritize leads based on their quality, engagement level, or other relevant factors, ensuring that the most promising leads are routed to the right sales reps.
- Customizable rules can be set up to route leads based on various criteria, such as lead score, geographic location, industry, or other specific attributes.
- Leads are matched to specific accounts or target companies, allowing for personalized and account-focused lead routing.
Pricing: Available upon request
9. Traction Complete
Traction Complete is a sales routing platform that assists sales and marketing teams in organizing data and establishing hierarchies. When combined with Salesforce CRM, your team can merge customer data, assess engagement performance, conduct sales territory planning, and more.
Key features:
- It helps you capture leads and route them based on the criteria you need, including geography, territory, partner, hierarchy, account owner, and more.
- Traction Complete assists in territory planning and finding opportunities for cross-selling by identifying commonalities among accounts.
- The software automatically merges data and removes duplicate accounts.
Pricing: Available upon request
10. Lead Angel
LeadAngel is designed to assist businesses in preventing lead loss and increasing revenue from their sales and marketing. This platform allows users to categorize leads by factors like location, industry, and company size.
Key features:
- This lead distribution software provides various ways to assign leads, including round-robin, weighted, and segmented distribution.
- LeadAngel offers a drag-and-drop interface to create quick routing rules, ensuring that any object is directed to the right rep.
- LeadAngel’s data clean-up function allows you to eliminate duplicate leads, merge leads with existing contacts, and eliminate redundant accounts.
Pricing:
- Lite: $99 per company/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
11. PowerRouter
Power Router is a platform that helps businesses match prospects with the right sales development representative. It also allows managers to assign high-quality leads to account executives or customer success teams by matching them with existing accounts in real time.
Key features:
- Sales managers can use round-robin arrangements and weighted or load-balanced algorithms to distribute leads based on sales rep’s work hours, time zones, and availability.
- Power Router allows users to create lead segments based on territory, industry type, or source and set up preconfigured rules of routing for each segment.
- Power Router provides a user-friendly interface for creating and editing workflows easily.
Pricing:
- Starter: $15 per user per month billed annually
- Growth: $25 per user per month billed annually
- Enterprise: $35 per user per month billed annually
12. Syncari
Syncari is a data automation platform that focuses on helping businesses manage and synchronize their data across various systems and applications. While it is not primarily lead routing or CRM software, it can play a role in facilitating lead routing and data management by ensuring data consistency and quality across systems.
Key features:
- Syncari connects your entire GTM team, eliminating data silos and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
- It allows you to remove duplicate leads using the criteria you need, whether it's common details like email or custom factors like the location of the company.
- You can use Syncari to set up different routing plans, like round-robin, based on territories or specific accounts, using an easy interface and step-by-step instructions to create, monitor, and change routing processes quickly.
Pricing: $1,995 per month
13. Freshsales
Freshsales is a customer relationship management (CRM) software developed by Freshworks, a popular software company. Freshsales is designed to help businesses manage their sales leads and customer relationships effectively. While Freshsales primarily focuses on CRM and sales automation, it does offer some lead distribution features.
Key features:
- Freshsales’s Skill-based Routing feature allows you to route qualified leads to team members with specific skills or expertise, ensuring that the most qualified individuals handle leads matching their skill set.
- You can filter and route leads to sales reps based on their sources, such as website forms, social media, or email campaigns. This helps in tailoring the sales approach to the lead's point of origin.
- It allows you to set up custom lead assignment rules based on various criteria, such as geographic location, lead source, or lead score.
Pricing:
- Free
- Growth: $12 per user/month billed annually or $14.40 per user/month billed monthly
- Pro: $33.62 per user/month billed annually or $40.83 per user/month billed monthly
- Enterprise: $60 per user/month billed annually or $72 per user/month billed monthly
How to Choose an Ideal Lead Distribution Software?
Until now, we've talked about lead distribution software, its purpose in simplifying the lead distribution process, and the top 13 tools available today. Here are some of the factors you need to consider while selecting the right software for your business:
Routing Based on Specific Rules
Look for software that allows you to create custom rules for assigning leads. This ensures that the right salesperson gets the right lead based on criteria like geography, lead source, or lead score. This ensures efficiency and a higher chance of conversion.
Routing Based on Availability
Availability plays a crucial role in lead routing. Your software should be capable of routing leads based on team member's real-time availability. This ensures that prospects don't have to wait for hours to get a response, increasing the chances of making a sale.
Owner-Based Routing
Owner-based routing feature in the software allows you to route the lead to the sales rep who already owns them in the CRM.
This reduces the likelihood of multiple people from the sales team reaching out to the same lead and allows the owner to tailor their communication and strategies to suit the lead's specific needs.
Integrations
Ensure that the software can easily connect and work with your CRM system, calendar, and other tools in your tech stack. This integration allows for seamless transfer of lead data between your CRM and the lead distribution software.
Lead Prioritization
Evaluate whether the software provides lead scoring or prioritization features like automatically assigning scores to leads based on various criteria, such as demographics, behavior, engagement, and fit with the ideal customer profile.
This helps direct the most promising leads to your top-performing sales representatives, maximizing the opportunity.
Receiving Feedback
Feedback is essential for sales managers to monitor the progress of leads once they are assigned to sales reps.
A good lead distribution software should send automated notifications and prompt reps to submit updates via email, surveys, comments, or notes. This function helps managers oversee lead progress and quality, enabling adjustments to enhance the sales process.
