One of the biggest challenges for sales managers is fairly distributing these leads among their reps to ensure everyone has an equal shot at meeting their quotas.
Manually distributing leads can lead to:
- Overburdening only a select number of reps in the team,
- Assigning leads to unavailable reps, and
- Not assigning leads at the right time to reps.
Ultimately, uneven lead distribution can be detrimental to sales success as it can lead to missed opportunities and potential revenue loss.
So, how do you address these challenges to ensure fair and efficient lead distribution?
By using a round robin software.
In this blog, we’ve discussed round robin software and its benefits and given the top 5 round robin software to ensure fairness and efficiency in the lead distribution process.
What Is Round Robin?
Round robin refers to the method of distributing leads or tasks evenly among a group of individuals or teams in a rotational manner.
This method is commonly used in sales and customer support environments to ensure everyone in the team gets an equal opportunity to handle leads, customers, or assignments.
Round robin distribution can be done either manually or with a round robin software.
What Is Round Robin Software?
Round robin software automates the equitable distribution of leads to the appropriate sales reps. As soon as leads enter the pipeline, they are distributed to the most suitable reps, eliminating the need for manual lead assignment.
This ensures quick response times and maintains a fair system where every sales rep has equal opportunities.
Why Do You Need Round Robin Software?
You can continue to assign leads manually if you have a small team and low lead volume. But as your business grows, you’ll start having a high volume of leads. At this point, manually distributing leads becomes inefficient and can hinder your sales process.
This is where round robin software comes into play, offering several significant advantages:
1. Improve Speed To Lead
The leads who’ve shown interest in your solution are also evaluating your competitors simultaneously. The quicker you respond, the higher the chance of converting a lead. In fact, a study reveals that 78% of the leads go to the vendor that responds first.
When you use round robin software, leads are automatically assigned to the next available sales rep in the queue, reducing delays and ensuring that follow-ups happen promptly. This improves your chances of engaging potential customers before your competitors do.
2. Fair Lead Distribution
One of the biggest challenges in manual lead routing is the fair allocation of leads.
Manually allocating leads causes inefficiencies like:
- Selective allocation: Some leads might be selectively given to certain reps based on perceived performance or favoritism, leading to unequal opportunities.
- Slower sales cycle: Inconsistencies and delays in assigning leads can slow down the overall sales cycle, affecting the productivity of your sales team.
- No workload balance: Manual distribution can result in some reps being overwhelmed with leads while others have too few, creating an imbalance in workload and performance.
Round robin software ensures each rep gets an equal opportunity to work on quality leads. This promotes a balanced workload and reduces any potential bias in lead allocation. This fairness boosts team morale and ensures that no single rep is overburdened or underutilized.
3. Assign Leads by Availability
Sales reps have varying schedules due to meetings, appointments, and other commitments, making it challenging for you to keep track of each rep’s availability. Manually assigning leads without considering availability can result in missed opportunities and inefficient follow-ups.
With the round robin tool in place, you can take into account the availability of each sales rep.
If a rep is unavailable during certain hours or for extended periods, the system can be updated to reflect this. The software will then automatically route leads to the next available team member in the queue, ensuring that leads are not left unattended due to rep unavailability.
4. Refine Lead Distribution Strategy
Round robin software provides valuable insights into your lead distribution process. With this software, you can:
- Measure Sales Performance: Track key metrics such as the number of leads assigned, speed to lead, and conversion rates. These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your lead distribution strategy.
- Identify Trends and Areas of Improvement: With clear data on how leads are distributed and handled, you can spot trends and identify areas for improvement. For example, you may find that specific reps excel with certain types of leads.
- Make Informed Decisions: Armed with the data, you can make informed decisions about refining your lead distribution strategy. You can adjust the round robin settings, reallocate resources, or provide additional training to reps based on their performance.
5 Round Robin Software in 2024
1. Schedule IQ
Schedule IQ by Klenty is a meeting scheduling and lead routing platform that automates the entire process of lead distribution based on the round-robin distribution logic and rules, ensuring that the right rep is assigned for every prospect and no opportunity is missed.
Let’s look into the key features of Schedule IQ that helps you in efficient lead distribution:
- Round robin scheduling. Schedule IQ offers 3 types of round robin scheduling to ensure you always route the right leads to the right rep:
- Flexible Routing randomly assigns meetings based on availability.
- Strict or Equal Routing allocates equal meeting slots.
- Weighted Routing assigns reps to leads based on predefined weightage.
- Drag-and-drop routing builder. Create complex routing workflows with ease. Schedule IQ is the only lead routing platform with a workflow builder that lets you quickly visualize, review, and edit your routing strategy. Make changes to your routing logic in seconds, and visualize your routing strategy easily.
- Access 4 different lead routing options. Enhance your lead distribution process. Choose from any of the following lead routing options to route leads alongside round robin:
- Form-based routing: Route leads based on their form answers
- Owner-based routing: Route leads based on their owners in the CRM
- IP-based routing: Route leads based on their geographical location.
- CRM-based routing: Routing based on CRM insights on an account/ lead
- Time zone support: Schedule IQ automatically detects your leads' time zones to ensure that meetings are scheduled at the correct times, regardless of their locations.
- Seamless calendar integration. Connect your Google or Outlook calendar to Schedule IQ to let prospects book a meeting during your available hours.
Pricing:
Schedule IQ's pricing options:
- 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. Calendly
Calendly is an online appointment scheduling software that simplifies the process of setting up meetings and appointments. It eliminates the back-and-forth communication often involved in scheduling by allowing users to share their availability and let others choose from the available time slots.
This tool is widely used by businesses, sales teams, recruiters, and service providers to streamline scheduling and enhance productivity.
Key features of Calendly:
- Equal meting distribution: Calendly’s round robin scheduling distributes meetings evenly among team members. This ensures that all members get a fair share of meetings, preventing any one person from being overloaded.
- Customize rules: 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.
- Team Availability and Buffer Times: Calendly ensures that team members' availability is accurately reflected, and buffer times between meetings can be set to prevent scheduling conflicts and allow for preparation and follow-up.
Pricing:
- Basic: Free
- Standard: $10 per user per month
- Teams: $16 per user per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Review the top 10 Calendly alternatives to drive revenue growth.
3. Chili Piper
Chili Piper is scheduling software that streamlines the booking and management of meetings for sales and customer success teams. It helps businesses automate their scheduling, improve their lead response times, and enhance their overall efficiency in handling inbound leads.
Here are key features of Chili Piper:
- Round robin queue: Leads are automatically assigned to the next available representative in the round robin queue, reducing manual intervention and speeding up the process.
- Custom round robin: You can customize round robin lead distribution based on your rep’s availability, workload, or expertise. This ensures that leads are assigned to the most appropriate sales rep.
- Custom Workflows: You can create custom workflows to handle different types of leads, ensuring each lead is directed to the right person or team based on specific criteria.
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)
Evaluate the 10 best Chili Piper alternatives for closing more deals.
4. BookIt by LeanData
LeanData is a revenue operations platform designed to help businesses optimize their lead management processes. It focuses on lead routing, account matching, and data management to ensure that sales and marketing teams can effectively manage their leads and accounts.
Here are some of the key features of LeanData:
- Lead Routing: With LeadData, you route leads to the right sales rep based on criteria such as territory, round-robin assignments, or other custom rules.
- Lead-to-Account Matching: The tool automatically matches inbound leads to existing accounts in the CRM to provide context and improve engagement. This ensures that sales reps have complete and accurate information when they reach out to prospects.
- Custom routing rules: You can define and customize routing rules and criteria based on your 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. RevenueHero
RevenueHero is 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.
Here’s how RevenueHero helps distribute leads:
- Round robin distribution: Revenue Hero enables you to set round-robin lead distribution logic and route leads based on territory, ownership, or predefined rules based on your sales process.
- Customizable Rules: The platform allows you to set up custom rules for lead distribution based on various factors, such as lead source, industry, company size, and more.
- Seamless CRM integration: It automatically updates the lead data and meeting details in the CRM after a website form is filled out or a demo schedule is scheduled.
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)
How To Choose the Right Round Robin Software for Your Business?
Choosing the right round robin software involves evaluating several key features that ensure efficient, fair, and optimized lead distribution.
We’ve compiled 5 key features you need to consider before choosing the right round robin software for your sales team.
1. Flexible Lead Distribution
When evaluating round robin software, it’s important to ensure it offers flexible lead distribution options like:
- Multiple Allocation Methods
Your software should give you the option to select from flexible, strict, or weighted round robin methods, allowing you to ensure optimal performance.
- Customizable Rules
The software should allow you to set custom rules for lead assignment, such as based on industry, geographical location, or lead source. This ensures that leads are matched with the right reps, leading to higher customer satisfaction
2. Owner-Based Routing
Owner-based routing is a feature in the round robin software that allows you to route the lead to the sales rep who already owns them in the CRM.
Routing prospects who’ve already reached out to your company get connected to the same rep who interacted with them the first time facilitactes better interaction experience.
Why? Prospects don’t have to start the interaction from the scratch. The reps who already interacted with the prospect will have better context and familiarity to tailor their communication and strategies to provide a personalized interaction.
3. Quick Editing & Visualizing of Routing Strategy
Opt for round robin software that provides capabilities to help you review and edit your routing strategy easily. A user-friendly dashboard with intuitive controls allows you to visualize how leads are being distributed and make adjustments as needed.
This feature enables you to fine-tune your routing strategy in real-time, ensuring optimal performance and adaptability to changing business requirements.
4. Time Zone Support
If your sales team operates in multiple time zones or deals with leads from different regions, it's crucial to choose round robin software that supports automatic time zone conversion.
This ensures that leads are distributed to available reps within their respective time zones, minimizing response time delays and improving overall customer experience.
5. Customize Availability
Look for a tool that allows your sales reps to customize their availability based on their schedules and preferences. This feature enables reps to indicate their working hours, days off, or any other time constraints,
This ensures that leads are assigned to only available reps and that leads don't have to wait for hours for a response, increasing the chances of making a sale.
You need a tool that fulfills all these conditions. And the one tool that fits the bill is Schedule IQ by Klenty.
Schedule IQ is a meeting scheduler tool that helps you in efficient round robin lead distribution.
Whether it’s distributing leads by geography, company size, or industry, you can ensure that leads are evenly distributed and routed to the right reps always.
Book a demo now to experience first-hand how Schedule IQ helps you in fair and prompt allocation of leads!
FAQs:
How to do Round Robin scheduling?
Why do you need a round robin tool?
- Fair lead distribution
- Assign leads by availability
- Improve speed to lead
- Refine lead distribution strategy