TL;DR:
- Lead routing is about taking what your sales team already does well and elevating it with personalized, relevant, and actionable information about prioritized leads.
- When lead routing is paired with customer analytics and is able to be integrated with data from across your organization, it can ensure the right sales rep has the correct data in order to make the conversion.
- This can all be achieved in one place when you pair CallRail’s Call Tracking with Lead Center.
Does your organization struggle with around one of every four marketing leads being assigned to the wrong account owner? Do you even have a way to determine where your organization stands compared to others?
Whether you can answer those questions or not, they bring up the important role that lead routing plays in the sales process. Often overlooked in the normal speed of business and overshadowed by other metrics, lead management and routing can actually make a big difference in your customer’s experience and, ultimately, your bottom line.
In short, lead routing is one of the defining aspects of the overall lead management lifecycle, which includes:
- Lead generation
- Scoring
- Routing
- Initial customer contact
- Nurturing
For many organizations, lead routing tends to be an automated process dictated by assignment rules set by the team. When it’s done correctly, leads are properly routed and appropriately handled, preventing the opportunity from becoming stale or a customer from having a negative first impression with your brand.
What your company could be missing out on without effective lead routing
Not having lead routing in place or not establishing proper lead routing processes and rules can spell trouble for sales teams. Leads can get assigned to the wrong account team or, even worse, not tracked at all. In both cases, it means missed opportunities for your business, delayed follow-ups, and a poor sales experience.
For organizations with hundreds — if not thousands — of leads to manage, relying on a manual process or one based on software that’s not designed to handle the job is just not feasible. Even for businesses that have established some sort of lead routing method, evaluating the performance and fine-tuning it can seem more problematic than it’s worth.
Luckily, there are lead tracking and routing systems that can automate these processes from start to finish, including the initial organization of leads, the overall management of the lead routing process, and the nitty-gritty of assigning leads within an easy-to-use interface.
Even better, industry-leading solutions can also integrate into your company’s existing communications and mobile platforms, track leads in real time, and sync across your organization to enhance the data that other functions use. \
How predictive lead routing can improve sales and operating efficiencies
Once in place, an effective lead routing system can help with several key functions and deliver strategic advantages to your business.
Here are just a few examples of functions that can see a boost as the lead routing and management process takes off.
Lead tracking
The way your leads move from their first brush with your brand to the moment when they make a purchase needs to be seamless. This is where lead management comes in.
Lead management tools help your team prioritize leads so you can maximize your time and resources, adding personalization to your contacts and providing the data that you need to track and refine your methods.
As a lead moves from generation to scoring, routing, contact, and nurturing, your team will benefit from having a more purposeful — and less reactive — marketing strategy that resonates with that lead.
Conversion and sales analytics
You will not find many people in sales complaining about having too much information about each facet of their job. When combined with a sound lead management process, conversion and sales analytics will be even more meaningful, presenting ample data that helps your team prioritize its efforts, processes, and revenue-generating activities.
From account-level details down to the digital history of how your leads move on your platform, industry-leading systems can provide rich data for your team to use to craft meaningful interactions with potential customers while also supplementing existing enterprise data to drive decisions.
Platform integration
To understand how and why your leads and customers react the way they do, you need your lead management solutions to handle integrations with your other enterprise systems right out of the box. This way, your systems can constantly feed sales, engagement, call, and conversation data into a uniform tool so you have real-time information to adjust your communication strategies accordingly.
For example, you can configure your system to kick off alerts to notify your sales team when leads take specific actions or when they request support for certain features during a free trial, so both your customer support team and your marketing team can provide a uniform response.
Marketing synchronization
On the marketing side, it’s vital to know whom your team is creating content for and what you want your content to do for you.
As a lead management solution captures and organizes lead and customer details, your marketing team will have even more granular data on the people you’re creating content for, the types of content that are generating the right types of responses, and the methods that reach your audience most effectively. This equates to a better use of your marketing dollars with a bigger impact.
How an organization can get started with lead routing
Now that we’re all on the same page regarding the importance of lead routing and management, how do you kick-start the process?
Fortunately, lead routing is not about scrapping your current processes, data, and experiences. In fact, it is about organizing and streamlining the actions your team is already taking and using even more customer-driven data to empower the team.
So how can your organization get started with lead routing? Here are a few key steps.
1. Identify your core team
Bring together members of your sales, marketing, customer success, data analysis, and management teams so they can all share their insights, perspectives, and experiences. You can capture your “current state” processes, identify any available data, and document pain points and best practices regarding how leads are currently tracked, routed, and managed. \
2. Define your lead management strategy
Lead management is about guiding and accompanying your customers along their buying journey, pairing them with the right contact within your organization to answer their questions, and sharing the resources they need to have a positive experience.
This step is about understanding who your customers are, how they should be prioritized and routed, and which tools should be utilized to keep them engaged and moving forward.
3. Implement industry-leading software
Lead management software is supposed to make your team’s job easier — not give the team a headache. Industry-leading software will have the integrations, analytical power, interfaces, dashboards, reports, and tools ready. And it can also be customized for your environment so you can track leads at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Once lead management is implemented and combined with other functions such as call tracking, conversation intelligence, and form tracking, every interaction can be measured, evaluated, and refined over time.
4. Refine and iterate for continuous improvement
Like many other processes in the quick-moving software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment, lead management is not going to be a “set it and forget it“ exercise. Your team can constantly update and refine its processes and tactics to improve how it’s engaging with leads. For example, with lead management, your team can follow a customer’s experience back to the initial source to see what can be improved, where unnecessary delays may have slowed progress, and which resources could further ease the customer’s journey.
Taking the next step
No matter where your organization is in its ability to route leads and structure your communications, CallRail’s Call Tracking and Lead Center solutions can help. Like all SaaS businesses, you need marketing metrics and customer-generated data to gather the necessary intelligence and flip a lead to a new customer as efficiently as possible. CallRail’s tools provide all of this functionality — from tracking the first inbound phone call to closing the sale — in one unified system.
Ready to see it for yourself? To learn more about CallRail’s solutions and how we approach lead management, read more in our blog or contact us for a free trial.