Too much of a good thing can absolutely be a problem. Marketing initiatives can deliver too many leads, which can cause some of them to fall between the proverbial cracks—or get assigned to the wrong salespeople. An overabundance of leads can also slow response time, causing your team to miss the windows of opportunity they present. Today’s prospects anticipate near instant response times. Timing is critical when it comes to sales, which is a big part of the value of lead routing automation.
What Is Lead Routing Automation?
The process of collecting and assigning leads to members of a team of salespeople is referred to as lead routing. Conducted effectively, leads are analyzed, organized, and allocated to the sales rep(s) best suited to manage them. Manual processes for these procedures are often slow, inaccurate, and incomplete. Automated lead routing, incorporating a HubSpot/Zoom integration, for example, gets the right leads to the right people, saving hours of manual work, maximizing productivity and enhancing profitability.
How Lead Routing Works
Lead prioritization and call cadence, enabled by a lead routing automation platform, helps you move leads through the sales cycle with greater efficiency. Customized workflows provide information to your sales reps so they always know whom to contact and when. Incorporating features such as automated scoring, tracking, and autodialing, automated lead routing can free sales teams from administrative work, affording them more time to focus on closing deals.
Another key factor of routing automation is ensuring the pertinent salesperson gets the appropriate lead. There may be language considerations, a specialized experience or expertise requirement, or just plain time with a contact to close a deal. Lead routing automation can help you match leads to the salespeople most likely to close particular prospects.
Lead Routing’s Benefits
The benefits of lead routing automation are:
- Improved Response Time – Taking too long to respond to a lead can cost sales. With competition what it is today, one of your rivals will be right on your heels if you fail to make contact within a reasonable time frame. Online sales leads, in particular, have remarkably short lifespans. Real time lead distribution afforded by an automation platform speeds response times and ensures that the best-equipped salesperson to close gets the lead.
- Enhanced Data Accuracy – Automating data collection and analysis improves the intel upon which your people have to act. Automation also gives you the ability to observe trends and produce more accurate sales forecasts. Moreover, lead automation relieves your sales team of the tedium of collecting and analyzing data when they’re planning calls.
- Improved Lead Organization – There are a number of different ways to organize leads, among them are by location, the means with which communication should be conducted, as well the period of an engagement. Properly organized leads also help sales teams avoid contacting disinterested prospects as well as those who have already been contacted. Improved organization also affords you the data you need to distribute leads most effectively.
- Effective Relationship Building – It can frequently require more than one call to close a prospect. In such instances, carefully crafted engagement and consistency are needed to convert that prospect into a customer. Lead routing automation can help reps maintain these relationships with personalized automated follow-ups at designated intervals.
In Summary
The value of lead routing automation lies in its ability to accelerate response times, enhance data accuracy, improve lead organization, and support your sales team’s relationships with prospective customers. Sales managers who have yet to embrace this technology would do well to implement automated lead routing—before all of their competitors do so.
