One of the chief concepts in lead generation, sales, and marketing is lead routing, which decides how to assign new prospects to sales representatives.
Now that I’m writing this article and at the time that you are reading it, every second, new potential customers have become aware of our brands and have been adding to our sales funnels. 🔻
Every second is worthy as new leads are coming in. And the seconds become more noteworthy when we want to decide which of our sales specialists contact each of these prospects.
This article explores the meaning and significance of lead distribution as an important technique in lead generation, along with lead routing best practices, examples, rules, and common issues. Moreover, it introduces the best lead routing software. Whatever essential you need to know about lead routing is investigated here.
Continue reading to become surprised by the details found nowhere and enhance your lead generation level! 😲
What Is Lead Routing?
Lead routing is the process of assigning new incoming potential customers to various salespersons in a team to make the most of lead generation efforts.
The below example will clearly clarify the lead routing meaning: 👇
Consider five sales professionals working in your company who are responsible for contacting and engaging prospects to convert them from leads to paying customers.
After running an email campaign, fifty email recipients have responded to your email. Now, it’s time for your sales executives to continue the conversation with these new leads.
50 new leads have come in and you have 5 sales specialists to answer and guide them through the sales funnel’s first stage of awareness to the last stage of purchase. It means that each marketer is responsible for converting 10 of these new leads.
But an important question arises here! How to distribute these leads among the sales reps? Do you prefer to route leads by location, value, use case, customer type, or simply by alphabetical order? Do you want them to be distributed equally among reps?
Sales managers are responsible for lead management and routing. They assign new potential clients to their marketers based on various attributes and reasons, which are explained in detail in the next section.
Then, sales representatives use the best lead generation tools and strategies to convert leads to paying customers.
Why Is Lead Routing So Important for Sales and Marketing Teams?
When you have experienced salespersons on your marketing team, isn’t it better to assign high-value leads to them rather than to new and less experienced reps on your team?
Isn’t it better that each of your company’s sales agents focus on a group of leads located in a certain city or industry?
Lead routing ensures that prospects are assigned to the right sales specialists who have enough time, skill, and knowledge to manage those leads efficiently.
Lead routing boosts conversion rates, balanced workflow, and personalized engagements. With the help of the lead routing examples and strategies in the next part, save your efforts and time.
The Leading Lead Routing Examples and Strategies
Various lead routing examples and options are explained in this section assisting sales managers to find the best one that suits their needs and preferences.
1. Lead Routing by Round-Robin Method – Balanced Workload
In this type of lead distribution, each member of the sales and lead generation group takes turns handling a new lead in a sequential manner. It is the simplest method of lead routing, focusing on fair lead distribution.
For instance, if a marketing team has three marketers, the first incoming lead is assigned to the first marketer, the second lead is assigned to the second marketer, and the third lead is assigned to the third marketer. Then, the cycle is repeated.
This simple method ensures that each sales team member gets an equal number of leads over time. It avoids overloading one person and ensuring fairness in workload distribution.
Since everyone knows how the leads are distributed, there’s transparency in the process. It reduced any potential disputes over lead assignment. It also makes it easy to track who is responsible for each lead.
2. Lead Routing by Value – High-Value vs. Low-Value Leads
When we want to distribute leads by value, first, we should divide leads into two main groups:
- ➕ High-Value Leads: Leads that come from bigger companies and are more likely to sign larger potential deals.
- ➖ Low-Value Leads: Leads that come from smaller companies and are more likely to sign smaller potential deals.
Now that I have written the meaning of these two types of leads, it’s easy to understand the meaning of lead routing by value.
To distribute prospects by value, high-value and qualified leads are assigned to more experienced and skillful salespersons as they are more capable of converting these invaluable potential clients into paying ones. They do their best and make the most of personalization to encourage these high-value leads to start complex deals with them.
On the other hand, low-value incoming leads are assigned to marketers who are less specialized and experienced. However, you need to ensure that these less experienced sales reps are trained and support them through the whole process of conversion.
Moreover, you can even use automation tools to handle low-value leads. For instance, automation tools help manage follow-ups for low-value leads, schedule emails, and provide timely support.
3. Lead Routing by Location – Continent, Country, City, or Street
Managers can divide leads into various groups based on their geographical location and then assign one or several of these groups arranged by location to each sales specialist.
In this way, they ensure that each geographic location is routed to a marketer and all areas are covered completely.
First, they should define territories. For instance, consider an Indian trading company that exports agricultural products from India to various European countries.
This company has four marketers. We can define four territories in this example and assign the customers of each of these territories to one marketer:
- Northern Europe: Includes leads from countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland that are assigned to marketer
- Western Europe: Includes leads from countries like France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Switzerland that are assigned to marketer
- Southern Europe: Includes leads from Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece that are assigned to marketer
- Eastern Europe: Includes leads from Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria that are assigned to marketer
When a lead comes in, the company’s CRM system automatically identifies the geographical location of the lead based on the information provided. The lead is then routed to the sales rep responsible for that specific territory.
4. Lead Routing by Product – Optimized Expertise Allocation
This type of lead routing is possible for companies that offer various types of products or services.
Let’s explore an example to make it clear. Picture a Chinese producing company that manufactures two types of products, including:
- Home Appliances: Like refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves.
- Electronics: Like smartphones, laptops, and tablets.
This company sells its products to customers inside China. Its marketing team has 100 employees divided into two main groups based on the products.
If the leads were looking for the products of group 1 (home appliances), the 50 markets in the first group are responsible to reply to them and meet their needs.
And if the coming leads are interested in the products of group 2 (electronics), the 50 marketers in the second group are responsible.
In this way, marketers of each group focus only on one group of products and increase their knowledge and information about those limited products.
In the above example, the sales reps of the first group only concentrate on the features, use cases, benefits, and market of home appliances, and there is no need to have data about electronics.
Sales representatives with specialized knowledge of a particular product can address queries more effectively. It improves the chances of converting leads into customers.
5. Lead Routing by Lead Score – Prioritization works well
Some managers evaluate and qualify various attributes of leads to determine their potential value for their business. The more a lead’s score is, the higher the possibility of conversion will be.
In this way, they prioritize leads and put their time and energy first on leads that are more likely to be turned to paying customers.
Various attributes can be used to qualify prospects, such as company size, industry, location, value, revenue, funding stage, job title, use case, interest level (shown through website visits, email or social media interaction, and engagement) etc. You can assess leads based on any attribute that is important to you and assign a numerical score to each lead.
Afterward, high-scoring leads can be assigned to more proficient and experienced sales representatives, and low-scoring leads can be assigned to less skillful and experienced reps. Leads with very low scores can even be handled by automation tools, especially when you are in a time shortage.
Below, we have discussed the complete process that a manager should follow in order to route leads by lead score:
✔️ First – Find Key Attributes, including
- Demographic Attributes: such as industry, company size, role, and location.
- Behavioral Attributes: such as visiting your website, opening emails, attending webinars, or engaging on social media.
- Firmographic Attributes: such as annual revenue, number of employees, and market position.
- Psychographic Attributes: such as how well your product fits leads’ needs.
✔️ Second – Determine the Significance of Each Attribute
All attributes do not have the same level of importance. It depends on your business and goals. For instance, in many cases, the decision-maker’s role is more important than the city where the leader lives.
✔️ Third – Assign Scores to Values
You can use a range of scores from 10 to 20. For instance, to qualify the company size, you can use this scoring system:
- Large enterprise (1000+ employees) = 15 points
- Medium (100-999 employees) = 10 points
- Small (1-99 employees) = 5 points
✔️ Fourth – Calculate the Total Scores of Each Lead
Sum up the scores given to each attribute to find the total score of each lead.
✔️ Fifth – Define Scoring Thresholds
You can define leads’ score like the following:
- Hot Leads (80+ points): Ready for immediate sales engagement.
- Warm Leads (50-79 points): Needs further nurturing but likely to convert soon.
- Cold Leads (Below 50 points): Requires more engagement and nurturing.
✔️ Sixth – Route Leads by Score
Finally, you can assign the hot leads to the most experienced salespersons, warm leads to less experienced ones, and cold leads to automation tools.
6. Lead Routing by Availability – For More Responsiveness
Lead routing by availability focuses on assigning leads to sales agents who have more free time at that time. If a marketer is too busy right now, it’s not efficient to assign new leads to them.
Assigning new prospects to a busy agent not only reduces the potential for conversion of the new leads but also negatively impacts the leads that the agent is already working on.
You can use CRM or sales automation tools to monitor the availability of your sales reps in real time. These tools can automatically assign leads to executives who have the bandwidth to handle them.
Ensure that sales reps keep their calendars updated with meetings, time off, and other commitments. Integrating this information into your lead routing system allows you to automatically assign new leads to available reps.
7. Lead Routing by Customer Status – Old vs. New Customers
You can route leads by customer status. It means that you should assign leads that are already your customers to more knowledgeable executives like Customer Success Manager (CSM) as they can efficiently expand the relationship, explore new products/services for them, and provide professional and specific support for these old clients.
Leads from the companies that are not yet your customer and should be converted can be assigned to Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) that can guide them through the first stages of the sales funnel, including the awareness and evaluation stages.
In fact, new leads and existing customers typically have different levels of familiarity with your company and products or services. It influences the types of questions they ask and the complexity of their inquiries.
Simpler questions of new leads can be easily handled by SDRs but complex requirements of existing customers need the proficiency of managers.
Lead Routing Best Practices Every Marketer Should Know
In this section, various lead routing best practices are explained to help sales consultants and their managers make the most of lead routing and distribution.
1. Evaluate Your Sales Team
Before deciding how to route leads and what strategy to use, you should evaluate your sales and marketing team to have a deep understanding of their expertise, experience, availability, and capacity.
Are they specialized by industry, region, or account size? Are some reps more skilled at closing high-value deals?
2. Align with Your Marketing Goals
Ensure that your lead routing strategy aligns with your sales and marketing goals.
For example, geographic routing may be the most effective if your goal is to penetrate new markets. If increasing conversion rates is the priority, lead routing by lead score is suggested.
3. Assess Your CRM Capabilities for Lead Routing
It’s recommended to review the capabilities of your CRM or automation tool to find out whether it can help you in lead routing or not.
Determine if they can support complex routing rules, integrate with lead scoring systems, or provide analytics.
4. Apply Lead Routing Software
Not all CRMs come with built-in lead routing tools. But no problem! If your CRM has no automated lead routing feature, you can use one of the lead routing software introduced in the next part.
5. Measure and Optimize Your Strategy Continuously
First, test your lead routing strategy for a month. Then, assess and analyze the performance. Monitor key metrics like lead response time, conversion rates, and sales cycle length.
Once the strategy is fully implemented, continuous feedback from sales reps will be gathered, and the process will be tracked. Maybe you need to change the lead routing method in the future as new needs arise.
3 Best Automated Lead Routing Tools to Hit the Target
In this section, we will introduce three of the leading lead routing software in the market, boosting the process of lead distribution in terms of precision and speed.
1. Distribution Engine
Distribution Engine is a lead assignment and routing tool that is commonly used in integration with Salesforce. It uses various techniques for lead routing like round-robin, classifier, availability, etc. to streamline this process and save time. It ensures that leads are distributed fairly and efficiently.
2. LeanData
LeanData is a cloud-based lead distribution software that connects interested buyers to your marketing team in minutes with customizable routing rules. Instant and precise lead distribution are the main benefits of using LeanData for lead routing.
3. LeadSquared
LeadSquared automates lead assignment rules based on various attributes like lead source, location, language, agent performance, sales territory, etc. It helps marketing teams to simplify the process of lead routing to reduce challenges of time-wasting and errors.
Common Issues with Lead Routing and How to Avoid
There are some issues that threaten the process of lead assignment and routing and may result in lower conversion rates and burnouts. Managers should be aware of them to avoid risks and potential obstacles.
- Unbalanced Distribution: If you don’t use a reliable automatic lead routing tool, some reps may have more leads than others. They become busier and cannot manage their tasks efficiently.
- Lead Leakage: Leads may be lost in the system, either due to technical issues, incorrect routing rules, or human error. Lead leakage can also occur if leads are assigned to reps who are unavailable.
- Poor Integration Between Systems: If your lead routing system is not well-integrated with your CRM, data may not flow smoothly between systems. This can result in incomplete information or misrouted leads.
- Duplicated Leads: Duplicated leads in your CRM means that some leads may be contacted by several sales reps. So clean your CRM to avoid time-wasting and frustration.
We recommend you use CUFinder’s Enrichment Engine to check the data accuracy and find duplicated information in your CRM through its 27 enrichment tools.
The Conclusion Stage
This article investigated the concept of lead routing in the field of lead generation, explaining its importance, benefits, rules, problems, tools, and best practices.
An automatic lead routing tool is designed to distribute leads fairly and efficiently among sales reps, ensuring that the right executive is contacted with each lead.
Explore the leading lead routing software introduced in this article along with lead routing best practices to fully take advantage of this concept.
FAQs
1. What does lead routing mean?
Lead routing is the process of assigning new leads to various sales representatives based on different attributes such as value, company size, etc.
2. What is the goal of lead routing?
The goal of lead routing is to ensure that leads are handled quickly and with the right salesperson who is more capable in converting that certain group of leads.
3. What is routing vs. scoring?
Lead scoring is the process of qualifying leads and giving numerical scores to them, while lead routing is the process of assigning leads to various reps that can be done based on the lead scores or other attributes.
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