You’ve probably heard by now how intelligent lead routing — an automated system of processing leads — can help sales teams improve their speed to lead and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. But finding the best lead routing software for your business takes special consideration — your team has unique needs, and all lead routing solutions are not created equal.
Here are the core factors you should consider when choosing a lead routing software provider, the main questions to ask potential vendors, and whether your existing approach to data can support your routing goals.
Questions to Ask When Choosing a Lead Routing Solution
Finding the right system depends on your sales team’s goals and the particular bottlenecks in your lead process. As you evaluate solutions, ask yourself these framing questions:
What Results are You Expecting?
Start by thinking about your goal and reverse-engineer it to reach your starting point. That may look like actual sales numbers or a certain lead volume. If that’s the case, you’ll want to understand things like your ideal conversion rate, your speed-to-lead rate, or your quarterly revenue goals.
Rather than limiting yourself to the constraints of your existing sales systems, consider all the possibilities that come with an end-to-end lead routing solution — one that carries your precious contact across the sales finish line, reliably and repeatedly. In other words, get inspired as you think of your ideal outcomes.
Take Spectrum as an example. The telecommunications and mass media company revamped its lead routing process from end to end, saving sales teams days and days of wasted effort.
“We cut our lead routing time from three days to less than a minute,” says Matt Kromer, a marketing operations manager at Spectrum. “This has immensely cut down our sales cycle time.”
It’s common knowledge that the faster you can respond to a lead, the better your chances are of success. By using customizable routing workflows from ZoomInfo, Spectrum assigned leads faster, which increased its conversion rates considerably.
Which Routing Capabilities are Must-Haves for Your Team?
With your ideal outcomes in mind, dig deeper into which specific features your team needs to get there. Nurturing a lead through the sales journey takes a robust system, but what if your team could take this advanced functionality and apply it to other database objects besides just ‘leads’?
ZoomInfo’s intelligent lead routing allows you to activate any-object routing and leverage your Salesforce triggers to automate the real-time movement of all kinds of records — including leads, contacts and accounts — directly to your sales team.
The routing types available with intelligent routing include:
- Time-based routing
- Account-based routing
- Territory-based routing
- Round robins or weighted round robins
Additional revenue-generating routing features include:
- Leveraging account hierarchy management
- Automating data hygiene and maintaining a healthy database
- Enabling enterprise territory management
- Automating account-based selling motions with dynamic account teams
Does Your Data Strategy Support Proper Lead Routing?
Data is a must-have for accurate lead routing. That’s because automatically routing leads to sales relies on critical fields like industry, employee size, or location being populated and accurate. However, most of today’s data providers only match 30% of accounts, which leaves far too much of their data unrouted.
Data quality affects lead routing efforts in several ways:
- Duplicate leads and contacts – Overlapping records create headaches and inefficiencies for reps trying to contact leads faster.
- Data inconsistencies – Non-standardized data, such as varying job title spelling and address formats, can affect how leads are scored, prioritized, and routed.
- Data completeness – Is your data being enriched with both first-party and third-party data? If not, then a lack of complete records will harm your conversion rate.
- Lead-to-account matching – If you run account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, automated lead-to-account matching is a must — it aligns revenue generation teams and enables a seamless customer experience.
If your lead routing system is the center of your universe, data is the gravity that holds it all together. As you go through the buying journey, consider the data components that must be present so it can run smoothly.
Which Integrations do You Need?
It’s challenging to piece together a cohesive data management function that cleans, enriches, and updates information in real-time. That’s where comprehensive solutions like ZoomInfo’s advanced lead routing come into play. With drag-and-drop features, creating a custom routing workflow fueled by world-class data can become second nature, as you connect the steps in your process to any input or activity type.
By incorporating world-class data and next-generation orchestration, an intelligent lead routing system significantly reduces the number of point solutions required for a GTM tech stack.
How Will You Measure Return on Investment?
Once you’ve deployed your solution, think about how you will gauge success. While there isn’t one surefire way to measure lead routing performance, a good start is checking if the most common lead routing problems were solved. The alternative is measuring ROI by aiming for a better overall conversion rate. As you measure performance, consider the intangible benefits that are worth including in your assessment.
After implementing better routing, teams work more cohesively and with less conflict.
“Before Route, salespeople literally used to fight over who owned what lead,” Kromer says. “Now, leads can be distributed automatically and fairly, using a round-robin approach.”
Checklist: Essential Lead Routing Features
Once you’ve identified your expectations and goals, compare top lead routing software providers against the features that matter most. Use this checklist as a guide:
Flexibility and customization
- Can you build multiple round-robin assignment workflows from your marketing automation platform (MAP) or CRM?
- Are you able to route any object?
- Can you create sophisticated lead assignment rules with an easy drag-and-drop interface?
- Can you easily integrate your core revenue generation platforms such as your MAP and CRM?
Automation capabilities
- Can you automate lead scoring, segmentation, and prioritization before routing?
- Can you update field values automatically?
- Can you automatically reroute leads based on your own pre-defined rules?
Data orchestration features
- Are you able to seamlessly integrate your data enrichment layer into your routing workflow?
- Does the solution offer integrated data normalization and cleansing features?
- Are you able to maintain data hygiene with your routing solution of choice for better conversion rates?
Tap the Power of Data-Driven Lead Routing
Routing leads to the right reps can lead to higher conversion rates, but making sure your team has the right tools at hand is step one. Find a data-driven approach that gets you:
- Simple, customizable routing workflows
- Lead assignment automation tools like round-robin
- Alignment features to route based on rep availability and skill