The quality of your company’s data and the way it’s routed have a direct effect on your bottom line. Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, it’s all too common for sales teams to be hamstrung by incomplete routing systems and low-quality data. But expecting stellar results with a patchwork data strategy is a little like putting regular fuel in a racecar and expecting to win the Indy 500.
To set their sales teams up for success — and drive the largest possible return on investment for their businesses — today’s go-to-market leaders need comprehensive, integrated data and intelligent lead-routing systems. With intelligent routing, you’ll be able to eliminate bottlenecks in the lead flow process and fuel your entire sales journey with ease. And it all starts with clean data.
What are the Impacts of Incomplete or Inconsistent Data?
Routing with poor-quality data severely disrupts your whole GTM engine. This includes:
Slow manual processes
Manually chasing down the right information is simply not an option for efficient sales and marketing operations. In a recent survey, Deloitte found that more than half of marketing professionals name finding the right data as their biggest challenge. And keeping go-to-market data up to date and accurate only becomes more difficult as the sheer volume of it increases.
Lower conversion rates
Poor-quality data dramatically reduces the accuracy of lead scoring and prioritization. This reduces conversion rates, as hot leads aren’t qualified and remain stalled in your marketing automation platform. Your reps miss out on new sales, cross-selling, and upselling opportunities.
Ineffective account-based selling
Without accurate data, you can’t automatically match leads to accounts. This deprives sales teams of a cohesive view of individuals and behaviors within target accounts. The result? Long sales cycles and decreased revenue.
Reduced speed-to-lead
Customers lose interest quickly. A good rule of thumb in sales is that you have five minutes to capitalize on a qualified lead. In fact, a study from InsideSales found that conversion rates dropped eightfold if outreach happened after the initial five-minute window. Manual processes, slow routing assignment, inaccurate scoring, and poor segmentation reduce your speed-to-lead time.
How You Can Solve the Biggest Lead-Routing Challenges
Without an integrated routing solution, chances are high that you will run into daily challenges and inconveniences like:
- SDRs failing to meet quota
- Lower than average win rates
- Not meeting quarterly targets
- Prospects are left uninformed about your product
Clean, accurate, and insightful data drives efficient processes, enhances results, and significantly improves both buyer and seller journeys. This isn’t a happy accident. Solving your biggest lead-routing challenges requires taking a few steps back and looking at your data systems and how they are managed.
Normalization: Remedy disparate data with automatic standardization
Data comes into your systems from a variety of sources and may be unstructured or unmatched. For example, the following terms can be entered differently while meaning the same thing:
- CPG | Consumer Packaged Goods | Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
- SVP | Senior Vice President | Sr VP
- California | CA | Cali
Normalization ensures that all data is combined into one standard format, allowing you to match, segment, and score data accurately and quickly route it to the right sales reps.
Enrichment: Solve missing field issues with more complete data
A missing industry code or an incorrect job title can cause major disruptions when you’re trying to segment and route leads to the right person. However, with a robust enrichment process, you can add first, second, and third-party data to your database. Being able to access and compare multiple data sources ensures that you have an accurate and validated data set.
For example, if you’re missing accurate phone numbers in your database, your SDR team won’t be able to call their assigned leads. A data enrichment solution, like ZoomInfo’s Enrich, solves this problem by pulling information from all your data sources to automatically fill in missing fields — including the right phone numbers.
The results? A comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date database that provides a more complete view of prospects. This makes enrichment one of the most important components of your lead management strategy.
Lead-to-account matching: Solve misrouted leads with powerful accuracy
Lead-to-account matching helps automate account-based selling motions. It makes account data available on the matched lead, which can then be used to segment, score, and inform your routing processes. Key account data within your lead routing rules can include:
- Company size
- Annual revenue
- Territory
- Industry
Lead-to-account matching delivers a complete customer view that allows sales teams to focus on individuals within the account that have actual buying power, potentially shortening the sales cycle. Personalized outreach and proactive nurturing of accounts are also made possible with effective lead-to-account matching technology.
The Results of Using High-Quality Data for Lead Management
There are three major benefits of high-quality data that’s been enriched, standardized, and matched to your routing efforts.
A healthy database for powerful GTM motions
A cleaned, enriched, and normalized database enables an error-free routing process. Database costs are reduced by finding, eliminating, and preventing duplicates. With an intelligent approach to routing, hot leads can be identified at the right moment, and business intelligence can be leveraged to accurately score, prioritize, and target leads that are further down the sales funnel.
Speed-to-lead as a competitive advantage
With an intelligent routing approach, it’s no longer necessary to rely on slower manual routing methods. Reps have full visibility at the account level and speed-to-lead time is significantly improved.
An improved customer experience
A frictionless buying experience produces happy customers. With the relevant firmographic and personal information available to orchestrate engaging interactions, sales reps can approach customers with the right messaging at the right moment. Building customer relationships with positive experiences takes less time. Impressing your prospects with deep knowledge of their business needs becomes second nature.
Thinking Beyond Lead Routing Software
Revenue operations leaders who leverage intelligent lead routing with quality data can drive successful GTM motions and create more opportunities. By using OperationsOS Route, teams can quicken their speed-to-lead, increase conversion rates, and automate lead-to-account matching.