In an ideal world, B2B revenue teams would run with lightning-fast lead response times, streamlined operations, and an aligned sales and marketing team.
But can all of that be possible at the same time? Without a doubt. A sales funnel powered by volume and velocity is vital to stay competitive in today’s market. Intelligent lead routing is a key component of that effective, speedy sales motion.
Here are some real-life examples of intelligent routing that tackle challenges faced by revenue ops teams. Specifically, we look at businesses that have leveraged intelligent lead routing to:
- Significantly accelerate speed-to-lead response times
- Streamline complex operations with event-triggered automation
- Align sales and marketing with better routing assignments
3 Challenges Standing in the Way of Speedy Lead Routing
Sales reps today too often contend with misrouted leads, time-consuming processes, and conflicting data. In the hustle and bustle of connecting with contacts and closing deals, misrouted or slowly routed leads can sit in a backlog or end up forgotten.
According to HBR, a tenfold drop in lead qualification happens if you wait longer than five minutes to respond to an inquiry. And if 10 minutes go by, the chance of qualifying the lead can decrease by as much as 400%.
The mismanagement of leads happens because of three things:
- The disruption of dirty data into your routing systems
- Leaning on inefficient integrations to assign leads to the right accounts and right sales reps
- Misaligned sales and marketing teams resulting from poor lead routing workflows running on poor data
The disruption of dirty data
Outdated information, missing contact fields, duplicate entries, and non-normalized entries all come together to form dirty data. In this context, it isn’t a stretch to say “dirty data” is nearly synonymous with “bottleneck.”
Using it comes at a cost. According to Gartner, businesses are losing as much as $13 million per year thanks to dirty data. Any effort to match leads to the right prospect account, to score, prioritize, or even route them properly is squandered if the data fed into your systems hasn’t been normalized, cleansed, enriched, or deduped.
Dirty data wreaks havoc on any lead routing efforts and contributes to a sluggish revenue generation team. Suddenly, they’re needing to handle leads manually, which slows their speed-to-lead response times, and decreases conversion rates and revenue.
Inefficient integrations
Every go-to-market team has something that makes it unique. That’s why they need a curated suite of applications and data sets that seamlessly integrate with their systems.
But too often, tools are added without assessing their compatibility with existing tech. Inefficient integration creates delays in the lead-to-revenue process, particularly when it comes to lead follow-up, and it puts a damper on a company’s sales funnel.
Sales and marketing misalignment
Misalignment between sales and marketing creates missed opportunities and a poor customer experience littered with bottlenecks.
It’s all too common for sales reps to spend time manually fixing entry errors, re-routing leads, or prioritizing low-quality leads at the expense of more promising ones. Ideally, revenue teams reach an agreement on the definition of leads, their quality, and status. The lead routing workflows that support those motions should follow suit.
How Intelligent Routing Helps Sales & Marketing Teams Engage Faster
An integrated intelligence layer that powers faster lead routing and higher win rates is possible once your data quality issues are resolved. Here are a few examples of intelligent routing with high-quality data in action.
Accelerate speed-to-lead
Kaseya, a company dedicated to IT platform management and monitoring solutions, recently went through a series of mergers and acquisitions. While Kaseya’s rapid growth was good news, it resulted in several data problems, including a large database filled with duplicate entries and a disjointed sales pipeline.
Juliet Forte, the company’s vice president of marketing operations, says Kaseya was losing money because leads were being routed incorrectly. “Instead of reassigning the lead to the appropriate person, they would just sit on it. And those leads would essentially go cold,” she says.
Kaseya solved this problem with OperationsOs from ZoomInfo and intelligent lead routing. Now, with robust lead-to-account matching, sales reps can accurately follow up with the right account data and minimal lag time.
“We can now associate a new lead with the existing customer accounts, associate that record to the appropriate account manager, and make sure that they can grow and expand that customer relationship,” Forte says. “Our conversion rates are much higher as a result.”
The stellar outcomes of Kaseya’s adoption of intelligent routing speak for themselves:
- 50% reduction in lead follow-up time
- Higher sales rep productivity
- A 5% increase in lead retainment
Streamline complex operations
Integrate offers a software solution that helps high-growth enterprise companies with demand marketing. The complexity of its target market requires comprehensive workflows that are optimized for revenue generation. Account-based territory lead routing capabilities, along with parent-child relationship mapping, are critical to its revenue strategy.
Unfortunately, the company was working with a platform that had limits in complex territory planning and round-robin capabilities. Integrate didn’t have a way to preserve account hierarchies for use within routing workflows — until they discovered ZoomInfo’s intelligent routing solutions.
“Enrichment and normalization make it easy for us to determine parent-child relationships of accounts in different regions,” says Ashley Langford, a senior marketing operations manager. “In one web-hook call, a record is enriched, normalized, and routed to the appropriate SDR. This is all before it even hits Salesforce.”
Integrate was able to boast better results with ZoomInfo’s intelligent routing framework, including:
- Preservation of account hierarchies
- Complex routing motions based on account hierarchy or associated account territory
- Streamlining routing workflows with automation
Align sales & marketing with an integrated routing system
Luis David Real, a revenue operations manager at OpenSpace, was working with a chaotic lead routing process.
Manual processes were the go-to way to manage leads for the company, which provides software dedicated to construction photo documentation. Tension among sales reps was common. It wasn’t unusual for Real to deal with messy lead follow-up efforts that often went nowhere.
OpenSpace needed a way to unify data silos and automate its approach to lead management. But how could they optimize their sales efforts if they weren’t even able to enrich their data? Real found the answer in ZoomInfo’s intelligent routing solution.
“Before, multiple API web calls significantly slowed down our lead-routing process. Now, one platform does all of the heavy lifting. Having a tool like this makes me more valuable,” Real says.
By cleansing its data, enriching it, and executing account-based segmentation, OpenSpace was able to bolster data insights for better sales outcomes. Plus, they no longer have to worry about siloed data with an intelligent routing system that manages data quickly and easily.
“It allows me to go in there and take care of a request that might have taken me a couple of hours before and finish it in a matter of minutes,” Real says.
Intelligent routing enables Real to smooth out OpenSpace’s routing bottlenecks, including:
- Added efficiency in lead routing and follow-up initiatives
- The enablement of round-robin routing processes
- The consolidation of routing processes to one platform
Do More with Reliable Data at the Core
A unified, singular solution to lead routing fueled by high-quality data is the key to the GTM kingdom. Solutions like ZoomInfo’s intelligent lead routing, operating with the world’s most reliable business data at the core, address the common lead routing problems that sales and marketing teams face.