Being able to consistently discover new leads is an essential part of maintaining a thriving business. But your company won’t get anything out of a lead until it converts it. Different sales strategies are discussed when increasing conversion rates comes up. But lead routing is one of the most underrated and under-explored of these tactics. With an optimized lead routing strategy, your company could boost its sales numbers significantly. But what does that look like? And how do you get started? Keep reading to learn more about using lead routing and some of our favorite lead routing examples to streamline your sales strategy.
Understanding lead routing
Lead routing is simply the process of distributing leads across different sales representatives as they come in. It’s the system that a company uses to decide which salesperson will be assigned to interact with each prospect.
Why it matters
Lead routing matters because the salesperson best equipped to close a lead will vary based on the unique characteristics of that lead.
For example, some of your sales staff may have technical backgrounds that allow them to connect with certain types of buyers more effectively. You would want to make sure that you route the relevant leads to the salespeople who give you the best chance of converting them.
How lead routing contributes to an improved sales strategy
Sales strategies are broad – they take a company from the first point of interaction with a prospect to closing a deal. The more you can optimize each strategy segment, the likelier you will achieve your desired company-wide conversion rate.
Lead routing strategy is one point of optimization that often gets overlooked. That means choosing the correct strategy here could be exactly what you need to distinguish your sales process from your competition.
Top lead routing examples for 2021
There are five main strategies that companies use to route their leads. In this section, we’ll provide an overview of each. Keep in mind, you also have the option of combining several of these strategies to create a customized solution that’s ideal for your business.
Random
Some companies don’t use a strategy for lead routing. They simply go through a list of salespeople and assign leads one-by-one until they complete it and then start from the top.
This strategy isn’t a great option unless there are truly no distinguishing factors you can use to assign leads to your salespeople. The one benefit that it offers is it ensures that each of your salespeople has roughly the same number of leads that they’re working with at any given time.
Geography
Geography-based lead routing is a strategy that’s best for industries heavily reliant on real-world locations. Sectors like manufacturing and real estate tend to benefit from a geographic approach.
The idea is that the company assigns salespeople who operate in the same area as the prospect. To make this strategy work, you need to create clearly defined geographic territories to ensure that your sales representatives aren’t stepping on one another’s toes.
The downside to the strategy is that it often creates scenarios in which some salespeople have multiple leads to work with, and others have very few. If you notice that happening, make sure you have your best salespeople in the territories with the most opportunity.
Value
Value-based lead routing can be very effective. Instead of assigning leads to different people, this approach assigns to different processes.
Companies like Slack and Dropbox route leads to different places based on a high-value or low-value basis. If a lead has a high value, they will put it through a sales funnel optimized for closing larger deals. If the lead has low value, these companies will automate much of the sales process.
This approach is a great option if your company regularly deals with both high-value and low-value prospects. Using it will ensure that you’re using your organizational resources as effectively as possible.
Use case or specialization
This lead routing strategy makes sense if you sell a tool that has multiple use-cases. For instance, Trello can be used for fixing software issues and planning weddings.
With these types of products, you want to make sure you’re putting prospects through a sales funnel that aligns with their intended use of your product.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is to assign different salespeople to each potential use case for your product. If we continue with the Trello, that would mean dedicating one salesperson to software-focused sales and another to your wedding-focused business.
Doing this enables your sales team to specialize in niche areas. It ensures your prospects always get to speak to a uniquely qualified salesperson to help them select the best solution for their needs.
Lead score
If you’re already using lead scoring, then you might expand that strategy to include sales routing. You will assign a value to each prospect you encounter and then divvy out the leads based on their scores.
This is helpful because it allows you to specialize your sales team in different stages of the lead process. For example, you might have a team that focuses exclusively on leads that are ready to close quickly and another team that deals with prospects in the early stages of the buying process.
This type of specialization is useful because you increase the likelihood that each lead makes it to the next stage of the buying process.
Lead routing best practices
We’ve seen what the most common strategies for lead routing are. Now let’s take a look at some best practices so you can make sure you’re optimizing your lead routing process from the start.
Maintain a strong alignment between your marketing and sales teams
Keeping your marketing and sales teams closely connected is an important part of maximizing your lead routing strategy.
That’s because you need to nail the handoff from marketing to your sales team for any lead routing strategy to work. And the only way to do that is to ensure that these two departments are in constant contact with one another and have a shared understanding of when lead handoffs need to occur.
Bring as much personalization into the process as possible
One of the main reasons to use lead routing is to provide each lead with as much personalization throughout the sales process as possible. This should be a point of focus for whatever lead routing strategy you pick because personalization is an important part of closing deals.
More specifically, try to look for opportunities to provide a personalized touch and build those into your lead routing process. That might mean picking a strategy that allows you to assign salespeople to leads that share some of the important characteristics.
This may help your sales staff close deals more effectively because it will help them build stronger relationships with their prospects.
Create and work toward concrete goals
It’s also important to set and track the specific goals you’re hoping to reach by implementing a lead routing strategy.
Would you like to see your conversion rates go up? Or perhaps you’re focused on speeding up certain aspects of your sales cycle.
Regardless of what you hope to achieve, make sure that it’s something you’re thinking about and tracking. Doing so is the only way to know whether the lead routing strategy that you’ve chosen is right for your company or if more changes are needed to make it work.
LeadLander helps companies unlock their full sales potential
Optimizing your lead routing strategy is just one way to move closer to fulfilling your full sales potential. Another route is using LeadLander to start getting more out of your website visitors.
You can leverage this data to:
- Discover new leads
- Validate interest from existing ones
- Improve your website pages
- Optimize your marketing strategies
You can try a free 14-day trial of LeadLander today to see exactly how much you can benefit from it yourself. We look forward to partnering up.
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