Lead assignment rules in Salesforce act like a traffic controller: a lead comes in; Salesforce directs the lead where it needs to go. By default, leads from the web-to-lead form on a company’s website route to the default lead owner as defined on the lead settings page. This process works fine for a company with one sales rep.
With a slightly larger team, companies can also use the simple, built-in lead assignment rules in Salesforce or their marketing automation tool such as Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, or Eloqua. But companies with dozens of reps need a more advanced traffic controller that can handle lots of cars — in this case, leads — heading to one of many destinations, which are the sales reps.
If your team sees any of these five red flags, you can benefit from more sophisticated lead assignment rules.
Red Flag #1: Slow or No Follow-up on Leads
After they come in, leads must be followed up quickly. The faster the follow-up, the greater the chance the company will land new business. The Lead Response Management Study found that the best time to follow up on a lead is within five minutes. Using this study as the foundation, InsideSales.com conducted their own study, which confirmed that the five-minute rule held true.
Unfortunately, the average lead follow-up time is a whopping 40 hours. That is an unacceptable 2,395 minutes too long.
Why does it take so long to follow up? Three reasons: a manual step exists somewhere in the lead assignment process, the lead goes to the wrong person, or the lead goes into a holding queue where it’s forgotten.
Let’s say Jane works for Company A and is the account manager for a Fortune 100 company. Leads from that Fortune 100 company funnel to her and the process works smoothly. One day, Jane is out of the office. New leads sit in her account waiting for her return and a response.
Companies work hard to land a single lead. It’s not okay for a lead to get lost, assigned to the wrong person, or assigned to someone who is not available. Meanwhile, a competitor who knows about the five-minute rule is doing everything possible to respond quickly.
Red Flag #2: Account-based Sales Leads Don’t Go to Account Manager
Simple lead assignment rules don’t have the ability to support Account-Based Sales (ABS), which rely on lead-to-account matching to ensure leads go to the right account manager.
Perhaps, a company wants some leads assigned based on territory and others go to the owner of a named account, which would require operations to assign leads based on the name of the account. A company could write a workflow rule for each Named Account with “contains” and “equals” conditions to send associated leads to the right person.
But this would turn into a massive job and be hard to manage for more than a couple of dozen accounts. Picture a traffic controller in the middle surrounded by 50 or more streets and hundreds of cars waiting for direction.
Salesforce provides a powerful duplicate matching engine that can identify existing accounts and contacts that match a lead. It does this based on configurable conditions like matching company name, address, name, or email. However, there is no simple way to incorporate the results of the duplicate matching into lead assignment.
Implementing lead assignment for ABS needs a way to combine lead-to-account matching with flexible assignment rules.
Red Flag #3: Sales Reps Get Too Many or Too Few Leads
Even if Jane is the right contact person, it is possible that she could become inundated with leads causing a traffic jam. Considering the importance of quickly following up on leads, it would be better if some of Jane’s leads go to the second-best contact person. The company does not want to leave anything to chance and risk losing a lead to a competitor who acts faster.
A solution to this common problem is to set a cap on the open leads Jane can have assigned to her. And redirect any overflow to a backup person or queue.
Alternatively, when a company has a team of reps with equivalent skillsets, a typical approach is to distribute leads to members of a group instead of one person. In distributing these leads, companies use strategies that range anywhere from basic Round Robin to Weighted Load Balancing.
Red Flag #4: Updating Assignment Rules Takes a Long Time
Mid- and large-sized companies often have hundreds of lead assignment rules. Some companies’ rules hit the thousands, especially those doing business internationally. Sales reps at these companies come and go all the time or their territories change. And that means more updates to lead assignment rules.
That’s not all. Products are constantly added, changed, or removed; territory alignments change and don’t rule out company acquisitions or mergers. If updates to lead assignment rules require Salesforce admin skills, or worse, APEX coding, they can easily take days or weeks to complete. In the meantime, leads will get assigned incorrectly, leading to lots of manual clean-up work.
Red Flag #5: Leads Often Need to Be Manually Reassigned
When a sales team encounters territory changes, employee turnover, product changes, or absent employees, it typically ends up manually re-assigning leads that are currently being worked. This isn’t too bad for a small team that rarely needs changes. For mid- to large-sized teams, manual updates can turn into a big job.
The person doing the update needs to figure out who should get the assignment. With many rules involved, it can easily lead to mistakes.
For example, at first glance, it may look like Rajiv is the right person to take ownership of a lead because he’s the rep assigned to the territory where the lead is located. Except, in this case, the lead is associated with a Named Account owned by Jane. It’s easy to overlook, especially when reassigning dozens or hundreds of leads.
Now consider what happens if Jane is on a two-week vacation. The person re-assigning the lead may not be aware she’s out. Or if the person knows about Jane’s absence, the person would need to manually reassign the lead to Ted, someone on her team who can handle her accounts when she’s out. A manual process could easily misplace or lose many of these valuable leads.
A better way is to update the assignment rules to reflect the new staffing and organizational structure. Then select any leads that need reassignment and run them through the new rules to ensure all factors are taken into account.
How to Overcome Common Lead Assignment Problems
Decisions on Demand is an AppExchange app, which extends Salesforce to solve these five common lead assignment problems. The app focuses entirely on managing the heavy traffic in a lead assignment process.
It adds key features like support for Account-Based Sales and distribution strategies like Round Robin or Load Balancing. Decisions on Demand takes Load Balancing and Round Robin a step further by incorporating weights, skill-matching, caps, and checks for absent reps.
Furthermore, you can either define your lead assignment rules in a simple table inside Salesforce or use Excel import/export to update large rulesets.
Salesforce doesn’t come with tools to test lead assignment rules. Rather than hope the hundreds or thousands of rules work, you can test them in Salesforce with Decisions on Demand. This turns lead assignment into an automated process that drastically reduces errors while ensuring leads route to the right person at the right time for the quickest follow-up.
Learn more about flexible lead assignment rules, or schedule a personalized demo at a time that works for you.