Unclassified lead routing can be a major headache for your sales team. If your sales team is constantly chasing their tail and losing leads that they are trying to close on. Read this article to find out how you can get a better handle on your lead routing to generate more revenue.
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What is unclassified lead routing, and how does it affect your sales?
When an organization routes unsolicited leads directly to sales without first filtering them, it’s called unclassified lead routing. This can have a negative impact on your sales pipeline because it bypasses the screening process and allows unqualified leads to enter your system.
Unclassified lead routing can create confusion and frustration among employees trying to manage their information. This can ultimately decrease productivity and increase the risk of losing important customer data.
If organizations don’t filter leads before assigning them to employees, it can result in the following:
- Missed sales opportunities.
- Customers are switching to competitors due to delays in response.
- Wrong leads to a wrong sales rep.
- Time-consuming customer routing.
- Unhappy employees and customers.
- Follow-up delays.
- Misinformed sales team.
- Waste of resources for maintenance.
What are the causes of bad lead routing?
To remove the poor lead routing process from your business, you first have to understand the root cause of poor lead routing:
- Quality of data
Data quality issues are the primary factor in lead routing inaccuracies. No matter whether you have the robust and flexible technology for lead routing when you don’t have the necessary data to power the logic for routing. For instance, the ZIP code is used for routing accounts for commercial transactions in New York. But the leads don’t have any ZIP code.
- Manually loading lists
Manually loading a huge list can take days or even weeks. Therefore, this process is usually performed by a small team who clean, standardize and separate the data.
Although “research” is a frequent part of the process, most time goes wasted on repetitive activities rather than the actual research work that can add value. Examples include searching and entering the missing salutations before the first name or searching for state information for over 20,000 towns across France.
- Inconvenient solution for lead routing
Lead-routing procedure requiring technological investments shows that the sales staff is large enough to undergo frequent changes, such as adjusting territories, rearranging accounts, and permitting exceptions.
These kinds of business changes could happen quicker than the ability to modify and evaluate your route software. It has been seen that implementing these system adjustments in larger businesses takes much time; sometimes, it goes up to three months.
- Missing or broken lead routing process
Are you aware of how many leads are assigned to people in the CRM who are no longer working with your company? What about leads staying in the queue for over three months? Is there a salesperson with more leads than any other sales rep?
This happens due to faulty or ineffective processes. Unfortunately, companies lacking effective monitoring tools fail to recognize these problematic situations.
Result? Leads remain with a person no longer working in the company, and leads are left to rot.
What is the solution for the poor lead routing process?
It’s not difficult to fix the broken lead routing system, and you can do it in the following ways:
Clean your leads before the route
Inaccurate and duplicate data can cost the company as much as 12% of its total revenue. But, as we know, lead routing is based on data. And as with any other data-driven process, the output depends on the input.
By considering these basic data hygiene principles, you can make the lead routing process accurate up to a great extent.
- Remove bad data from the database. For example, an invalid email ([email protected])
- Resolve wrong data like “Nevada, Germany.”
- Fill in any missing data; if given City = “Austin,” State = “Texas,” then the ZIP code can be deduced as “73301”.
Lead to accounts matching
Following are the ways to improve the matching of leads to an account that is already present within your CRM:
- Direct routing of the lead to the person who owns the account avoids any unnecessary steps.
- Utilizing the account information to replace or fill in information from leads.
- Converting leads automatically into a contact in the software and attaching the contact to the account.
- Recognizing and merging duplicate leads.
Automate the process of loading lists
You must automate the process of loading lists if you load over a few thousand leads per week.
Automate the below tasks in the process of list loading:
- Cleaning and normalization
- Validation
- Segmentation
- Enrichment
- Matching of leads to accounts
- Updating and loading
Use data-driven technology
The system you’re using to control the lead routing process will fail to meet the demands of business changes, particularly if you require IT to create code or develop complex workflows.
If you also need to raise a request in order to alter the routing process, the technology you use won’t keep pace with the sales team. Rather, you should use an automated lead-management software system that is data-driven, allowing you to control most of the changes that occur daily.
Recover the leads from black hole situations automatically.
Below are some possible black hole scenarios in which a lead can sink, but simply monitoring these situations can solve the problem along with the use of good automation tools:
- Leads assigned to ex-employees.
- Leads staying on a stage for more than the allowed time.
- Employees who have very large or very small amounts of leads.
- Mismatched or wrong data that raise discrepancies.
- Frequent lead assignment.
Summary
Sales reps receive unsolicited leads through unclassified lead routing. It reduces productivity and raises the risk of losing clients. Poor data quality, manual list loading, and not using automation tools are some common reasons for this issue.
However, these issues can be resolved through some practices mentions above, such as keeping your data clean, bringing automation in list processing and lead mangement, and monitoring the leads time to time to save them from going in vain.
