Prioritizing the hottest leads using Assignment Groups
Rudimentary lead assignment systems use lead scoring to do the prioritization. But in high-volume/high-growth environments, a more sophisticated approach is absolutely critical to success. Deploying Assignment Groups, in conjunction with dynamic assignment rules, can truly transform a team’s performance.
In a high-volume sales environment, it’s common for there to be more leads coming into the business than the sales reps can handle simultaneously. In order to extract the maximum possible value from those leads (i.e. give the team the best possible chance of hitting, or even over-achieving, their revenue targets), it is critical to implement a prioritization process – whereby the hottest leads, with the most potential, are prioritized and assigned to the best available sales reps.
Scoring leads in Salesforce
Rudimentary lead assignment systems rely on lead scoring to do the prioritization and – in Salesforce environments at least – Pardot lead scoring is often the go to method. In Pardot, every prospect (usually a mixture of leads and contacts) builds up a Pardot score based on their “activity”. Every interaction with a company’s website (e.g. a visit to a product page, or downloading a white paper) will add something to the score. Over time, many of the prospects will build up sizeable scores, and the ones with the highest score are often given the highest priority.
Pardot Scoring is not the answer
But choosing to prioritize leads in this way can be a big mistake. Lead scoring has its place (more on that later) but, as far as the initial assignment is concerned, the Pardot Score is of secondary importance.
What’s more important is the context of the lead in question i.e. What type of lead is this? Where did it come from and – most importantly of all – what type of response/action is required as a next step?
Context is everything
A lead that has just downloaded a white paper is very different from a lead that has sent an email to your sales team. The former (we’ll call it Lead A) is planning to read something about your company, product or service – maybe an interesting thought leadership article. The latter (Lead B) is asking you a specific question or questions. The question may be “is your product ABC compatible with XYZ?”. Or “How much does product ABC cost?”. Lead A does not require an immediate response. Indeed, they may be a bit annoyed if you reach out to them at this point. Lead B requires a response. An immediate response.
At this point, the Lead Score or Pardot Score is almost certainly irrelevant. Even if Lead A has been sniffing around your website for 6 months and accrued a Pardot Score of 983, it isn’t necessarily more important than Lead B, who may have only have a Pardot Score of 10. So long as Lead B meets basic MQL criteria, then the likelihood is that Lead B needs to be prioritized over Lead A – because they are expecting a response.
Introducing Assignment Groups
Large and fast-growing companies need a robust lead prioritization/assignment process and this often revolves around the deployment of “Assignment Groups”. Assignment Groups are one of the core features of Q-assign, the advanced assignment app, which is available from the AppExchange.
An Assignment Group is a group of target sales reps who share a set of attributes and each Assignment Group has a set of dynamic assignment rules which determine the conditions upon which leads will be assigned to members of this group. These assignment rules determine which lead records will be selected and assigned to this group, which order to assign them out in, and who to assign them to, based on availability, workload, skill, language, territory, account ownership or any other attributes deemed to be important to the company in question.
The size and complexity of the sales team will determine the number of Assignment Groups required. The scenario outlined above is a fairly simple one. In this scenario we might have two Assignment Groups, as follows:
Assignment Group A – “Inbound leads requiring an immediate response” – i.e. leads that have been submitted via a contact form or maybe via an inbound email enquiry.
Assignment Group B – “All other leads”
Deciding which lead to assign first
The leads are now sitting in Assignment Groups, waiting to be assigned. Group A has priority. But which lead in Group A should we assign first? The leads now need to be ranked. Smaller, low-volume teams, might use the Pardot Score as a simple method for ranking leads from top to bottom. But this does not factor in the “attractiveness” of the lead to your company. In mature, high-volume sales environments, identifying the most attractive leads is crucial. Is this a company that you are interested in doing business with? Does it fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? Or are they very small, and not particularly attractive? In Pardot, “Lead Grading” is the method used to determine the ICP status of a lead. But more sophisticated ICP scoring systems are often used directly in Salesforce.
Deploying Dynamic Assignment Rules
We now have two scoring systems that can be applied sequentially to float the best leads to the top of the queue, and we can sort any ties using the the lead creation date/time-stamp. We can start to build Dynamic Assignment Rules now:
Rule #1 – Identify leads which are an ICP-match and sort according to Lead Grade (or ICP Score) from top to bottom. If there are “ties”, apply rule #2
Rule #2 – Sort ties on Pardot Score (or Lead Score). If there are still ties, apply rule #3
Rule #3 – Sort ties on Lead Creation Date/Time.
The same rules might be deployed to rank and prioritize the leads in Assignment Group B. But they could be different, depending on the attributes of the Assignment Group.
Deciding which sales rep should receive the next lead
The leads are now fully ranked and prioritized and need to be assigned. [Incidentally, with an automated assignment app, like Q-assign, the whole prioritization process happens in real-time, in a fraction of a second]. But which rep should receive the next lead? A number of different systems might be deployed, and these would be centred on the “attributes” of the sales reps in question. Attributes might include: availability (are they available to receive a lead?); skill-set; experience; territory; language; location; or any other factor that can be measured. Common assignment systems include:
- Assign to first available rep – This is often used in high-volume environments where the leads need to be processed as fast as possible
- Assign by territory assignment – A common use case. Where the reps are aligned to territories, route the lead to the first available rep in that territory
- Assign to the best available rep – Here, lead matching is used to match leads to sales reps according to skill-set, experience or other attributes
Build a high-performance Sales Team
In any sales team, speed-to-lead is critical. By floating the hottest and most urgent leads to the top, and assigning them to sales reps immediately, with no delay, the potential for a successful conversion increases dramatically. Teams which deploy advanced assignment systems have a huge advantage over teams that rely on manual or rudimentary lead assignment methods. Important/urgent leads are prioritized. Less relevant leads are de-prioritized. By getting the right sales rep working on the right lead at the right time, you are well on the way to building a high-performance Sales team.
