Q-assign for Salesforce
Overview | Q-assign for Sales | Q-assign for Service
ASSIGN LEADS FAIRLY TO PREVENT CHERRY-PICKING IN SALESFORCE
Cherry-picking, the scourge of many a sales team, often happens in the absence of a robust lead assignment system. Leads come into the business, sales reps have visibility of all of those leads, and they “claim” the ones that look the most attractive.Sometimes they’ll claim a lead because it’s a well-known company. Or perhaps they’ll choose to work on a lead because it looks like it has high potential value or because their job title is VP of Whatever. The thing is, where cherry-picking is allowed, reps usually make irrational decisions based on their own peculiar biases.
The consequences of unfair lead distribution
Firstly, because the sales reps have cherry-picked what they perceive to be the best leads, other very good leads have been left behind. These can be sat there for hours, days, weeks or even forever. The problem is, many of these leads will be exceptionally good leads. Just because the company in question isn’t a household name, it doesn’t mean they don’t have cash to burn.
Or just because someone isn’t a VP or a CXO, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a big say about how the budget gets spent. Leads go cold very quickly, so if leads are getting passed over by your sales reps, be it consciously or unconsciously, it’s probably too late. Cherry-picking can seriously undermine a sales teams’ performance.
The impact on staff morale
The other big impact is on morale. Often, where cherry-picking is commonplace, it’s the most senior and/or most experienced sales reps who are doing the bulk of the cherry-picking. The perception of everyone else is that these guys are hoarding all the best leads, leaving them to pick through the rubbish. Ironically they probably aren’t identifying the best leads at all but, as we all know, perception is reality. Everyone else thinks this is happening and therefore morale is negatively impacted.
Treat every lead like gold dust
A good practice here is to treat your prospecting database, including all your leads, like a goldmine. In a mining scenario, there’s pretty much 2 types of gold: gold nuggets and gold dust. In the days of the gold rush, everyone was after the nuggets. Nuggets look like they have a high value and they are relatively easy to identify. The gold dust looks and feels less valuable and it’s also much more difficult to mine. So when the early prospectors had mined all of the nuggets at one mine, they moved on to the next one to look for more nuggets, leaving the dust behind. But of course, as mining technologies developed, mining the dust became more and more viable and more and more profitable. New miners moved in to mine the gold dust. And as more and more gold dust was extracted from the mine it dawned on everyone that the value of all of the gold dust far outweighed the value of the nuggets the old-timers had extracted.
Realising the full value or each lead
If you are allowing your sales reps to cherry-pick leads then you are almost certainly leaving behind a huge amount of value in the neglected leads. By deploying an intelligent lead assignment system you can eliminate cherry-picking altogether. Leads can be routed to individual sales reps automatically. They can be matched on numerous attributes, perhaps skillset, product knowledge or location – and current workloads can also be factored into the assignment rules so that the leads are distributed equitably and fairly – for maximum productivity and performance.
Automated lead assignment for fairer distribution
There are numerous different lead assignment systems, each one with pros and cons, each one appropriate for one environment or another. But one thing is for sure, if your current system facilitates or turns a blind eye to cherry-picking, then it’s time for an overhaul. By deploying an intelligent lead assignment system which utilizes dynamic assignment rules and automated load-balancing, you can dramatically increase lead throughput, reduce response times, increase conversion rates, improve morale and, perhaps most importantly of all, transform you sales teams’ performance.
