Q-assign for Salesforce
Overview | Q-assign for Sales | Q-assign for Service
MATCH LEADS TO SALES REPS USING DYNAMIC LEAD ASSIGNMENT RULES
Lead assignment rules in Salesforce are nothing new. You can easily set them up and use them to route leads to sales reps automatically. The problem is, automatically routing leads to sales reps isn’t particularly clever in-and-of-itself.To achieve maximum performance and productivity, you need to route the right lead to the right sales rep at the right time. That’s where dynamic lead assignment rules come into play. You can use dynamic rules to route leads to reps based on numerous attributes, including skills, experience and location. Here we’ll take a look at the most common attributes our customers use to determine where to route every inbound lead.
Territory Assignment
Perhaps the most common criteria to use is location, with sales teams often being organized by territory or zip code. That’s all well and good in a small team, but in high-volume, high-performance environments it’s important to take multiple factors into account before matching each lead to the best available sales rep.
Skill-set
Perhaps the most important attribute of all is skillset. A sales rep who specializes in home insurance might struggle to deal with an enquiry about car insurance. A travel agent whose expertise revolves around India might be all at sea if asked to deal with an enquiry about Brazil. Factoring all your sales reps skills, qualifications and certifications into your lead assignment rules is an important first step in optimizing your Salesforce lead assignment system.
Experience
Experience is also key. You don’t want to be routing your hottest and most valuable leads to your least experience reps. You want to be scoring, ranking and prioritizing each and every lead in Salesforce. The hot ones need to go to your best available reps. Lower-value, less important leads can be assigned less experienced or trainee reps, so that they can learn and improve on the job – without risking large amounts of revenue.
Language
Knowing which of your sales reps speaks fluent Spanish or French or German can also be important. It may well be that a hot new prospect speaks Spanish perfectly whereas their English is so-so. Are your chances of converting that lead higher with a Spanish-speaker. Probably. It’s certainly a factor. Make sure you measure and document your sales teams’ language capabilities and build that into your lead assignment rules in Salesforce.
Time-zone
It’s well documented that the faster you respond to a lead the higher the chance of converting it. So what to do when you receive a lead at 5.29pm, 1 minute before your shift is ending? Leave it until 9am tomorrow? In multinational organizations, it can be beneficial to route leads to the most appropriate time zone.
Imagine you have English-speaking sales teams based in San Francisco and London. At 5.29pm in London it’s 9.29am in San Francisco. So why not route that 5.29 lead to San Francisco, where they can get a response within minutes?
Industry
Many B2B businesses, especially at the Enterprise level, organize their sales teams by vertical market or industry. Salesforce is a good example. They have teams which are aligned to Financial Services, Energy, Automotive, Education, High Tech and so on. They build up huge amounts of knowledge about customers and prospects in those sectors, and are able to convert a large amount of leads as a result. Building such factors into your lead assignment rules can be critical.
Workload
Load-balancing is absolutely crucial too. There’s no point in matching a really hot lead to your very best sales rep if they are already working on half a dozen other leads. Likewise you don’t want some sales reps sat idle whilst others are overwhelmed. You need to get the balance right. Your lead assignment rules need to be able to “pass over” sales reps if they are over-loaded or have maxed out on their quota.
Dynamic Lead Assignment Rules in Salesforce
Pretty much any configurable attribute can be factored into your lead assignment rules in Salesforce. And in high-volume, high-performance sales teams, all-of-the-above attributes are likely to be factored into dynamic lead assignment rules – with possibly more on top. Dynamic rules are able to assess hundreds or even thousands of factors at any given time, with each lead ultimately being matched to the most appropriate sales rep at that specific moment in time.
Empowering Managers
Finally, there’s a huge side-benefit in deploying dynamic assignment rules. Some Salesforce organisations have hundreds or even thousands of hard-coded lead case assignment rules in place which are designed to route leads to specific individuals or queues. Creating these rules involves a lot of hard-coding. To keep on top of them, as people leave the business (and new starters join), is both time-consuming and expensive. Hard-coded lead assignment rules are not a practical solution in a large and/or fast-growing organisation. By switching to dynamic rules, efficiencies can be made and sales management teams can be empowered to make quicker and more effective decisions.
