How Effective Lead Assignment can Ensure Business Uplift

A lead in marketing and sales, is a term used to define an individual or organization who has expressed some interest in your product or services. The interest can be expressed by sharing contact information such as email id, phone number, etc. - in response to your emails, landing pages or social media postings.

In concise words, leads means everything to sales and marketing executives. From the first touch point of interest to its conversion as a customer, every stage in a lead’s lifecycle has to be nurtured with care and proper considerations to ensure business uplift.

What is Lead Assignment?

Lead assignment can be imagined as a traffic control process, where incoming traffic (leads) are directed towards the respective destinations (sales representatives). Whenever a lead comes in, the marketing team marks it as a qualified lead and passes it to sales team for further nurturing. Lead assignment as a process can be simple or complex based on - number of leads and sales reps, organization size, or other factors.

Lead Assignment in a CRM

CRMs such as Salesforce usually has a pre-defined or default system for lead assignment. Thereby, the leads coming from the company website are directed towards a default lead owner. This process is apt for small size companies, and companies larger in size can use built-in lead assignment rules in Salesforce or they can utilize marketing automation tools like Pardot. As a brand grows in size, they require more advance systems in place to manage the high volume of leads and sales reps. 

The Tricky Part

Leads come in a broad spectrum and they can be wide ranging. This means that some leads are well qualified and just require a sales representative to close the deal and others might not be that warm and not be worthy enough for sales rep to invest their time.

The situation becomes more convoluted, when a company is spread over different regions and there is a different sales reps for each region. To explain this lets proceed with an example. A company named ABC Corp has different products for region A, B and C. All the regions in turn have different territories with a sales rep for each territory.

In this situation, if there is an absence of a streamlined lead assignment process, a lead can be lost in the shuffle easily. In ABC Corp, its possible sales rep 1 can be overloaded with leads. whereas sales rep 2 can be vacant. To avoid such scenarios, we require an automated process which assigns the leads based on some pre-defined criteria or set of rules to the sales rep.

How Pardot can be super effective?

Now that we have established how important leads are and how significant the role of lead assignment is - it’s time to look at some facts related to leads and lead assignments.

• Only 25% leads are legitimate and should advance to sales – Gleanster Research.

• Sales reps make 1.3 (average) call attempts before giving up on a lead.

• Companies with poor sales and marketing alignment have a 4% revenue decline year on year.

Therefore, we see how grave the situation can become, if leads are mishandled.

Leveraging Pardot features like Groups and Automation rules we can setup a real time lead assignment system which allows leads to be assigned based on certain parameters. Pardot provides a comprehensive solution for lead assignment.