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Improving the sales of your business is nothing less than a tricky affair. For a successful sales drive, you need to identify the key drivers right at the start. The key performance areas of any business are the volume of sales, conversion rate, and conversion time. Once you tap into these three KPIs, you will be able to understand the challenges better and segment the data through trusted CRM software.
- What challenges can affect sales?
When you streamline the sales process, you will have a more cost-effective and less risky approach to the growth of your business. However, some new challenges can crop up from time to time when the sale is being optimized. Common problems can be categorized into:
- Scattered data: this problem arises when the salesperson needs to identify the selling content.
- Confusion among teams: this challenge arises when the systems in an organization need to be better connected and will create an unorganized movement of the content.
- Unsynchronized info: when the salesperson gets access to the information faster than they can deal with it.
- Inefficiency: this happens when the sales representatives need help with the sale process within the specified duration.
- How to build a better sales strategy?
When your business gets leads, you need to capitalize on that fast. To convert the maximum number of leads, the sales representatives in your organization should contact the leads within minutes of being approached. Did you know that conversion rates drop to 8x within 5 minutes of the lead being generated?
If your sales representatives don’t act fast, you will lose out on valuable customers. 99% of the majority of B2B organizations fails to achieve this. Moreover, nearly 57.1% of the first call to the leads takes place more than after a week.
This is the time when your competitors swoop in and steal your clients. Can you imagine your company just missed out on the amount of revenue? Hence, getting the lead to the right salesperson is of utmost importance. And this is where lead routing comes into the picture. What is lead routing?
Also known as a lead assignment, lead routing is assigning sales representatives to incoming leads. In other words, you assign leads to each sales representative for better conversion. The lead routing process can be simple. Leads are listed and assigned to the appropriate sales representative based on the territory, conditions and filters used by the user. If you try to do this manually, you will take more time.
Moreover, it will become a tedious affair. Hence, it is best to shift to an automated lead routing system. The automated system allows users to set the order criteria for a customized lea assignment experience. You can assign the leads to categories like industry type, territory, deal size, etc. This makes the entire affair smooth and hassle-free.
- What are the best lead routing practices?
When there is a massive generation of inbound leads, it is essential to implement an operational lead routing system. But the question remains, which practice is the best? How to be sure? Here is a list of some of the popular routing practices that you can try out:
1. Assign the lead to the right sales representative
Lead routing and data segmentation are quite similar. It is essential to assign leads based on certain factors. The popular ones are:
- Company size: small, medium-sized, or big company – the size determines it all. You can assign the leads to the sales representatives depending on the size.
- Geography: this is the most common one used by B2B companies when using lead to account matching. They can contact the lead quicker. The turnaround time is faster when the representative is in the same time zone as your lead. This ensures better results.
- Industry: here, you need to categorize it as per the industry type. Your representatives will perform better when assigned a lead that they have better knowledge of.
- Expertise: you should assign the lead per the sales representative’s expertise. If one is an expert in selling cars, you should assign similar leads to them.
- Lead score: this is based on the amount of value or score you assign to a lead. Using these scores, you can identify the important ones.
Besides using these criteria, you can also ask these two questions:
- Is the lead already working in an organization that is already your customer?
- Is the lead’s employer not your existing customer?
Answers to these questions will give you a clear idea about where your company stands as far as lead management is concerned. Your sales representatives can work accordingly.
2. Ensure well-integrated tech
B2B companies often need to take advantage of this practice. They need to realize that the lead is not generated from a single source. Multiple sources are at work. For example, you will get leads from your social media campaign; someone might reply to your online advertisement or any other web form. You need to integrate this data into your company’s tech system so that you can categorize them correctly. The better the data, the higher the quality of the lead generated.
3. Don’t try to enforce, be flexible in your approach
It is essential to draw the line between sharing required information and too much information. You might share optional details for converting the lead to sales to better segment the lead. As a result, the representative may lose motivation and end up shortlisting certain specific leads and ignoring the rest. This, in turn, leads to a low conversion rate.
Let’s sum up
The main reason why lead routing works so well is that it ensures a seamless sales process. Once the lead is better segmented, converting them to customers becomes easy and smooth. When you throw in a personalized touch to your entire approach, the percentage of success increases manifold.
If you’re looking for a more effective way to manage leads that will close, look no further. By capitalizing on the factors mentioned in this blog post, you can create a sales machine that works while you sleep. So, what are you waiting for? Try out automated lead management today and see how it changes your business for the better.
