Looking to save time and increase sales pipeline? Take some age-old advice from Benjamin Franklin:
“Time is money.”
It’s the tagline of opportunity cost — when you spend time or money on one thing, you forgo the opportunity to spend it on something else.
Which means there’s likely untapped revenue, in the form of wasted time and inefficiencies, hiding out in your sales processes.
It’s in the hours your Operations and IT employees spend managing routing rules, triaging misrouted leads and assigning accounts. It’s in the time your Sales teams spend researching lead information and finding the right account executive (AE) or customer success manager (CSM) to handle an account.
No doubt there are better, more efficient, revenue-generating activities on which employees should invest their time.
Below we’ll highlight three companies who’ve successfully increased sales pipeline by reducing manual processes and leaning into efficiency through the use of revenue orchestration tools.
Eliminating Manual Lead Routing Processes
Alation, a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, serves 450+ enterprise customers and 300,000+ subscribers worldwide through data governance and cloud data management.
Alation’s Marketing Operations (MOps) leaders noticed leads from the same account were being routed to different sales development representatives (SDRs). This created a poor buying experience. To further complicate matters, the MOps team was manually routing leads to SDRs through a round-robin process which made responding to leads slow.
To solve these challenges, Alation implemented a lead-to-account (L2A) matching and routing solution to support account-based motions and help with round robin lead assignment pools. These changes created a huge impact in time saved as routing errors had previously taken 25 to 30 hours of manual labor per week to fix.
Seeking further efficiencies, Alation implemented an automated meeting scheduling tool. This allowed prospective customers to schedule a meeting the moment they submitted a demo request form. SDRs no longer spend time making multiple attempts to schedule meetings, freeing up their time to focus on outbound motions. This change alone resulted in an 88 percent improvement in lead response time.
Reducing Lead Troubleshooting Time
Everbridge is a critical event management platform used by 6,500+ global organizations for public safety and emergency response communication. With routing systems formerly housed in two separate platforms, Everbridge’s MOps team noticed multiple inefficiencies in their lead management process.
Everbridge’s challenges included a complex system of Salesforce routing logic rules, record duplication, lead leakage, and uneven lead distribution. As a result, sales reps were spending valuable time manually troubleshooting leads. Ineffective lead management ultimately impacted forecasting, which in turn made future planning and decision-making difficult.
To solve these challenges, Everbridge deployed a lead matching and routing solution where they could build and manage logic in one place. To correct uneven lead distribution, Everbridge incorporated a round robin routing solution. Then, by implementing service level agreement (SLA) notifications, leads now undergo timely follow-up or route to an escalation process that reroutes unworked leads and contacts.
These solutions resulted in the following positive outcomes:
- 30 percent reduction in lead management troubleshooting due to detailed audit logs
- Five hours per week saved by BDRs due to the elimination of manual lead management and routing, resulting in quicker response times and faster conversion rates
- 50 percent reduction in time savings for the MOps team in maintaining lead routing
- Time and money saved by not developing and maintaining a custom, in-house routing solution
Increasing Flexibility for Change Management
F5 is a cybersecurity company that helps organizations optimize and secure their applications and API. F5 noticed that their existing lead assignment rules within Salesforce were causing leads to either sit unworked in queues or route to the wrong sales representative. As a result, follow up was severely delayed, or worse, leads would fall through the cracks.
F5’s Sales Operations team often spent months working with their IT department to troubleshoot lead management issues. Meanwhile, F5’s sales reps would spend precious time researching lead records and attempting to schedule a meeting with the prospective buyer.
To combat these problems, F5 implemented a lead matching and routing solution as well as an automated meeting scheduling tool. This lead management transformation resulted in three primary benefits:
- Change management for lead routing decreased from months to daily, as needed
- Thousands of hours of time saved by sales reps no longer having to manually sort and research leads
- Speed to lead and accountability is now built into the lead management process
Efficiency Drives Pipeline
When tech stack solutions work inaccurately, rework is required, and it leaves operations teams literally spinning their wheels. And even if a company catches its own mistake before any customer interaction, time delays are incurred when leads are routed to the wrong reps.
When an organization focuses on efficiency in their lead management processes, several positive, impactful things happen: productivity goes up, the buyer experience improves, and pipeline increases.
In uncertain economic times, it’s a proven formula for success.
Kim Peterson
Kim Peterson is the Manager of Content Strategy at LeanData where she digs deep into all aspects of the revenue process and shares her findings across multiple content channels. Kim's writing experiences span tech companies, stunt blogging, education, and the real estate industry. Connect with Kim on LinkedIn.
