Imagine this:
A hot prospect discovers a pain point and researches possible solutions. They find you and a competitor, and they submit demo requests on both of your websites at roughly the same time. The lead comes in and gets assigned round robin to a SDR who is responsible for scheduling the appointment. However, the SDR fails to respond in 48 hours – they were at a tradeshow booth / on vacation / had too much going on already to get to it. In the meantime, your competitor responded to the web request within an hour (talk about striking when the iron is hot!). This is a Go To Market (GTM) calamity in a world where 78% buyers claim they buy from the first company to respond to their website inquiry. You’ve pretty much lost the deal in the first hour.
“Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead.”
– Harvard Business Review
The point I’m making here is that time is of essence. As much in today’s GTM as in our lives. Time is critical from the point of view of not only reducing sales cycles but also increasing conversion rates. As we saw in the example above, the speed of response from your SDR team can impact the % of inbound leads that you win deals with.
Many Sales & Marketing managers and leaders set effective SLAs with their teams
These SLAs are used to drive certain standards in process adherence and response times that make the entire GTM process efficient and productive. Examples of time-dependent SLAs include:
- Any inbound lead that is marketing qualified has to be emailed / called within 1 hour. If it isn’t it will be assigned round robin to another SDR on the team
- Any marketing qualified lead has to be dispositioned within 72 hours. If it isn’t, it will be assigned to the common pool.
- No sales rep can have an open opportunity that is more than 4 months old
- Any lead that has been disqualified will not be engaged by any other rep for at least 2 months
- Once an opportunity has been lost with reason “No budget”, the rep will get in touch with the primary contact again after a 3-month period
- The CSM on an account will reach out to the primary contact at least 45 days before deal renewal
Factor time in your lead routing processes
LeanData now gives you the ability to build time-based processes using its visual FlowBuilder interface. So in the example we spoke at the beginning of this article, you can now leverage LeanData to check if SDRs were responding to inbound leads within an hour and if not, you can assign the lead to another SDR.
The Time-Based Routing node will check if the lead status had changed within 1 hour.
If that condition is not met, you can reassign to the SDR pool (which can easily skip the previous owner)
There are many other applications of LeanData’s Time-Based Routing
Imagine if you could extend the above example to any Salesforce object – contacts, accounts, opportunities. And also perform any time-based action (not only assign or re-assign objects) e.g. convert a lead, create an account / opp, send email notifications. This makes your entire sales lifecycle more efficient and not just your lead response time. With LeanData’s Time-Based Routing, you can set up processes that:
- Keep ABM-qualified leads or accounts in a holding pattern and schedule them to be assigned only at a particular time or cadence e.g. once a week
- Once an opportunity has been lost with reason “No budget”, the rep will automatically be assigned that opportunity to get in touch with the primary contact again after a 30 day period
- Reroute an opportunity if the close date is greater than a certain period e.g. to renew SDR outreach with any deals lost 6 months or more ago
- Create a new renewal opportunity if it is 10 months from the closed won date of the original opportunity
Make your entire GTM process in Salesforce more efficient, with clicks not code. Learn more about LeanData Routing today!