How Optimizely Escaped Legacy Routing Pain and Scaled SDR Operations

Solutions

LeanData Orchestration

Results

Introduction

Optimizely is the AI platform for marketing, built for the experience-makers who shape how brands show up in the world. That requires a GTM engine where marketing and sales move in lockstep—capturing demand, routing it with precision, and acting on it fast.

In late 2023, Jared Stubbs joined Optimizely to fill a critical gap in SDR operations. Part of his mandate was to take ownership of lead routing. What he found would shape his first major recommendation at the company.

The Challenge: Opaque Logic, Siloed Tools, and Stalled Pipeline

Stepping into a new operations role often means untangling systems built by someone else, and Optimizely was no exception. When Stubbs took ownership of lead routing in late 2023, he found a legacy instance with no historical context and a routing model that was hard to interpret. The result was an environment where reps lacked clarity, changes felt risky, and confidence in operations had dipped. As he dug in, three core problems came into focus.

No Visibility Into Routing Decisions

The legacy tool offered no clear way to understand why a given MQL or account was assigned to a specific rep. SDRs had to manually investigate campaigns, ICP fit, and intent signals just to understand why a lead landed on their desk. “It caused a lot of SDR confusion, and ultimately very slow response times,” Stubbs explained.

Confusing, Unscalable Logic

Ringlead lacked a true visual flow builder. Everything lived in plain lines of text logic that were difficult to follow and even harder to hand off. “It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Stubbs said, “in terms of if there was a conflicting dependency that was causing an error.” The tool only handled MQL assignment—with no room to grow.

Disconnected Systems, Endless Manual Work

The platform didn’t integrate with the rest of Optimizely’s tech stack. Auto-sequencing leads at the point of assignment, or pushing real-time notifications over Microsoft Teams, simply wasn’t possible. Operations was stuck applying day-to-day band-aid fixes. Every routing change was, in Stubbs’s words, “like pulling teeth. Super slow and painful.”

That friction had a direct business impact. Slow speed to lead meant missed opportunities from high-intent hand-raisers. “Someone submits a contact us form, and if that person wasn’t followed up with in a timely manner, they’re also evaluating other competitors,” Stubbs noted. “If they reach out first, they’re probably going to win the deal.” Worse, the slow change process eroded stakeholder confidence in the operations team’s ability to innovate at scale.

“The tool was the limiting factor. We had the vision, we knew where we wanted to go, but we couldn’t get there.”

The Solution: A Routing Ecosystem Built to Scale

Stubbs had used LeanData at a previous organization, and he knew exactly what a capable orchestration platform looked like. His recommendation required no lengthy vendor comparison.

“It was my past success with LeanData that made it the obvious choice,” he said. “In my mind, I already knew that LeanData was—and still is—the leader in the space. I knew it could support us through essentially the whole lifetime of the need.”

Within roughly a month of Stubbs joining Optimizely, the team was in active conversations with LeanData to transition off Ringlead. Three capabilities were decisive:

• A visual flow builder that replaced strings of plain text logic with an intuitive, structured interface — making it straightforward to build, test, and deploy routing changes without developer dependency.
• Multi-object routing out of the box, covering leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities within one unified system.
• A deep integration ecosystem, including Outreach, Microsoft Teams, 6sense, and UserGems — all connected through a single orchestration layer.

With LeanData in place, Optimizely activated two integrations that became central to its SDR operating model. The Outreach integration auto-sequences lower-intent records based on specific criteria, freeing reps from manual follow-up tasks. The Microsoft Teams integration delivers real-time, Salesforce-enriched notifications the moment high-intent records — like a contact us form or a pricing request — are assigned, so no hand-raiser goes cold.

Handling a Full Organizational Overhaul

The real test came at the start of the year, when Optimizely’s entire SDR organization restructured into product-specific pods, pairing reps on shared accounts by product area. The shift wasn’t incremental and required a complete rebuild of the routing strategy across every object, on short notice.

“Because of LeanData’s capabilities — everything from the visual FlowBuilder, to the support, to the integrations —  we were able to implement everything in record time,” Stubbs said. “If it was done in any other platform, it would have caused quite a few gray hairs, to say the least. But doing it through LeanData, it was kind of just another week in the office.”

Throughout the process, LeanData’s customer success and technical support teams remained engaged. “Working with the customer success team is truly world class,” Stubbs said. “Every single time I’ve reached out to LeanData Support, their response is extremely quick, and they’ve helped guide me to a solution 100% of the time.”

Results: Faster Signals, Better Selling, Consistent Growth

The shift to LeanData produced measurable improvements across Optimizely’s revenue motion.

Speed to lead dropped from hours to minutes. “Looking back at where we were before LeanData to now, in terms of speed to lead, is truly incredible,” Stubbs said. “It’s gone from hours to minutes in many cases.”

SDRs reclaimed hours of selling time every week. By auto-sequencing lower-intent records through Outreach, the team freed reps to focus on high-intent and outbound activities. “That’s translated to hours and hours per week that the SDRs get back,” Stubbs explained. “They can then devote that to the more high-intent motions, more outbound motions, picking up the phone and calling more—which also increases pipeline.”

Follow-up speed that competitors noticed. Real-time Microsoft Teams notifications, enriched with Salesforce context, let reps act on hand-raisers immediately without jumping between tabs or reports. The impact reached beyond Optimizely’s own walls. “It’s actually been called out by a few CMOs and other executives at other companies,” Stubbs shared. “They’ve reached out to our exec team and said they were very impressed at how quickly our follow-up was. And each time, it’s boiled down to how quickly the SDR was notified.”

Consistent quarter-over-quarter growth. “We’re growing every quarter since I’ve joined, and I do credit part of that pie to LeanData, absolutely,” Stubbs said.

Looking Ahead

With a scalable routing foundation in place, Optimizely can now adapt its GTM strategy without operational drag. If the business direction changes, routing logic changes with it—without tickets, delays, or uncertainty.

“If someone brings a strategic need to myself or to the team that involves anything LeanData touches, it’s essentially: if we need it, we can build, test, and deploy it quickly and efficiently,” Stubbs said. “There’s never been a moment of, ‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s possible, we’ll have to put in a feature request and keep our fingers crossed.’ The tool has never been a limiting factor.”

About Optimizely

Optimizely is the AI platform for marketing, built for the experience-makers who shape how brands show up in the world. Bringing together content management, content marketing, experimentation, commerce, personalization, and analytics into a single platform, Optimizely gives marketers the freedom to create, customers the experiences they remember, and AI agents the content they come looking for. With Optimizely, you’re free to grow. Learn more at optimizely.com.