Lead Routing: canary in the coal mine?
Over the last ten years I’ve witnessed the explosion of MarTech and its incredible impact on businesses. Once upon a time, I remember signing up to find little more than a rudimentary Contact Us form with a 1-800 number below it. But that’s all changed. Just visit any Web2 SaaS website on both desktop and mobile, you’ll find a chatbot at the lower corner. It’s a direct interactive interlink between prospects and vendors. Tear down this wall!
You’ll find a Contact Us navlink in the header as you always have.
You’ll find a big shiny Subscribe or Demo javascript button on the homepage.
Typically baked right into a Hero banner. Type in your email, and an action takes place. Either a Submit button appears, which you’ll have to click for a second time. It might even expand so that you can fill out the rest of the required fields.
Fun times giving away our information!
Now if the company is on top of their game, you’ll get called within five to ten minutes.
In fact, when I go onto a website myself I often like to pose as a mystery shopper. I pull out my phone and start my timer. If I get called within five minutes I’m typically going to pick up out of courtesy. “Wow, kudos on getting to me within your SLA is what I’ll say. Who leads your Marketing Operations?”
Game recognizes game.
The frontier of innovation back then was to break down lead capture friction. What’s the point of driving high website traffic if it’s going to get stuck in some blackhole of an MAP (marketing automation platform), CRM (customer relationship manager), or worse, a group distribution email. Heaven forbid!
But as I said before, we’ve come a long way. Marketers have solved for driving traffic to websites. The art and science of content publication, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, paid display, and paid search. That cocktail of marketing tactics results in higher website traffic. The trick is how to build a sustainable audience of unique visitors at a reasonable cost. Marketing’s contribution to Customer Acquisition Costs depends on it.
So that’s the first solution. The next bottleneck was how to convert those unique visitors into handraisers. Turning anonymous visitors into identified individuals. Rather than tracking general visitor characteristics such as pages visited, time on site, browser type, and location it’s all about capturing your required attributes. This is what I call the Minimum Viable Lead. If you’re using Salesforce, for example, it’s all about that first name and email. Nothing else matters when it comes to an MQL-agnostic CRM. Ask any Salesforce admin and they’ll tell you this is gospel.
Tell this to any marketer and they’ll jump out the window. What about job title? What about last name? Phone number? Social security number? Credit card number? Are they ready to whip out that plastic and buy now? Well that’s a bit creepy but we’re all thinking it. So take it slowly there partner. There’s a give and get to life. Two stepping with a first time anonymous-visitor-now-turned “LEAD” should be a thoughtful and deliberate affair.
Now let’s assess where we are. We’ve dramatically bumped up web traffic. We’ve provided enough value that visitors and are now guests. We know them by name. They’ve wiped off their shoes and entered your house. Their information is in your CRM and MAP. Be a good host now and treat them with respect.
So let’s take a peek inside the considerations on how to meet the customers where they are. As a host, it’s for you to decide what mechanisms to deploy to retain these guests to remain in your sphere of influence. Do you come out and roll out the red carpet? Wine and dine them right away? What if they’re just curious and more skittish? Do you have regale them with stories to increase their curiosity?
Basically is it a slow burn or is it time to go, go, go. On a technical and process front, we call this Lead Routing. It’s the science and art of determining how to increase lead conversion.
There are five tenets to think through as you build out your lead routing.
Technical performance
Data enrichment
Meritocratic equilibrium
Fault contingencies
Administrative burden
So let’s go over these one by one.
What is technical performance? This is defined as the amount of physical time it takes for a lead to enter their information into webform or chatbot to the time it hits your notification layer. Now what does that mean exactly? When you’re testing your lead routing you’ll typically have a staging layer to your webforms. Your testers will enter a series of acceptable test leads into the form. From the second that information is fired off, the lead will go through a series of transfers and transformations. Transfers in the sense that the lead will through a javascript form either directly into your CRM or first pass through a series of intermediaries. If you have Pardot for example bolted in front of your CRM the lead is going to have to pass into Pardot, go through its processing logic, and receive the go ahead to sync into your CRM. If you have batched intervals, it can sometimes takes Pardot ten minutes to batch sync leads into your CRM.
Funny how systems can act a lot like clogged plumbing. Am I right?
The notification layer takes many forms. At the very minimum it’s a Salesforce notification native within the CRM or an email nudge. For the intermediate, it’s a notification to your chat tool such as Slack. I’m waiting for the day when the lead buzzes your Salesforce wristband. In some cases, the Lead hits a Chat or Call Now capability. This is where a chat window or phone call live connects to the sales floor.
How much friction you believe is acceptable to your leads is up to you and your business model. There is a point for any business where that friction signals that you are difficult to do business with. Don’t cross that Event Horizon if you can help it.
For the second tent, Data Enrichment is akin to how much of a finished product you want coming off the factory floor before really assigning that product a personality. When a Lead comes in, the form capture is going to be somewhat minimalistic. There’s a natural asymptote to conversion when you increase the number of required fields. In fact, I can bet you that the more required fields you have the lower your form completion rate. And that might be perfectly acceptable! In fact, if you’re strapped for headcount then a sign that says “serious buyers only” is A-Okay. If you go onto Craigslist today and shop for a used car the one line you’ll see is “serious buyers only”. Go figure!
Let’s say your form is so simple that it only captures first name and email. If your data stack incorporated enrichment tools you have the option of enriching the lead. This is a very simple API handshake. The API service you deploy will take in whatever you send it and send back to you the missing data. That’s if they have it of course. Firmographic information will come in. Company name, size, technographic information. You name it. It might just be bolted onto your paper thin lead.
Now the question is do you enrich pre or post CRM insertion. Like everything else, there’s a series of tradeoffs to be made. If you choose pre-insertion you increase the amount of time it takes for that lead to hit the notification layer. For the speed-to-lead acolytes out there this could mean a death sentence. In some studies, the relationship between time and response is best graphically shown as a negative exponential curve. Oof! Down and to the right anyone? Sign me up!
If you choose post-insertion you can do so at pre-notification or post-notification. Pre-notification has the same issues as negative the advantage of speed-to-lead. But doing so post-notification preserves speed-to-lead, but will disadvantage your reps in terms of preparation.
There’s no right or wrong here. Discuss with your leadership what makes the most sense for you. As long as you have a framework from which to base your conversations, it will increase your chances for success.
The third tenet is Meritocratic Equilibrium. I’ve often heard that it always makes sense to send your very best leads to your best reps. That is the ultimate meritocracy. But that also comes at a cost. What about your newest reps? Or your up and comers? By only sending the best leads to the best reps, do you not also stifle your talent pipeline? Again, that’s a conversation to have with the business. Having a Performance Management Framework combined with clear Rules of Engagement will set you up for success. Now if you get the rules or the framework wrong, that’s acceptable. At least it’s codified and can be adjusted. Everyone knows where they stand. Ambiguity kills meritocracy and, at worst, creates regrettable attrition among your ranks.
Develop a set of rules with a series of metrics you’re optimizing for. Lead conversion is one metric. Matching lead to account is another. Ensuring that every single lead is sent to the appropriate role, team, and geography is a difficult task to master. Not least because certain CRMs have created a two citizen system of Leads versus Contacts.
The fourth tenet is Fault Contingencies. Now what happens when an employee rightfully plans a vacation? Or is out sick? Is your lead routing engine smart enough to detect that ahead of time and automatically self-heal your routing logic? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen operations team bob-and-weave complicated work schedules to ensure leads go to an available resource. There are several tools today that integrate right into calendar tools. They detect “all day” events with the subject lines of “OOO”, “Vacation”, “PTO”. It’s not rocket science, but when we were dealing with stone age tools in the past it can feel a lot like living in a revenue utopia.
The last tenet I’ll leave you with is Administrative Burden. Changing lead rules too frequently will burn out any operations team. For administrators, the User Interface matters quite a bit. If This. Then That rules in the form of sequential text forms with logical operator maps stored in another text box is one form factor. Think about Lead Rules Assignments in Salesforce for example. Or how about an Activity Diagram. Activity diagrams are graphical representations of workflows of stepwise activities and actions with support for choice, iteration and concurrency. In the Unified Modeling Language, activity diagrams are intended to model both computational and organizational processes. SHOUT OUT TO WIKIPEDIA FOR THE DEAD EYE ACCURATE DESCRIPTION! Both can be administered to a degree that serves your business. Just make sure you document every use case out first before you design anything in your systems. And if you do anything, always do it in Production first. Avoid being a cowboy and pushing the nuclear button without doing a simulation in your Test environment.
We went on the deep end of Lead Routing today. If this bored you to death, don’t worry! I was bored too. But believe me when I say that getting lead routing wrong is not boring.
The business will immediately go off the rails. So begins the proverbial breathing-down-the-necks of the ops team as soon as it happens.
So take care out there with your lead routing!
A word on the Patreon Group
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