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A LEAD’S JOURNEY TO FIND THE RIGHT HOMERouting and Converting

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A Lead’s Journey to Find the Right HomeConsider the humble lead. It’s the lifeblood of any business. A lead represents possibility. Opportunity. And ultimately, revenue. It’s why, of course, companies spend so much time and effort generating them. Then they celebrate when leads come flooding into their systems.

But if they are so important, why can it be so complicated getting those leads to the right people within your organization so the process of cultivating them into closed deals can begin? The painful reality is that in the modern B2B sales journey, it’s not easy getting a precious lead to the right home. It’s no secret that the traditional, manual way of managing leads is wasteful, inefficient, labor-intensive and most of all, frustrating.

Maybe these headaches will sound familiar – heck, you might be feeling them right now. While the popular Salesforce.com CRM platform does have native assigning rules, they are so cumbersome and difficult to maintain that the system can be thrown into utter disarray as sales representatives come and go, and leads are left as orphans. Or maybe the thorn in your side is when front-line reps are tasked with sorting through a deep bucket of leads at the top of the sales funnel. Either way,

the result is the same: Reps must research the companies and then scour the database looking to see if anyone owns those accounts or territories. It’s a tedious, monotonous, boring job that leaves people with “sales” in their job description actually doing little selling. Instead, they are performing busy work as they spend valuable time trying to determine the worth of leads and then shuffle them around. In fact, LeanData estimates that it takes, on average, 2.3 minutes to properly research and then assign a single lead.

That doesn’t even factor in when something goes awry. And too often, leads never find their way to the proper home. The sheer volume of leads can mean mistakes happen. Sometimes a lot of mistakes. Promising leads are shipped to the wrong place. They languish, get ignored and eventually are forgotten. Or maybe a lead accidentally ends up with a rep who dutifully calls on a “new” prospect only to be deeply embarrassed when they’re told: “You do realize we already use your product, right?” That’s not a good customer experience.

Let’s just say that leads are not treated with the tender, loving care that they deserve. This is how sales and marketing operations professionals have described the lead-assignment process:

• Overwhelming• A massive time-suck• Tons of clutter• Totally wrong

“It’s an inherent problem for virtually any organization,” said Bernie Macht, director of sales operations for global financial service company Fincad. “The only thing that changes is the size of the problem. If you’re a business dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of potential leads and accounts, it becomes a completely unwieldy situation. You need countless hours to deal with that because the assignment process can be so subjective. Human beings simply can’t stay completely on top of it in a sensible, economic way.”

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A Lead’s Journey to Find the Right HomeLeanData has solved this troublesome pain point. The inherent problem is that in Salesforce.com, leads and accounts essentially live in different data silos. There is no natural connection. But LeanData’s “fuzzy matching” software application creates a bridge between the two by matching leads to existing accounts in a company’s database. No manual intervention is required. And then it goes one step further. With LeanData, a lead automatically can be routed to the proper account owner, such as a general Sales Development Representative (SDR) or an Account Executive working highly targeted accounts, who can judge its viability. Or it can be converted directly into a contact – the act of lead qualification – within a prized account that a business is working hard to penetrate, thus providing greater and instant visibility into the revenue opportunities that exist there.

Routing and converting isn’t an either/or proposition. One-size-fits-all rules never work in business. That’s why some companies choose to route their leads, some convert them into contacts while many others prefer to tailor a hybrid system of both that meets their sales operations needs. A wide spectrum of options exists because LeanData recognizes there’s no right way or wrong way to manage lead flow – only your way. Just as a GPS system will give you multiple options to get from Point A to Point B, there are different ways to direct leads to the right place. When it comes to routing and converting, it’s all about flexibility and leaving your possibilities open.

“This isn’t a technical question,” said Hendrick Lee, LeanData’s vice president of product. “We have the solution. But it does become an

organizational question. What works best for you? Everyone’s processes are very personal to them. Our goal is to help you be more efficient, not hinder you. You’re building the rules into the product. We don’t dictate anything to you. You’re making the decisions.”

So think of this eBook as a deep dive into “best practices” about routing and converting, and how your business can become more successful by cleaning up the underlying sales and marketing data. It’s also intended, though, as a closer look at the various ways that smart organizations are choosing to carefully guide their valuable leads on the journey to the right home.

But first, it’s important to understand why connecting leads to the proper accounts is critical for businesses that are adopting an Account-Based Marketing Strategy.

As a sales or marketing operations professional, you might be asking yourself two questions:

1. Wait, I can automatically match leads to accounts? Answer: Yes. Leads never get lost.

2. So, should I be routing or converting leads? Answer: It depends on your business.

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ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING: THE FUTURE IS NOW

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Account-Based Marketing: The Future is NowYou don’t need to be told that the buyer’s journey in the B2B sales cycle has become increasingly complex – especially if you’re selling a complicated product or service. One person might write the check, but any business deal today essentially involves a committee of stakeholders. CEB research indicated that the approval of 5.4 decision-makers is required to close a typical B2B sale. The number is even higher for major technology purchases at large businesses. A 2014 survey by IDG Enterprise found that there are an average of 17 influencers in a single deal at companies of more than 1,000 employees.

Account-based Marketing (ABM) has become the strategy to adapt to this changing landscape. ABM aligns sales and marketing departments to focus on the prized accounts that offer the best chance of creating the greatest amount of revenue. Sales and marketing teams create a list of targets and then work together to penetrate those accounts with highly personalized messaging and engagements that build relationships with new potential customers as well as existing ones that you are trying to upsell and cross-sell. ABM creates a more accurate view of the entire customer lifecycle. And the better the information, the

greater the chance of closing a deal.

“Maybe we know, in our heart of hearts, that every company would be interested in our solution if they understood our value proposition,” said Lars Nilsson, vice president for global inside sales at Cloudera Inc. “But focus should become your best friend. Not every company is a prospect. That ocean is too big to boil. You can’t be everything to everyone. You have to target where you’ve had success, companies in a certain revenue band, geography, and so on. Then you go after those with hyper-focused, targeted messages at the right individuals at companies you want.”

ABM represents a complete shift away from generating a vast quantity of leads. Instead you pay more attention to quality leads. What ABM also does is make those quality leads even more valuable. If they don’t find their way to the proper home, ABM won’t work because you won’t know all the key players in an account.

“So LeanData plays the role of traffic cop,” Nilsson added.

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Why Routing and Converting Matters

Leads get directed to the correct place. They always are shipped to the right salesperson in your organization, based on lead-assignment

rules that you create. The result is leads will not slip through the cracks and disappear into a black hole. They never go missing.

Leads are assigned without delay. Speed is crucial because prompt responses yield results. When someone shows up on your radar – for

example downloading a white paper or watching a recorded webinar – the moment to reach out is when your product is on a prospect’s mind.

Lost time means lost revenue. A landmark 2007 study conducted by MIT and Insidesales.com found that companies are 21 times more likely

to qualify a lead if they contact the interested party within the first five minutes rather than if they waited 30 minutes. That startling research has

been replicated many times since then. Leads go cold fast. Routing and converting gets them to the appropriate sales rep immediately.

There is greater context. Understanding who that prospect is and how he or she fits into the larger picture within a target account is vital.

Account-Based Marketing is predicated on the idea of having complete visibility into a target so you can differentiate between the key decision-

makers and people who have no influence in a potential deal. Not every new name coming into your system means something. But if someone

is actively consuming your content, reading your blog, researching your materials, it could mean a lot. Routing and converting streamlines that

process by bringing together all the relevant information inside the account. Knowing all the players, and their roles, in a target account helps you

understand the buyer journey and provides the context on how best – and when – to approach prospects.

Poor customer and prospect experiences are avoided. Routing and converting ensures there will never be an awkward situation where

sales reps accidentally reach out to existing customers. Or when a prospect is approached by multiple reps from your organization. “If I’m an

experienced salesperson who has been working an active account for a long time, I don’t want some random salesperson from a call center

interacting with them and getting in the way,” Cloudera’s Lars Nilsson said. “It makes you look disjointed and unprofessional.” Also, greater

visibility into accounts means both prospects and existing customers can be engaged with more personalized, and timely, marketing campaigns.

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THE CASE FOR ROUTING

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The Case for RoutingLeanData’s Router takes inbound leads and automatically assigns them to the proper owner when they match existing accounts in Salesforce.com. If there are no accounts, a lead can be matched to other leads from that company. Once leads have been routed to the right home, a sales rep then can decide the next course of action depending on your business’ internal process – deciding that it’s not viable, convert it, begin a nurturing campaign, and so on. But the important thing is the lead gets to the right person so the sales process can start.

Fincad’s Bernie Macht knew he needed a solution like this long before he realized that one existed. When Macht says he had a lead-assignment problem, he’s not kidding. “A lead would come in and get manually assigned, but then sometimes they would just sit there if our reps were moved around,” Macht said. “We had leads getting assigned to people who hadn’t worked here in years.” When Fincad made the decision to incorporate a strategy of account-based management, they also encountered the problem of the disconnect in Salesforce.com between leads and accounts. Simply put: Salesforce.com doesn’t make it easy to understand all the people in accounts.

“But to take an account-based approach means you must match leads into the accounts,” he said. “That’s why LeanData Router has become an absolute necessity for us. It’s ended all the confusion in our data. We’re getting speed, accuracy and our lead database is starting to clean up. I hadn’t realized how much time my team was spending doing manual reassigns.”

For Fincad, leads are routed directly to the named accounts and arrive with the right sales rep immediately. If there’s not an exact match, lead-assignment rules will direct it to the proper person for evaluation. Once leads are routed, Fincad begins its own rigorous lead-scoring process to decide if it reaches the threshold of being converted into a contact or if it’s not viable.

“When you have a lot of new names coming in, they’re not all going to turn into potential customers,” he said. “So if someone’s a tire-kicker – someone who stumbled upon our website or likely will never be a buyer – we don’t want them in the account base. We want to leave them as a lead record and eventually flush them out. We get a high percentage of those, and we even get a high percentage of those in what we consider target accounts.”

Namely, an all-in-one HR solution, faced a challenge when it came to promptly following up with prospects. Chris Flores, the manager of inside sales, said that as the company grew rapidly, more and more leads were coming into the Namely system. His concern was that the response time of the sale team wasn’t as quick as he wanted. And speed matters, Flores said. Perhaps opportunities were being left on the table.

“We didn’t have the tool to actually start routing the leads to the appropriate people, whether it be clients who were visiting the website, consultants, people who wanted to partner or just new prospects,” Flores recalled. “We had no visualization of where they were coming from, who was going to own that account and where they were being routed. As we scaled, it ended up being a pain point for us.”

LeanData Router changed that. Now when promising leads arrive, they are immediately directed to the correct sales rep, who then can make an informed decision about the action

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The Case for Routing

needed. The process is fast. There is no confusion. And the Namely sales team has greater visibility.

“Our reps are just focused on new business,” Flores said. “So it’s been a big improvement for us. It gets the job done.”

Take-home message: Router makes sure the leads get to the right home. Then, a sales team can make the decision if the lead is so valuable that they should open the door and allow it to come inside as a qualified contact.

What to Consider When Routing Leads1. Routing leads is automatic. But somebody on a sales team still must go through the manual process of deciding if that lead can be converted into a contact or not.

2. Because of the architecture of the Salesforce.com CRM, you don’t get to see the entire picture of an account when an object is still a lead. You only see the opportunities within the account after they are converted. Also, when an object remains a lead in Salesforce.com, you have limited reporting capabilities on marketing automation platforms such as Marketo.

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THE CASE FOR CONVERTING

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The Case for ConvertingLeanData’s Converter achieves two objectives. First, it’s a time-saver. It completely removes the step of sales reps having to review and process each individual lead inside Salesforce.com. Think of the board game Monopoly. Leads get to pass “Go” and head directly into the accounts where they appear as contacts. Secondly, once the lead is converted, sales reps now will have a much richer and more nuanced understanding of all the data because the opportunities associated with the account are visible. This is a huge benefit in an Account-Based Marketing strategy because it provides greater insights about where a buyer is on the sales journey. Only limited visibility of that context is available when a lead is, well, just a lead.

Some sales and marketing professionals see value in converting all of their inbound leads into contacts. For Jason Seeba, chief marketing technologist at the big data company BloomReach, the upside of full conversion comes when you have an account view of the world as opposed to a lead view. And at BloomReach, they are focused on a smaller number of highly qualified target accounts.

“I’m interested in moving all the people over because I’m a firm believer in having everyone

in one central area,” Seeba said. “It’s just more important to have a complete view because you want to know about everybody inside a specific account and be able to log your activities with them. You just can’t do that when you have leads. Whatever analysis you want to do with accounts, you just can’t accurately do it unless everyone is inside the account.”

Lars Nilsson, of Cloudera, said they deal with between 15,000 and 20,000 leads a quarter. Converting them saves countless hours for his inside sales team. It also eliminates the possibility of prime opportunities that should be connected to target accounts somehow being missed.

“We don’t want those orphan leads just sitting there at the top of the funnel, where you have to wait for a SDR to look at it – and chances are the wrong SDR will look at it anyway,” Nilsson said. “Every account is owned by an Account Executive. Why wouldn’t I want my AEs to know what’s happening in their accounts, right away? When something auto-converts, both the AE and the corresponding SDR get a message at the same time, and they can chat about their options. If I can do that, why wait?”

That also was the conclusion that Gabe Paley, the marketing operations manager at InsightSquared, reached. Originally, InsightSquared had designed a process of routing some leads and converting others. But Paley came to the conclusion that leads didn’t fit their account-based approach of focusing on high-value targets.

“The harder I thought about it, I just didn’t see leads as a very flexible object for us,” Paley added. “I can understand how it works for some businesses that are generating a million leads. Maybe it makes sense if you’re working the massive universe. But now, account-based has grown more prevalent as a strategy. To me, this just makes more sense.”

From Paley’s perspective, a sales rep will have to evaluate the viability of a prospect at some point – whether it exists as a lead or a contact. At InsightSquared, a smaller marketing team could look at leads when they come into the system. But it seemed more efficient to build rules where all leads automatically convert and then have the larger Account Development Representative team make the decisions on how to proceed. In fact, InsightSquared has created a process where leads that don’t match to target accounts will auto-

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The Case for Convertingcreate new accounts – even knowing that some ultimately have no chance of becoming potential customers.

“Either way, the information has to live in our database someplace,” Paley explained. “We want to be able to answer the question of how much junk are we actually getting. That’s very interesting information for us to know. For instance, we might be able to determine that a specific campaign or email marketing is generating a lot more junk than our AppExchange traffic. We need to know if there’s something wrong with our database, and this helps us understand it.”

David Lewis, the CEO of consulting firm DemandGen, said he’s a proponent of conversion because he believes leads are a distraction. “It’s like having business cards that you don’t look at,” he said. Think of your company, Lewis added, as a popular nightclub. Leads are the people left standing out in the parking lot. Contacts are the ones welcomed inside.

“Contacts are people who have been allowed through the velvet ropes,” he said. “C’mon in, join your friends! A potential customer should be allowed in. If any opportunity can become a client, we should auto-convert.”

Take-home message: Converter fully automates the process so that businesses can focus entirely on accounts – providing a more complete understanding of the opportunities that exist within valued targets.

What to Consider When Converting Leads

1. When you convert a lead into a contact, the process cannot be reversed in the Salesforce.com CRM. So you will want to establish strict assignment rules to make sure that conversion is accomplishing your goals.

2. If you auto-convert everything, the act of conversion loses its significance as a qualification event. The paradigm shifts. But for many companies this is an important metric. It might be closely tracked by C-level executives. Businesses can invest in technologies that map the stages of the traditional funnel, measuring indicators like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) – and need to justify that expense. Auto-conversion will affect a company’s reporting going forward as well as the ability to make historical comparisons. But if you are a

business that uses an ABM strategy, tracking leads and lead qualifications is not important because the focus is on accounts. “If you’re in sales ops or a marketing technologist, you should work to own that conversation about tracking the right metrics,” Seeba said. “If you’re tracking the wrong thing, then you should be changing the conversation to track the right thing.”

3. When you convert a lead and there’s no matching account, you’ll have more to consider and other decisions to make. For instance, that lead can be bundled with other leads from the same company already existing in your database. Or you could structure a process where the lead creates a new account in your database. But there is a pitfall to that option. “You are potentially creating a plethora of accounts when you do that – to the point where it possibly could make all accounts meaningless if there are so many,” said LeanData’s Hendrick Lee. But if it’s truly a “net-new” lead – from a company completely brand new to your universe – then whatever internal assignment rules you have created for managing leads to the right owner naturally take over.

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THE CASE FOR A HYBRID STRATEGY

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The Case for a Hybrid Strategy

Remember, you don’t have to choose just whether to route or convert leads. You can do a combination of both. It’s simple to customize a process where some leads are routed and others are converted based on a company’s internal operating practices.

For instance, many businesses convert leads

only when they match into competitor accounts, partner accounts and existing customer accounts. Those last two are examples of accounts where strong business ties already exist. “Typically, you don’t want to work those accounts in a normal sales process because there already is a pre-existing relationship,” LeanData’s Hendrick Lee said. By immediately converting those leads, it circumvents the manual lead-qualification process. In other words, that means there is no chance of awkward calls to existing customers or partners. Nor will multiple sales reps be calling on a single target. Instead, the front-line sales reps can stay focused on promising prospects and Account Executives can respond quickly to important developments within their target accounts.

Patrick Chen, the director of marketing operations at mobile marketing automation software company Kahuna, said they prefer to see everything from an account perspective. But they also make it a priority not to clutter up target accounts. Their solution was to build a set of assignment rules that use a mix of routing and converting. The distinction is made based on whether a lead is owned by an SDR or an Account Executive. If it belongs to an account where an Account Executive has open opportunities, then

it may convert – assuming it meets a threshold of viability. Otherwise, the lead will be routed to an SDR who is paired with a corresponding Account Executive.

Because those assignment rules are relatively strict, only a small percentage of leads at Kahuna actually auto-convert. Chen said he prefers it that way because if everything were shipped into an account, it would become hard to distinguish between all of the contacts.

“On the lead level, you can do things like lead scoring and establish lead status,” he added. “There are ways to surface better leads to the top. But if you’ve converted 100 leads into an account, they might be joining 200 other contacts already in that account. Who am I supposed to be talking to in this account? That’s part of the issue for me. And the SDRs are on the front lines talking to people as the leads come in. They have a better view. So there’s a benefit to leads. But I think there is a little bit of a push-pull here. I’m not sure where the happy medium is where everyone is pleased.”

But for Chen, full conversion is a step too far. He prefers to use Converter in a strategic way that helps clean up his database. Another business

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The Case for a Hybrid Strategytaking that approach is Typesafe, a startup that helps developers build software applications. It also has a sales model that includes focusing on targeted accounts and Kurt Keesy, the senior demand generation program manager, said Typesafe has a lot of moving pieces as a relatively small company. “And LeanData makes sure everything goes to the right place,” he added. While that’s largely accomplished with the LeanData Router, Typesafe also selectively uses the LeanData Converter option.

“If somebody from the press or an analyst or a partner comes into our system, we’ll convert those just to get them out of our lead queue,” Keesy said. “We want to get some of the noise out of there for the SDRs so they can focus on net-new opportunities for us.”

Take-home message: A hybrid system can provide the best of both worlds. For instance, leads belonging to target accounts as well as partners and existing customers automatically can be converted. Other leads can be routed to the appropriate sales rep and immediately await whatever internal qualification process that a business has created.

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JOURNEY’S END: SAFE AT HOME

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Journey’s End: Safe at HomeThink of Router and Converter as the two sides of the same coin. They both accomplish the same task: Efficiently getting leads to the right salesperson and at speed and accuracy impossible to duplicate manually at scale. You just have to decide which tool – or more likely which combination of the two – will kickstart your Account-Based Marketing strategy into overdrive.

“People are doing it all different sorts of ways, and there are benefits to all of them,” said Kahuna’s Patrick Chen. “It really can depend on your business. You have to figure out what’s best for you.”

Whatever path you craft for your organization with LeanData, the humble lead will find its way to the right home. And at the end of that journey, potential revenue awaits because now your sales and marketing teams have been empowered to do their best work.

“Nobody wants to be spending time on the job matching leads and accounts, doing the research, and then manually converting leads,” LeanData’s Hendrick Lee said. “You want to be marketing and selling. That’s what you do. You want to close deals. And we want to help you do it.”

About LeanData

WE’RE PASSIONATE about simplifying the B2B sales process through data-driven marketing. Our technology is purpose built for Account-Based Marketing and target-account selling strategies. LeanData customers like Marketo, Cloudera Inc., and DemandBase are seeing increased revenue attribution and greater sales productivity.

To learn more or receive a demo on account-based reporting, campaign-to-opportunity matching, marketing influence, or account-based nurturing, click here:

LEANDATA SIMPLIFIES LEAD MANAGEMENT SO YOUR COMPANY’S

SALES ORGANIZATION CAN FOCUS ON CLOSING DEALS.

• Match inbound leads to accounts, opportunities and

customers

• Auto-route leads to the right owner

• Auto-convert leads to contacts using custom business rules

• Nurture leads and contacts based on account-specific details

• Measure marketing effectiveness from campaign to close

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