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Access to the right leads can boost your business. But what happens if the lead is not followed up effectively?
Statistics say that 44% of sales reps are too busy to follow up with leads. Hence, the lead gets wasted and leads to a loss of time, effort, and revenue.
Such lead wastage should be avoided at any cost. Further, the acquired leads must be assigned to the right person.
In this article, we give you strategies that will help you effectively assign your leads.
1. Get lead assignments automated
A Harvard Business Review study reports seven times the likelihood of the lead getting converted to the business if the sales rep gets in touch within an hour.
However, most companies fail to do that. This delay in lead response happens due to an absence of automation, i.e., manual handling and assignment of leads.
When lead handling is automated, the response time is improved significantly, and more conversions can occur.
2. Get leads assigned depending on skill set
More than a salesman, customers today are looking for a trustworthy advisor. They like to talk to a sales rep with adept knowledge of the service or product.
The customer wants the rep to understand what they need and provide guidance to make the decision-making process easy.
When you assign leads based on which of your sales reps has the needed knowledge, you stand a chance to get a good business.
3. Try lead assignment in bulk
Bulk assignment of leads is a very self-explanatory process. The leads get uploaded on a lead management system and are assigned in bulk to a particular sales rep. Sales reps follow them up and manage to get better productivity.
You can integrate large lead files into proper sales reps with a lead management system. This method will help you save a lot of time.
However, this method will only work if you use a lead management system. When the data is stored in spreadsheets or likes, this method doesn’t work.
4. Use the Round-robin method for lead assignment
The round-robin lead distribution method ensures an even distribution of leads to the sales reps.
You distribute leads evenly and not based on geographical territories. It is an impartial, quick, and energy-efficient method.
This method doesn’t allow the sales reps to complain about territories. They remain focussed on what is important.
You can remove ethical bias and compare the sales rep on equal ground. Moreover, you end up accurately assessing the performance of the sales rep.
5. Practice scoring leads
Effective lead assignment means assigning fresh and best leads to your lead assignment salesforce. To understand which leads are the best, you need lead scoring.
A lead management system will help you by scoring the lead. With lead scoring, it will take the actions and attributes of a lead into account and project the prospect of the lead.
Lead scoring is done on factors like:
- Video views
- Website visits
- Form submissions
- Content downloads
- Event participation
6. Get lead response time measured
Before you manage something, you must measure and assess it well. If you don’t measure your response time, you can’t tell whether the lead assignment strategy is effective.
Ideally, your sales team should act on the leads super quickly. The faster response time you get, the more effective your lead assignment strategy is.
It is fairly easy to measure response time. Commonly, companies get the creation time and team and date of the lead compared with the time and date of the first activity.
7. Consider the availability of the sales rep
You must have a fair idea about the availability of the sales rep to whom you are assigning leads. Hot leads will turn cold if you assign leads to an absent or busy sales rep. You can also pause lead assignments for the unavailable sales reps.
8. Write down an SLA
You can prevent misalignment between marketing and sales teams by using a service-level agreement (SLA).
It is a contact through which you can outline the responsibilities of each team. Furthermore, it also helps explain the qualified lead and the communication process between teams.
9. Get your leads reassigned automatically
One good practice is to set certain requirements in the service-level agreement (SLA) about lead response time,
When you enforce an automatic lead reassignment, the lead response time improves. If the sales reps know their leads will get reassigned, they will be motivated to follow up as quickly as possible.
With this process, you can also ensure that if any rep is unavailable, the leads won’t go unworked or unnoticed for long.
10. Get your first response automated
The company that responds first has a high chance of doing business, as 78% of customers are inclined to buy from them.
Therefore, it is a growing trend among companies to opt for sales automation solutions that allow them to automate their first response to prospective customers.
You can send personalized and relevant text or email messages using automation platforms.
11. Utilize weighted lead assignment
You can optimize performance using weighted management, as it lets you control how many leads each sales rep assigns.
With this, not only will your conversion rates be maximized, but you can also get the workloads of the sales rep balanced and reward the best-performing sales reps that grabbed additional leads.
12. Assign leads randomly
Setting up your lead management system to assign leads randomly takes a lot of pressure off you. You only need to program your lead management system to work efficiently.
The system will do the rest of the work for you. You can also separate reps into groups and complete assignments within the group.
This method also helps in distributing the leads evenly across the sales rep. But it is a far easier method to set up than the other ones, like the round-robin lead assignment method.
Conclusion
The lead assignment is a very important step in completing the sales funnel journey of an acquired lead. So, follow the above methods to make things easier for you.
When done correctly, you will make most of the time, money, and effort you spend in your marketing endeavors.
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