🔀 The HOW-TO’S of LEAD DISTRIBUTION 🔀

We all agree that delivering value quickly to inbound Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) is key for lead conversion, but how do we effectively do this in practice, and who do we route the leads to achieve this? 

First, let’s zoom out and take a look at the top of the sales funnel—the average B2B SaaS company converts landing page visitors at around 9.5%. Of those that make it through, the average inbound conversion for a B2B SaaS SDR team from lead to ‘opportunity’ is around 10-20%, depending on what statistic you take (this varies heavily on the MQL type and their qualification / ‘readiness’). Essentially, we’re all haemorrhaging leads. Yes—not every lead is ready to buy—which is where the importance of our nurture programmes and continual value-add delivery comes into play—but stemming this leaky funnel where possible is key. 

Notching up inbound lead conversion by 5%, even just 2-3%, can make notable differences to your pipeline, and your Marketing ROI.

In the competitive landscape of B2B, a timely and valuable response establishes credibility, helps build the trust-bridge, and increases the likelihood of continuing the conversation.  

When optimising for this, we take into account:

• Speed to lead

• The value we deliver

• Reducing friction

An efficient SDR team, who provide real value, allow your Account Executives (AEs) to focus on converting leads further down the funnel, so you can respond to your inbound leads faster. Considering a lead is 21x more likely to convert if you call within five minutes than if you called after half an hour, surely that’s a goal worth pushing for? 

Plus, a faster, value-filled first engagement helps prevent your customers seeking your competitors while they wait for an answer.

The SDR team serves as the frontline, bridging the gap between marketing efforts and actual sales, creating a seamless and impactful transition that maximises the potential of each inbound lead.

But how do we provide value fast at Top of Funnel (TOFU) using SDR teams?

Providing value, fast:

The SDR team can efficiently provide fast value to MQLs by focusing on 4 key strategic actions:

1. Prompt Outreach: Time is crucial, and swift outreach ensures the lead is still actively engaged and interested. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on time to response help ensure this, and gives the SDR team metric oriented goals to strive for, which can be included in commission structures. 

2. Personalised Communication: Tailored and relevant communication based on the lead's expressed pain points, needs or interests. Demonstrating an understanding of their specific challenges enhances the perceived value. An SDR should not just be there as a scheduler for the next demo.

3. In-Depth Product Knowledge: Equip the SDR teams with comprehensive product knowledge. This enables them to articulate how the product or service directly addresses the MQL's pain points, swiftly showcasing value.

4. Value Proposition Articulation: Clearly articulate the unique value proposition early in the conversation. Sales enablement is key here, with training, centralised easy-to-access documentation, and now an array of real-time AI tools.

By combining these elements, an SDR team can rapidly and effectively convey the value of the product or service to MQLs, increasing the chances of successful conversion.

But who do you route the lead to, to ensure maximum value is given to each lead?

Is it a generic round robin through the SDR team, or do you route to specialist SDRs for each product / pain point / industry / location?

Routing inbound leads to the right rep:

There are many ways to do this, but here are 3 common practices businesses have adopted:

1. Leads are routed to a specialised SDR, who later routes to an Account Executive (AE)

2. Leads are routed between a generalist SDR team, who, post qualification, hands over to a specialised AE

3. Leads may be routed straight to AE

In practice, whether you route to specialist SDRs or round robin through the team depends on your business, industry, how complex or valuable the sale is, and how many products you have.

Many companies will have a combination of the above depending on the MQL entry type and how much pre-qualification occurred, the lead priority as set by some form of lead scoring logic, and if the lead books straight into a demo or comes in further up the funnel.

All of these come with pros and cons, but there are solutions to optimise all of them. Let’s break them down:

1. Routing leads to a specialised SDR:

For complex solutions, this provides value fast. Here are some examples where this commonly happens:

Splitting by product: You are a company with related but distinct products—you may therefore have specialist teams within the SDR function who specialise in each product/feature, and where possible you put your best foot forward when these leads come in. If you only have one product, your SDR team really should all be product specialists.

Splitting by size/priority: You may have split your leads by priority (for many SaaS products this will be team size as an indication of deal size) and choose to put your most experienced team members on converting these ‘whales’. 

Splitting by industry/location: Your product may require specialised industry or entity-based knowledge. Of course, location will be important for a global team in different time zones to ensure fast response times.

Benefits:

To consider the benefits, it may be easier to consider the alternative: Imagine you are a customer wanting to learn more about a product—you book a demo, you wait for someone at that company to contact you, you spend valuable time speaking with them, they don’t answer your questions and instead try to book you in with an AE at yet another time. You needed an answer for a meeting you had that afternoon. Instead in 2 days’ time you have a meeting scheduled with an AE where you will finally get some answers. It’s painful. 

Speaking to an SDR who can understand your pain points, provide solutions and answers, and can then book you in for a more in-depth demo to see how it works in practice is understandably a much better outcome for the customer. 

Things to consider:

How do you collect the information required in order to route to the right person?

To route to specialised team members, you need routing rules. This may mean you have to collect more information at TOFU—the weigh-up being how many questions can you ask (the common marketing conundrum of lead collection) versus how much can you get from enrichment tools.

The longer the form, the lower the completion rate—a phone number field alone can decrease form completion by 5%. SDR teams therefore have to work closely with marketing to ensure the bare minimum is asked for. With the ideal length thought to be between 3-5 fields. 

For instance if you’re B2B, asking for a business email (and disallowing personal emails) allows you to collect a business domain for which you can use automatic enrichment tools to tell you a ton of demographic information you did not need to ask in the form. 

Tech solutions for this:

One fantastic tool for this is Distribution Engine—a native Salesforce app, where you can easily build simple configuration and distribution tags to dynamically match to the best rep in your team for each lead.

Distribution tags are based on qualifying criteria, as collected from your lead gen forms, or enriched demographic data, allowing you to split leads by industry, location, time zone, product, size—whatever you need. Custom build your own or use pre-configured criteria such as territories. 

Companies set their own SLAs for ‘Speed-to-Lead’’ (time to respond)—which helps SDR reps to prioritise and encourages them to respond within the set time—and if they don’t you have the option to auto-reassign the lead.

Distributing by lead weighting also allows certain reps to receive more leads than others—this is extremely helpful for training, onboarding new team members, and where some SDRs have split focus and targets across inbound and outbound.

2. Routing leads to a generalised SDR team 

Often, this is happening for the purpose of further qualification and to shield AE’s from unqualified leads. While this can help increase speed to lead, companies can fall into a trap whereby this process is at the expense of adding value, simply adding friction to the sales process. It has therefore received a fair amount of criticism in recent years.

Where this is done badly—SDRs become glorified calendar schedulers while collecting ‘key’ qualifying information for the AE team. A lot of this comes from a lack of training for SDRs and investment in their growth—leading to higher churn, and therefore requiring more hiring and training—these costs start to stack up quickly.

Where this is done well—SDRs are trained with broad knowledge across all products and features, and while they may not have as in-depth knowledge as AEs, they can triage, provide reassurance, and answer all necessarily TOFU questions in a consultative manner for inbound companies.

A more general round-robin routing often occurs when, due to lead capture constraints, you can’t collect as much pre-qualification information as you’d always like—here, the SDR team are there to listen, assess, understand, and match a customer’s pain points to product solutions, before introducing a specialist AE member to help them further. 

Things to consider:

Are you adding any value here or just creating an extra layer of friction? A good way to assess this is to listen back to call recordings or review email exchanges—put yourself in the shoes of your customer and ask how do we add value? What more could we have done?

Just because an SDR is not a specialist in one feature, they still require on-going training and need an in-depth understanding of all products and features to help address a customer’s pain points. They are essentially like the General Practitioners of a health service, before referring to a specialist. No less important than any other function of your sales team. 

Tech Solutions for this:

Using Distribution Engine for generalist SDR teams is actually pretty simple—with speed being such a big factor here, using SLAs for ‘Time to Respond’ (where leads can be auto-reassigned if the SLA is not met) gives SDRs a clear focus and competitive edge. Their Team performance pages give great metrics on this, but however you do it—these metrics need to be visible to the team.

Distributing by lead weighting also allows certain reps to receive more leads than others—this is extremely helpful for training, onboarding new team members, and where some SDRs have split focus and targets across inbound and outbound.

For companies operating in multiple timezones, routing the Lead to a rep available at the right time is key. Using Territories, or various Team Availability and Shift options in Distribution Engine helps get Leads to an SDR who is available to respond then and there.

3. Routing leads straight to Account Executives

There are 2 key reasons why you may route leads straight to AEs:

1. High priority leads—in some sales funnels, an SQL may be the equivalent of a ‘Booked Demo’—and in many sales teams, the SDR’s role is to generate SQLs for AEs. It doesn’t even need to be an SQL, depending on capacity, some companies may decide to route more qualified MQLs to AEs directly, based on the MQL type of lead scoring (either based on ‘buyer readiness’, accumulative scoring, or an ‘Ideal Customer Profile’ score—probably a combination of all three)

With that in mind, if the lead books a Demo directly onsite and fills in a certain level of information in lead capture, they may well be considered an SQL and get routed straight to an AE — this would require specific distribution/routing rules. 

In this case, companies are most likely using different sets of distribution rules to distribute less qualified MQLs to SDRs, while also distributing direct SQLs (booked Demo’s) to AEs.

2. Smaller sales teams with no SDR team—If this is the case—you will want some form of distribution rules here, similar to routing to a specialist SDR. The downside of this is that while the customer’s first interaction is high value—the time to respond is likely slower.

Without having an SDR team, you are diverting attention from sales and conversion down the funnel. Which means something has to give. Trying to increase your Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) to Deal conversion while increasing TOFU MQL to SQL conversion will be tricky by using the same team. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done though. And there are solutions to help.

Tech solutions for this:

Companies using Salesforce can utilise the tool, Distribution Engine, to set Distribution Tags and Custom Segmentation to split leads by territory, industry, language location, time zone, product, size—and then automatically route qualified leads to the right team/rep and the best AE for that lead.

Companies set their own SLAs for ‘Time to Respond’, which means leads can be auto-reassigned if an AE doesn’t jump on the lead in the set amount of team. This helps ensure customers are being responded to in a timely manner and attention is solely on sales conversions further down the funnel. 

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So which routing method is right for your business?

Do you use a combination?

What tools do you use for this?

And most importantly, how are you ensuring value is delivered fast to your customers?

#LeadOptimization #LeadRouting #LeadDistribution #Sales #Conversion