How to Automate the Entire Lead Lifecycle

Lead Management: How to Automate the Entire Lead Lifecycle

Table of Contents 03 06 07 10 Lead Management: The Key Technology to Lead List Uploads: Lead Enrichment: How to Master the Automating the Lead Kick off the Lead Complete Lead Data Lead Lifecycle Lifecycle Lifecycle Faster for Faster Follow-Up 14 21 25 27 Lead-to-Account Lead Routing: Takeaways About this Guide Matching: Segmentation Drive Higher Sales and Smarketing Productivity 2

Section 1: Lead Management Overview Lead Management: How to Master the Lead Lifecycle Need to convert more leads? Here’s the biggest hidden problem in lead management For marketers, lead management is a serious But did you know that one of the most important Up to 50% of all prospects will choose the [2] challenge, and the most important aspect is factors when qualifying and converting more vendor that responds first . Following up converting leads to opportunities. Research leads isn’t something you solve with more within an hour makes marketers 7x more likely suggests that the top priority of 69% of strategic programs or cleverly-designed to qualify leads - that is, to have “a meaningful [1] [3] marketers is converting leads . campaigns? It’s speed. Specifically, how quickly conversation with a key decision maker.” (In you follow-up with leads after your first touch. comparison, the average response time for all If you work in marketing, you probably don’t need [4]) leads is 42 hours . fancy reports to come to this conclusion. Even though it’s always important to feed the top of your funnel with net-new leads, pushing new leads through to opportunity and closed-won stages is probably also a priority for your team (if not the priority). So how do you push more leads down-funnel? You probably already have ideas on this one, too. Important tactics include nurture programs, segmenting and prioritizing the best leads for sales, creating buyer persona- specific content, and optimizing your sales development outreach. Marketers’ top priority is converting leads to customers. 3

OK. So how can you follow • Lead segmentation (scoring, account up with leads faster? matching) - Ideally, marketers use some kind of filtering process (or processes) to segment Follow-up is one of the most important parts of leads before follow-up. This can include a lead’s lifecycle, which starts after the initial steps such as scoring to identify the hottest capture in any campaign, and ends once the leads for sales, or lead-to-account matching lead is either converted to an opportunity or to match new leads to existing accounts to routed to some other appropriate follow-up. ensure sales teams don’t waste their time But along the way, marketers need to perform chasing leads from accounts already in play. crucial operations to get leads ready for follow- These processes increase sales productivity up. Each of these operations comes with its own and mean a higher win rate overall. important steps - and its own baggage that can • Lead routing - After your leads are properly slow down the process: segmented, operations professionals need to • Lead list uploads - After capturing leads from route the hottest leads to their sales teams. After matching leads to accounts, marketers Not all firms respond quickly enough to leads. any source, marketers first need to upload their leads to their system of record, such as can then assign the hottest leads to sales their marketing automation platform (MAP) team members that own those accounts, route to set the stage for follow-up and additional warm leads to sales development reps (SDR) campaigns. for outbound follow-up, or send cooler leads to nurture programs. • Lead enrichment - Once leads are loaded into the system, marketers need to ensure Every step in this lifecycle is important. each lead is fully-formed and contains Unfortunately, many marketing teams sufficient data for follow-up. (The hottest experience challenges at one stage or another. lead in the world isn’t actionable if it’s Breakages at any of these stages can lead to missing key information like company, title or painful delays that make you less likely to ever phone number.) Ideally, this also includes a speak with a decision maker, and make it even seamless transfer of lead data from your MAP harder for your sales team to turn those costly to your CRM. leads into closed-won deals. Only about half of marketers are actually taking action on integrating their data. 4

[7] What causes breakdowns about half are doing anything about it . Here’s time are you spending on manual processes in the lead lifecycle? the problem: your most important marketing daily, such as vetting lead spreadsheets, or applications probably aren’t seamlessly copy-pasting lead data from one source to Here are some of the most prominent challenges integrated to the customized use cases you another? Manual lead management processes that prevent marketers from following up with need for your organization. This means your cause many challenges, like introducing leads fast enough? Within 5 minutes?: most important lead data remains locked human error, not to mention eating up tons of up within each of your apps. Without robust time, which means your response time gets • Siloed data - A recent survey of 400 executives integrations, none of your individual apps can longer and makes you significantly less likely found that 87% of companies feel their data is provide important insights on the full picture to convert. [5] of how your leads engaged with you...and the siloed among different sources - locked up in various applications or databases with no way best way to follow up. So how can marketers tackle these challenges to take action on it. This is frequently the case without having to resort to time-consuming, for marketers, whose lead and customer data • Process breakdowns - Research suggests error-prone manual work? locked up in their MAP isn’t necessarily synced that 60% of sales professionals spend at least with data in their CRM, outbound solution, an hour on manual data entry daily. How much or elsewhere. Not having unified, synced data leads to constant lead management headaches, including duplicate lead lists that incorrectly inflate lead counts, routing leads at the wrong stage to the wrong destination, or accidentally continuing to contact leads that have opted out. • Poor integrations - One of the most common causes of data silos is a lack of robust integrations - connections among software apps at the API level - among marketers’ tech stacks. While some surveys find that 97% of marketers believe tech integrations are More than 60% of sales professionals spend at least an hour on important for growth[6], others show that only manual data entry daily. 5

Section 2: The Key Technology to Automating the Lead Lifecycle The Key Technology to Automating the Lead Lifecycle Solving lead management challenges with a General Automation Platform Thankfully, there’s a better way to solve lead • Sophisticated automation: GAPs automate • Scalability: The best GAPs scale with your management challenges and plug up leaks in processes among multiple cloud apps, such team’s data usage and needs, and are built your marketing funnel. (Without committing as setting a process to automatically update to help you collaborate with your team, not more hours to mind-numbing manual lead information and trigger appropriate bottleneck your progress by limiting access to spreadsheet work.) campaigns in CRM, outbound email individual connectors or individual users. automation, and other apps whenever leads Marketers from around the world are using engage with your campaigns or website. The Let’s explore how this new technology is already General Automation Platforms (GAP) to unsilo best GAPs have flexible logical operators such helping marketers successfully automate their data, deeply integrate their marketing as if/then conditionals, looping, and branching important lead management processes. apps, and automate key processes to cut out that help you build sophisticated, multi-step the manual errors and move faster. General workflows to do exactly what you need with automation platforms have these capabilities: your leads. • Full API integration: GAPs can connect • Ease of use: Another important feature to any cloud-based app (including MAP, CRM, look for is a completely visual, user-friendly outbound, webinar, database, project builder. One that lets anyone - not just management, and many others) at the API engineers - easily build workflows to process integration level. APIs are the fastest, most and upload lead lists, route enriched leads efficient way that cloud-based software to the right owners, and execute customized communicates with other software, and the follow-up - faster, without errors, and without best GAPs deeply connect applications to flow having to code. data even from highly customized instances. 6

Section 3: Lead List Uploads Lead List Uploads: Kick off the Lead Lifecycle Faster Why automate lead list uploads? Speed, efficiency, and reliable lead data As we now know, the speed of lead follow-up is one of the most important factors in driving more conversions. And in the lifecycle of leads that begins after capture and includes lead enrichment, lead-to-account matching, and lead routing, uploading lead lists is the very first step in the process. Until your leads are actually ingested into your marketing stack, you can’t enrich them, segment them, or route them to sales. If you are manually formatting, de-duplicating, collating, and uploading your lead lists, there’s a good chance the people on your marketing team responsible for the process aren’t very happy about it. (They may even be chanting “Down with the Data Loader!” once you’re out of earshot. Next time you’re on your way out of the office, You’ve probably seen this screen before. It’s probably not a welcome sight. We’re sorry. listen carefully.) 7

However, since marketing teams are always on How to automatically A General Automation Platform (GAP) is the hunt for new leads, most teams source their ingest lead lists into built specifically to integrate cloud-based leads from multiple channels, including email, applications like your MAP, CRM, outbound email social (paid and unpaid), search (again, paid your stack automation, and others. GAPs also automate the and unpaid), events, webinars, and many others. entire process to take place whenever you need, The process never ends, and it often means As we’ve covered, the biggest barriers between such as an instant response to any incoming painstaking manual work double-checking and you and error-free lead list uploads are: lead, or to process in batches on a regular vetting lead data spreadsheets. • Data issues (errors, formatting, etc.) schedule. The best ones also have advanced helpers to seamlessly sync, cleanse, and flow Some estimates suggest that companies spend • No robust integrations to sync data across data, and can even accept lead lists in a variety upwards of 40 hours per month processing leads apps, error-free of different ways, such as via FTP, webhooks, or for upload[8]. As we mentioned earlier, letting even submitting them via email (as we’ll cover in leads sit for as little as one hour makes you 7x • Manual spreadsheet wrangling our example below). less likely to ever speak with a decision maker, and puts your sales team that much farther from • Repetitive field mapping Let’s go over exactly how to automate lead list turning any of those costly leads into actual uploads with a GAP. closed-won deals. What if you could automatically complete every step of this process in minutes, not hours? 8

Part I: Automating lead • CSV Processor: This step uses an advanced Part III: Creating leads list uploads helper that processes CSV files. Since each and triggering follow-up lead in the CSV will have its own row with Here’s the first leg of an automated workflow in a information including first name, last name, campaigns GAP that automates the lead upload process: email address, and other details, the helper begins the process of pulling the lead data, The final part of our journey creates the • Email trigger: The process starts with an row-by-row, from the submitted spreadsheet. uploaded leads within our MarTech stack and email trigger whenever someone emails a new begins the follow-up process: lead list in CSV format to an email address Part II: Loading in leads specific to this workflow. The sender could row-by-row be a member of the sales team uploading the spreadsheet from their badge scans after The next part of our automated workflow loads an eventful day at a conference, a marketing in lead data stored in our CSV file row-by-row: operations manager pulling in leads from a successful campaign, a third party lead • Loop helper: The loop helper iteratively runs vendor, or even an external contractor through repeated processes until they’re submitting manually-enriched leads. complete. In this case, it uploads row after row of leads from the submitted CSV file. • Create lead: This workflow step creates a new • Text helper(s): The last two steps here are text lead record in the marketing platform (in this helpers that verify and properly format the case, Marketo). lead owner field. • Request campaign: Finally, the workflow triggers appropriate campaign follow-up within Marketo. This workflow runs within minutes and lets us take in lead lists from any source and rapidly upload them into our system to create new • Check CSV: This step uses an automation lead records for follow-up. Read how sales helper to verify that lead data is properly engagement leader Outreach automates lead formatted for upload. list uploads to save hundreds of hours per year. 9

Section 4: Lead Enrichment Lead Enrichment: Complete Lead Data for Faster Follow-Up The key to clean, reliable data that means more wins Lead enrichment is another important step valuable leads. (This is part of the reason bad to tackle this problem, matching leads based in the lead management process across the data costs companies an estimated $3 trillion on email domain, company name, and other [10] full marketing lifecycle for leads. If you’ve ever annually in the US. ) information. Research suggests that 90% reviewed a list of your company’s leads after of companies use at least two different a campaign, you’ve probably seen the telltale Your options: Use lead enrichment providers[11] since each vendor has gaps in lead details - first name, last name, enrichment solutions a unique dataset. company name, phone number, company size, and/or manual data • Manual lead enrichment: Another common address, or any other fields you need to qualify practice for marketers is to utilize a manual lead and route leads according to your business enrichment enrichment service, paying human researchers priorities/rules. around the globe to fill in the gaps that your Trying to manually enrich your own leads enrichment solutions couldn’t match.[12] You can’t just ignore those incomplete or yourself isn’t practical. It’s a time-consuming unenriched leads. They cost your business process that would require you to play detective, So, getting your incomplete leads enriched time and money to capture. And they could scouring company websites, Google, and tends to be a matter of using a lead enrichment still become high-value opportunities. But you individual LinkedIn and social media profiles. solution, manual lead enrichment, or both. can’t act on them if they’re missing important Seems simple enough. data. To make matters more challenging, That’s why it’s common for marketers to look for anywhere from 20-25% of your contact external help. There are, of course, two primary But lead enrichment poses another challenge [9] options: that isn’t as easy to deal with. database decays every year . Why? People who have engaged with your company may change • Lead enrichment solutions: Excellent tools jobs. Their company may move. And so on. Not such as Clearbit, Datafox, DiscoverOrg, and having fully-formed lead data can slow, if not D&B Optimizer use sophisticated software completely halt, your ability to follow up with 10

How to flow enriched other app that needs enriched leads, you’re such as chat messaging, to ensure you have an lead data to the rest of looking at a much less fun alternative. That’s engaging, personalized experience the next time right, manually importing spreadsheets, a your prospects visit you. your stack time-consuming and error-prone process. And as we mentioned in our earlier article about Example use case: There’s still the matter of getting those enriched lead management, taking longer to follow up Enriching Intercom users in leads back out to the rest of your marketing and with leads drastically reduces your chances to revenue apps. convert them. bulk with Clearbit You need to flow those enriched leads into How to automate the The messaging platform Intercom is handy for your marketing automation platform (MAP) for flow of enriched data into interacting immediately with both customers follow-up campaigns into your CRM for sales and prospects. But all customer messaging record-keeping, to your messaging platform to your stack is most effective when you’re working from ensure customer conversations are based on refreshed, enriched data that’s up to date. With up-to-date data, and to many other destinations To review, the challenges that stand between you a General Automation Platform, it’s possible to within your tech stack. and getting enriched leads into the rest of your pull in a list of all people you’ve engaged with stack are: in Intercom, enrich their lead data as needed, Traditionally, there have only been two ways to then update leads in Intercom to ensure your get them there: • Potential lack of native integrations from your lead data is in sync even within your messaging system of record (CRM, MAP) platform. Here’s how. • Native integrations - Most enrichment tools have native integrations - pre-built, out-of- • Potential lack of native integrations among all the-box connections - to popular software your additional apps apps. While these can be useful, they often lack the custom functionality you need for • Lack of support for your custom business tasks specific to your business, like mapping needs, such as custom field mapping data to custom fields. Also, there probably GAPs are built to solve these problems and won’t be native integrations for all the apps in flow data, like enriched leads, freely among your stack. Which means you’re left with... your CRM, MAP, and other applications. They • Manual work - If you don’t have a customized can even, as in the example below, flow this integration from your enrichment tool to every lead data out to different marketing channels, 11

Part I: Inventory of Part II: Confirming messaging platform users enrichment status Here’s the first part of an automated workflow The second part of this automated workflow in a GAP that automates the syncing of pulls up the leads from Intercom and ascertains enriched leads to a messaging platform, in this whether they’ve already been enriched. case, Intercom: • Intercom - list users: This operation pulls up • Manual Trigger: The process starts with an on- the full list of leads currently in Intercom. demand trigger to kick off the initial steps to • Loop helper: This loop helper iteratively checks pull all existing Intercom leads for enrichment. each user that this automated workflow has (Note: With a General Automation Platform, found in Intercom for updated, enriched info. this could just as easily be a scheduled trigger that runs this update on a monthly, weekly, • Object helper: This step ascertains whether daily, or hourly basis.) the lead contains email and other enrichment information. • Intercom - count users: The next operation reaches into the integrated Intercom instance Boolean if/then helper: This step then starts a and pulls up a list of the total number of all follow-up loop for Intercom leads that are, in fact, leads in Intercom. missing lead data. If the loop ascertains that a lead is missing data, it passes that lead to the next step to be enriched. (If the lead is already enriched, the process more or less ends here.) 12

Part III: Enrich leads with • Intercom - update user: The final step in this Clearbit and update within process then flows any updated leads directly into Intercom to update them within the Intercom Intercom instance. The final leg of our automated workflow enriches You can create and run workflows like this any leads that need it, then updates the in minutes, rapidly enriching and syncing enriched leads in Intercom. all Intercom leads on the spot. Read how DigitalOcean enriches data with geolocation • Clearbit - Get enrichment info: For any leads information from its customer data platform. found to be “true” (not enriched), the workflow pulls up all relevant company info (including company, location, company website URL, and any missing contact information) to append as needed. • Get attributes: This helper compares the missing attributes between the previous lead info in Intercom and the enriched data available in Clearbit and fills in the gaps. 13

Section 5: Lead-to-account matching Lead-to-Account Matching: Segmentation and Smarketing Productive sales efforts vs. dead ends Lead-to-account matching is a subtle but Person At Your Company].” There are several with the wrong person, causing high-value important way to tighten sales and marketing issues that might cause this problem: “new” opportunities to stall. alignment and increase sales productivity, as leads might appear that actually roll up to an well as a key component of account-based active opportunity that belongs to a different These problems are costly at the enterprise marketing (ABM). Lead-to-account matching sales team member; partner-targeted leads level, where deals frequently involve a [13] is easy to define: An automated process that that should belong to your company’s partner committee of 6-7 decision-makers , which matches (and filters out) any incoming leads to channel erroneously end up in front of sales; means an increasingly higher likelihood of existing accounts. It prevents your sales team leads from target account lists from ABM or losing deals with longer delays. Delays can from actively prospecting leads that are already outbound campaigns also erroneously end up also significantly change the impact of your part of accounts that are either already part of in the wrong place; and in some cases, leads marketing budget on sales pipeline and active opportunities or are already customers. might be duplicates. marketing return on investment (ROI), as well Sadly, this functionality is typically limited as on sales productivity. in most cases, particularly within standard Prospecting the wrong accounts takes up marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and hours your sales team could’ve spent pursuing other broad marketing solutions that offer no net-new opportunities (or legitimate account customization or flexibility. expansion opps). Reports suggest that although the top sales priority for 75% of companies is Sales professionals pitching to existing still, predictably, closing more deals, 48% of accounts is obviously an embarrassing mistake companies are concerned with improving the that leads to confused prospects or customers efficiency of the sales funnel. This includes who might reply, “yes, we already know your making sure the leads your sales team receives company and are talking to [Some Other aren’t dead ends, or that they don’t end up 14

Why sales productivity matters: Minimize data issues, maximize prospecting You probably don’t need an explanation on why your sales team’s time is valuable. Your sales team would ideally prefer to focus 100% of their time on prospecting and closing deals. Data errors, like accidentally prospecting leads that are already in pipeline, waste the limited time of sales reps, who are already struggling with other time-consuming processes that eat up The #1 sales concern: More wins, of course. #2? Funnel efficiency. their prospecting hours. In fact, 35% of surveyed sales reps spend about an hour a day on data entry, rather than actually selling. (Another 27% spend upwards of one to two hours or more.) So how can you solve this problem? 35% of reps spend about an hour a day on data entry. Not selling. Image courtesy Hubspot. 15

The past: Use a lead-to- verify every new lead. And they know that 50% account matching tool, of sales go to the vendor that responds first. or try your luck at manual How to build custom CRM matching integrations to automate Unfortunately, up until very recently, there lead-to-account matching weren’t many options to tackle this problem. Again, the biggest problems that arise in • Use a lead-to-account-matching tool: While managing lead-to-account matching are: Example use case: Lead- there are some tools out there that can • Point solutions might handle matching well, handle the task of lead-to-account matching, but can’t do much else to-account matching they sadly can’t handle all the other data- within Salesforce related tasks that not only cost sales teams • Lack of native integrations to other apps leads thousands of hours every year, but also cause to delays before and after matching • Most companies use a CRM such as expensive delays in getting leads to sales in Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar, or the first place, such as lead enrichment and • Manually digging through accounts slows Oracle CX as a system-of-record to store lead lead routing. In other words, an out-of-the-box sales follow-up and jeopardizes deals and account info and record sales stages. lead-to-account matching tool might solve one • Hours of wasted time your sales team could’ve Unfortunately, many marketing and sales piece of the puzzle, but it won’t solve the larger spent winning deals teams find themselves spending far too much problem of sales reps wasting hours wrangling time popping in and out of their CRM instance data. They also lack native integrations to A GAP solves these problems by offering robust to manually update lead and account info as continue the lead lifecycle process once integrations with any cloud-based app, and part of non-revenue processes, like verifying matching is complete. the ability to automate processes like lead-to- whether a seemingly “new” lead is already • Try to handle the problem manually: You account matching, enrichment, uploads, and part of an existing account. Using a General could certainly ask your sales reps to be more others. Let’s walk through an example of using a Automation Platform, you can automate lead- conscientious about confirming new leads GAP to automate lead-to-account matching in to-account matching and never waste your against existing accounts. But you know their Salesforce, complete with options for fuzzy name sales teams’ time (or get confused customer job isn’t to dig through account structures to matching and filtering out probable spam emails. emails) again. 16

Part I: Identify new leads • Text helper - Was This a Test Lead?: This step whether it includes any common spam email on demand uses a quick, 100% code-free text query to strings (like “[email protected]”) or personal check whether this lead was a test run by the email domains, which will determine if the The first leg of an automated workflow in a marketing operations team. workflow can use the email domain to check GAP that automates lead-to-account matching for a match or not. • Boolean If/Then: If the lead was a test, the starts with an on-demand trigger that begins workflow stops here. However, if this was not a • Boolean If/Then - Worth Searching?: This step the process as soon as a new lead comes in: test lead, the workflow proceeds to the next leg. compares email domain and company name against the above spam names and generic Part II: Compile basic emails lists, as well as making sure those lead info and confirm values are not null, to determine whether follow-up value these values should be used to search for a matching account. The second section of this automated workflow confirms the lead contains a legitimate email and begins a test to see whether it’s worth trying to match it against our CRM’s existing account list. • Data Helper - Set Lead ID: This step uses a data helper to temporarily store and compile • New Lead Captured: The process starts with lead info to be queried by the rest of the a trigger that begins whenever a new lead is workflow in the following steps. captured in the MAP (e.g. Marketo, Eloqua, or • Text Helpers - Company Name / Email Domain HubSpot). / Domain -> Company: These text helpers split • Salesforce - Get New Lead Info: Next, the and parse the contact info of the lead to check workflow pulls up the lead’s information in the these values against existing values in the CRM. CRM, in this case, Salesforce. • List Helpers - Spam Names / Generic Emails: These list-based helpers then quickly screen • the lead’s contact information to determine 17

Part III: Convert leads • Salesforce - Company Name Fuzzy Match: Part IV: Determine the best that belong to existing This step performs a fuzzy match of the lead’s follow-up for leads “worth company name against existing account accounts based on names. pursuing” company name matching • Boolean If/Then - Account Found?: This true/ The “false” leg of the previous Boolean takes The “false” leg of the previous Boolean loop false Boolean step checks to see if a match care of leads that had an email domain we didn’t uses the company name only (not the email was found. If it was, the next step will convert want to use to match to accounts, so we simply domain which it found to be “not worth the lead. Otherwise, it will do nothing. used the Company Name field to try to find a searching”) to check if the lead matches to match. The “true” leg runs a search in CRM to see • Salesforce - Convert Lead: Finally, if this lead’s whether the contact exists in Salesforce, using existing accounts and if so, to convert them to a company name fuzzy-matched to an existing Contact on that Account. the email domain. account, this step converts the lead to a Contact on that account. NOTE: Again, while the workflow in this example ends at this step, the best GAPs can set multiple steps or follow-up workflows to sequentially cascade into each other. A common best practice for workflows of this type is to route enriched leads into a lead-to-account matching workflow like this, then trigger a subsequent workflow for lead assignment and routing to sales. GAP power users might also build in account stage lookup steps that automatically • Salesforce - Find Contacts: The workflow update the lead’s status if that particular queries Salesforce to see determine whether account has not progressed to further segment the lead’s email domain exists on other leads and ensure they only route leads from contacts within the CRM. active accounts to sales. 18

• Boolean If/Then - Contact Found?: The next • List Helper - Find Exact: This operation step figures out what to do with the lead performs an exact match query against the whether a matching email domain was found, lead’s email address. or not. • Boolean If/Then - Exact Match?: If the Part V: Determine whether condition is determined to be “true” - that is, the lead already exists and the exact same email address already exists within CRM as a Contact, then no action is close out the process taken. The workflow has determined that the lead is already part of an account and doesn’t Since the workflow has now determined the need to be converted. lead’s email domain does match other contacts in Salesforce, it now needs to determine whether • Salesforce - Convert Lead: If the Boolean loop the exact same email address exists already. determines that this lead does not, in fact, • Salesforce - Company Name Fuzzy Match: already exist in CRM, it then converts the lead As in a previous step, the workflow takes an to the matched account. apparently “new” lead and performs a fuzzy Part V: If the lead is “new,” name match to confirm whether the lead’s take appropriate action company exists in CRM. and close out the process • Boolean If/Then - Fuzzy Found?: The workflow then determines which actions to take if there The workflow has determined whether the lead is, in fact, a fuzzy match. is “worth” pursuing based on having a “good” • If “True” - Salesforce - Convert Lead: If the email domain, but it previously needed to workflow determines there is, in fact, a figure out whether, via Boolean Loop, it exists in company match for this new lead, it then calls Salesforce. Above, we covered what the workflow Salesforce to convert the lead and ends the does if it does, in fact, find the contact in CRM. In process here. this leg of the workflow, we cover what happens if the lead’s email domain is not already recorded in CRM: 19

NOTE: Again, this lead-to-account-matching Part VI: (The End!) Convert • Salesforce - Convert Lead: If, as the result of workflow is just for example. It would be if an exact match is found, the previous Boolean loop, the workflow finds possible to have the next steps after this route an exact match for the lead’s company name, it the lead to sales. and close out the process then converts the lead within CRM and closes out the process. If it fails to find an exact • If “False” - Salesforce - Exact Match? Since the workflow has already determined match (after having previously failed to also [Domain]: Having failed to make a fuzzy that the lead is “worth” pursuing, that it does find a fuzzy match), it does nothing, having company match for this new lead, it then not already exist within Salesforce, and that its effectively determined that it’s not possible to performs an exact match query in Salesforce. company name does not have a fuzzy match in convert at this time. Salesforce, the workflow closes out the process • Boolean If/Then - Exact Domain Match based on whether the lead’s company name has NOTE: Again, while this example lead-to- Found?: The workflow then runs another if/ an exact match in Salesforce. account matching workflow ends here, with a then step to determine which action should be GAP, it could easily contain additional steps, taken after running an exact match query for or cascade into a different workflow, that the lead’s company in Salesforce. then continues the follow-up process, such as routing leads to sales via a round-robin process or divvied up by other business rules like territory assignments. Many rapidly-growing companies and enterprises build automated workflows like this to instantly fuzzy-match and exact-match leads to accounts. Advertising leader AdRoll uses a GAP to integrate leads from multiple sources, enrich them, and prepare them for sales, driving 13% more sales appointments. 20

Section 6: Lead routing Lead routing: Getting the right leads to the right people in sales Lead routing is one of the last parts of the lead How to route leads: (And once you’ve routed your leads, you need management lifecycle. It’s also very important, Built-in features vs. to kick off the follow-up process, which usually especially as your company, sales team, and runs through entirely different apps. Unless lead count scale. Lead routing is the process point solutions your follow-up apps for outbound are directly of sending the right leads, once you’re done connected to your CRM and can accept a direct with lead uploads, lead enrichment, and have Not having proper lead routing means leads get flow of routed lead data, you’ve got more delays properly organized and segmented them (such assigned in error, or are not re-assigned after and more extra work ahead of you.) as by lead-to-account matching), to the right having lost a previous owner - in both cases, this people on your sales team for follow-up. means missed opportunities for your business. For rapidly-growing firms and enterprises that That means headaches for your operations have thousands (if not millions) of leads to Lead routing tends to be an automated process team as they manually re-assign leads based on manage, manual routing just isn’t feasible. In based on lead assignment rules set by your territory, account size, product line, or your sales the past, this often left marketing and sales operations team. Most commonly, operations organization’s structure. As your company scales operations teams with limited options: teams using CRMs like Salesforce will use and lead volume grows, these delays cost your Salesforce lead assignment rules they set company real revenue by delaying follow-up and • CRM built-in lead assignment features: Your based on a variety of factors, such as account providing a poor sales experience to prospects CRM often acts as a system of record for sales owner, territory designations, or in some cases, who got a duplicate call or email...or none at all. account information, as well as a strategic by random draw. In addition, lead assignment handled manually home base for planning, forecasting budgets, within CRM can eventually become extremely and assigning sales territories. However, built- complex as you scale to larger sales teams in lead routing features tend to be limited, with more members, more territories, and more with simple assignment rules that offer little custom business rules. to no customization. CRMs also tend to have 21

limited integrations - the ability to directly How to automate lead Example use case: Routing connect to and pass data between additional routing, without the leads to SDR team plus software apps, such as marketing platforms or outbound email sequencing. operational headaches auto-sequencing • Lead routing point solutions: There are some To summarize, the challenges you may be This somewhat simplified example goes very good lead routing point solutions on facing with lead routing right now include: through a routing process kicked off by pulling the market that focus on this important use in lead info from a webhook - a notification of a case, but sadly, as with CRMs, they frequently • Limited routing options in your CRM or source web-based event, in this case, a website visit. offer limited (or no) integrations for the other of truth In this process, the GAP takes the information applications in your stack. Again, this means • Limited integrations between your CRM and from a website visit and then verifies it against updating routed leads will require manual other revenue apps lead data within the marketing automation work. In addition, as mentioned above, unless platform (MAP), such as Marketo, Eloqua, or your point solutions have direct integrations to • Limited integrations between a lead routing HubSpot. The GAP then randomly assigns the other apps like your outbound email solution, point solution and other apps lead among sales development representatives you’re still stuck with delays. (SDR), and after the assignment, automatically • Operational headaches as you manually re- loads that lead into an outbound email assign improperly-routed leads sequencing tool, such as Outreach or Salesloft, You can solve these problems with the to kick off the first sales touch. sophisticated logical operators and flexible API NOTE: The example shown here is purposely integrations of a GAP to set custom logic for streamlined for educational purposes. A more- your sales team across product lines, account sophisticated workflow could easily incorporate size, territory, or other modifiers, and flow additional custom logic, such as sequencing routed leads among any other applications, follow-up actions by qualification criteria, or by not just your CRM, but also to outbound email which offers leads engaged with. This type of sequencing to kick off the sales cycle. workflow could also segment leads by account size or other criteria to flow certain leads to automated sequences while routing other leads directly to SDRs for manual follow-up. 22

Part I: Identify new leads • FALSE - Set Owner Data: If the Boolean and begin lead assignment operator determines a “false” outcome - that the lead owner field is not set properly - it process corrects the owner field. The first steps in our journey involve identifying • TRUE - Random Number: If the Boolean an inbound lead, verifying against MAP records, operator determines a “true” outcome - that and beginning the assignment process. the lead owner field is properly set for being sales-ready - it generates a random number to decide which member of the SDR team gets the lead assignment. • Workflow Branch: This branching helper then • Data Helper - Load Owner Data: Next, the opens up branching logic to account for the workflow, having determined the owner of this multiple members of the SDR team. lead, loads the owner’s identity to transfer into outbound sequencing, in this case, provided by Part II: Round Robin Outreach. leads to SDRs and begin • Outreach - Find Prospect: Next, the workflow outbound process loads the lead owner into Outreach and locates that lead’s data within the Outreach platform. • Webhook: The process starts with a webhook- The next leg of this automated workflow based trigger that begins whenever a new lead assigns the lead to the appropriate SDR, then Part III: Confirm lead exists is captured and validates it against records automatically kicks off the outbound email in sequencing and begin within the marketing platform. sequencing process. outbound outreach • Data Helper - Assign to: These steps in the • Boolean If/Then: The workflow then workflow branch accept the data from the The final part of this automated GAP workflow determines whether the owner field for the Random Number helper in our previous steps. briefly determines whether this lead’s lead is properly filled out at sales-ready Depending on the random number generated, information exists in Outreach, then places the status. the lead either gets assigned to SDR Jack or lead into a sequence to begin outbound. SDR Jill. 23

• Outreach - Add to Sequence: Having created a new record for this lead in Outreach, it then adds that lead to the appropriate outbound sequence and starts reaching out to this lead. Revenue teams already use GAPs to automate important processes like lead routing and even use sophisticated business logic to respond faster and with personalized messaging to drive higher response rates. Read about how some companies use GAPs to personalize emails with prospects’ Google search terms here. • Boolean If/Then - Prospect Found?: This Boolean step checks to see if the lead already has an existing record in the outbound sequencing tool, Outreach. • TRUE: Outreach - Add to Sequence: If the lead already has a record in Outreach, it adds that lead to the appropriate outbound sequence and automatically starts reaching out to this lead. • FALSE: Outreach - Create New Prospect: If the Boolean determined that this lead doesn’t already exist in Outreach, the workflow creates a new record for this lead within Outreach. 24

Takeaways Takeaways You should now have a more-complete understanding of the challenges across the full lead lifecycle: • Lead uploads • Lead enrichment • Lead-to-account matching • Lead routing You’ve also got blueprints into how you can automate each of these important processes to get rid of messy manual work and respond faster to leads, increasing your sales team’s ability to follow up more quickly and win more deals. To learn more about how you can start automating your lead management processes, please request a General Automation Platform demo. 25

Sources Cited 1. HubSpot, “State of Inbound 2018,” http://www. 6. eConsultancy, “Why data integration is vital for 10. Harvard Business Review, “Bad Data Costs stateofinbound.com/ marketers trying to achieve a single customer the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year,” https://hbr. view,” https://econsultancy.com/why-data- org/2016/09/bad-data-costs-the-u-s-3- 2. Fronetics, “50% of sales go to the vendor that integration-is-vital-for-marketers-trying-to- trillion-per-year responds first,” https://www.fronetics.com/50- achieve-a-single-customer-view/ of-sales-go-to-the-vendor-that-responds- 11. TOPO Blog, “Sales Development Technology: first/ 7. eMarketer, “Most Marketers Are Integrating The Stack Emerges,” https://blog.topohq. Data Across Their Tech Stacks,” https://www. com/sales-development-technology-the- 3. Harvard Business Review, “The Short Life of emarketer.com/content/most-marketers-are- stack-emerges/ Online Sales Leads,” https://hbr.org/2011/03/ integrating-data-across-their-tech-stacks the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads 12. Tray.io Blog, “How to Speed Up Manual Lead 8. Business2Community, “13 Demand Enrichment with Automation,” https://tray. 4. Drift, “The Drift Lead Response Report,” Generation Statistics That Will Blow Your io/blog/automate-manual-lead-enrichment https://www.drift.com/blog/lead-response- Mind,” https://www.business2community.com/ report-2018/ marketing/13-demand-generation-statistics- 13. Harvard Business Review, “The New Sales will-blow-mind-01968522 Imperative,” https://hbr.org/2017/03/the- 5. Forbes, “New Forbes Insights Report Shows new-sales-imperative Organizations Feel Customer Data is Siloed 9. HubSpot, “Database Decay Simulation,” and Exclusionary,” https://www.forbes.com/ https://www.hubspot.com/database-decay sites/forbespr/2018/06/20/new-forbes- insights-report-shows-organizations-feel- customer-data-is-siloed-and-exclusionary/ 26

About this Guide Written by Andrew Park Director of Content Tray.io Additional contributors: Loren Robeck Sarah Nelson Marketing Operations Manager Senior Director of Demand Tray.io Generation Tray.io 27

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