#lead distribution

One of our clients came to us after losing $500,000 in sales due to bad Lead Management, and one Automation improved his revenue by 180%

This client ran an EdTech company selling Teaching Material and Study Guides in Minnesota. He was generating 500 Leads a day, about 10k leads per month costing him $40,000 just on Ad Spend!

He was selling 5 unique products in multiple countries and regions and had over 40 sales executives to manage all the incoming leads. To manage these salespersons, he hired a Sales Manager to handle all incoming leads and allocate them manually.

He used to hand over all incoming leads to the Sales Manager’s inbox, hoping the Manager could assign leads to all the salespersons. He anticipated that at most there would be a delay of about a day or so in Lead Allocation, and he was ready to bear the cost of missed leads as he had huge ticket sizes.

However, the manager often forgot to assign leads, or was on leave, or just fell sick! As the business was not set up for WFH setup, the Manager could not be allowed for such arrangements. This small managerial task was the choke-point of his entire business plan!

As a result, his conversion rates were abominable and he was thinking of shutting down the whole operation.

Fixing the Issue

When the client came to us with this problem, we told him about our round robin scheduling automation — specifically dedicated to lead distribution and allocation.

This round robin scheduling and lead allocation automation retrieves incoming leads from various sources, filters them based on specific criteria, identifies the appropriate salesperson for each lead, and verifies the availability of the required salesperson. Additionally, it ensures that leads are assigned in a way that distributes the workload evenly across the sales team.

No points for guessing but our client was elated to learn about and finally use this automation. He didn’t have to monitor the business or worry about lead allocation to his employees. Everything happened seamlessly, thanks to our Round Robin Scheduling Automation.

By implementing this single automation, the Client enhanced employee work efficiency by 2 hours per day, converted more clients, and started making an extra $260,000 per month!

Before jumping into the detailed questions like: What is this automation? How does it work? What is the cost? Is it well suited for your business use case?

First, let’s learn about Round Robin Scheduling.

What is ROUND ROBIN SCHEDULING :

It is a way to schedule, allocate, and distribute incoming data to multiple stakeholders in a sequence. In other words, Round Robin Scheduling is the act of distributing information ‘One piece at a time.

Round Robin Scheduling/Allocation distributes incoming information evenly across multiple channels, ensuring that each channel gets the information in a cyclical pattern.

Now that we are familiar with what Round Robin Scheduling is, let us learn how Round Robin Scheduling can help your business using this example:

Imagine you have a team of salespeople named A to Z (26 people).

Whenever you receive new leads, you need to schedule them first and distribute them one by one to each salesperson in order.

The 1st lead goes to Person A, the 2nd lead to Person B, the 3rd lead to Person C, and so on.

When you reach Person Z with the 26th lead, the 27th lead will go back to Person A, and the 28th lead to Person B, continuing this cycle.

If a salesperson is on leave or busy, their leads will be given to the next available salesperson.

This ensures that leads are distributed equally among all available employees.

Challenges with the existing system:

Specialization: All 40 salespeople are divided into teams based on their expertise in a particular product and geography/region

Absenteeism: The sales team generally has 10% absent rate due to various reasons — so leads allocated to absentees will go to waste

Over Allocation: Every sales guy has a daily limit of Max 10 leads, which was always overshot for some guys and some were left with 2 leads for the whole day. Overallocation causes either wastage or poor handling

Productivity: Needed sequential and equal allocation of the leads to keep everyone engaged with most productivity

Over/Under Marketing Spend: The marketing team needed visibility of lead consumption to avoid any over or under-output regarding ad spend on Meta and Google

CRM Limitations: The CRM system i.e. Zoho and SalesForce were not able to handle these many conditions and the workflow led to failure frequently

SUPER IMPORTANT ISSUE — The Company did not follow the 15 MINUTES LEADS RESPONSE TIME policy, where the lead should be attended to almost as soon as it allocated

Our Strategy for New Advanced Automated System:

Step-1 Create a database of Sales People with the following attributes:

Product Expertise (one or more)

Geography (one or more countries and regions)

Attendance Status (Present, Absent, or Half Day Working)

Daily Leads Limit (10 per salesperson)

List of Backup persons (if some salesperson are absent)

Step-2 Connected this database with their Attendance System using APIs — with an hourly refresh frequency

This even ensures someone is on a half day leave wouldn’t get allocation during his absence

Step-3 Identification and mapping of various Leads Forms and their parameters to the sales team database

This helped us map the right attributes that follow the allocation algorithm

Step-4 Implemented Advanced Round Robin Allocation Algorithm, where

Leads are allocated to each salesperson in a sequence

Everyone gets an equal number of leads allocated throughout the day

Allocation based on all the database conditions like Product, Geography, Daily limit, and Attendance

Handling of backup resources for lead allocation

Step-5 Optimisation and handling of UnAllocated Leads

Implemented Leads prediction model to optimize the Daily Ads spending to reduce over-production

Created a separate parking database of Unallocated leads (overproduced)

Setup allocation priority and tagging for these unallocated leads

Step-6 Real-time Notification to Sales Person

This company is using Microsoft Teams for internal communication

We integrated the MS Teams in the Automation workflow to notify them instantly via Direct Chat Message

Bonus steps

Step-7 Leads Allocation and Planning Dashboard for Marketing Team

This is so they can see the daily & monthly leads consumption trend for each product, geography, and salesperson

Real-time dashboard on Leads requirement — this helps them to plan the ad spend to avoid under or over-production of leads

Allocation tracking helps the marketing team to optimize the daily campaign spending to prevent over or under-output of leads and run campaigns 24*7 for optimal results

Step-8 Notification to Prospect (Real-time)

Now that we know which salesperson lead is allocated to — so we started sharing the salesperson’s Name and phone No. & Email with the lead

This boosted the Lead’s confidence even before they interacted with this sales guy.

Results of the New Lead Management System

The lead wastage came down significantly to just 2% (From 20–25% earlier)

Added $260k per month in the Mainstream Revenue

The conversion rate increased by 180% — all because of the 15-minute response time

$6000 Saving in Marketing Ad Spend

Boosted confidence across, Sales Teams, Marketing and Management Team

Enhanced Visibility & Dashboards to Key Decision Makers

The client went on to ad on more products to their repertoire of offerings and is currently one of North America’s leading EdTech Startups.

The Initiative

Understanding the lack of awareness of automation as a strategic business move, that can potentially skyrocket your Business Potential; we at 1automation.us have taken up the initiative to teach business owners to automate your business themselves.

This initiative will be supported by world-renowned automation agencies like Growwstacks.com and MTech Automation Solutions (one of the world’s largest business process automation firms)

The initiative is named Automation DIY — with the vision of Empowering Small Business Owners to scale their businesses.

This FREE initiative is live on YouTube.

So why wait? Visit Automation DIY and Start Learning Automation

Want Experts to Build Your Business Automation?

Reach out to us at [email protected]

One challenge in ABM lead distribution is the need for close collaboration between marketing and sales teams to ensure a unified approach. Since ABM involves personalized and account-specific strategies, distributing leads effectively requires a deep understanding of each account's needs, preferences, and pain points.

Solutions for optimizing lead distribution in ABM include implementing advanced segmentation and prioritization based on account characteristics, engagement history, and potential revenue impact. This ensures that the right accounts receive the appropriate attention and resources.

The "Round Robin lead distribution strategies" method is one of the more straightforward lead distribution strategies sales orgs have at their disposal. It's a process where your reps automatically receive an evenly distributed volume of leads in the same order — without much tiering or criteria-based screening.

When sales personnel forget about a lead, it can fall between the cracks. All leads are assigned during the lead distribution process; if they aren't, they are at least kept in one central web spot where reps may discover them (such as in a manual strategy).

Lead distribution is a strategy that goes beyond just assigning incoming leads to different sales reps.

It involves matching every lead to the sales rep who is in the best position to seal this deal. Using a efficient lead distribution strategy would help in boosting the sales of the business. It is an automated process of analyzing, qualifying and assigning leads to your team.