Lead routing in Salesforce is the process of automatically assigning leads to the appropriate sales representatives or teams based on predefined criteria. Lead routing helps organizations ensure that leads are distributed fairly and efficiently, allowing sales teams to prioritize their efforts and respond quickly to new inquiries.
For example, when sales reps serve a specific geographic territory or product category, you want to make sure that the right leads are routed to them.
Lead routing is important for several reasons:
You can set up automatic lead routing through Salesforce. However, the automation can’t effectively route leads if you don’t have accurate, reliable data.
In this article, we’ll examine some of the common tools that Salesforce companies use in their lead routing processes, then look at some of the data-related issues that can bog down Salesforce lead routing.
Salesforce offers numerous tools that can help companies automatically route leads based on the criteria that they set. Many companies use a mix of these tools to deliver their full lead routing system, but with more features comes more complexity.
Lead assignment rules: Lead assignment rules are the primary method for automating lead routing in Salesforce. These rules allow you to define criteria and conditions for assigning leads to specific users or queues. For example, you could route leads based on geographic location, lead source, industry, or any custom criteria you choose. When a lead is created or edited, Salesforce checks the assignment rules to determine which user or queue should be assigned the lead.
Workflow rules and actions: Workflow rules can be used to automate additional actions when certain criteria are met during lead routing. For example, you can create a workflow rule that sends an email notification to the assigned sales rep when a new lead is assigned to them. Workflow actions can include tasks, email alerts, field updates, or outbound messages.
Process Builder: Salesforce's Process Builder is a powerful automation tool that allows you to create visual, rule-based processes for lead routing. With Process Builder, you can define a series of actions to be executed when specific criteria are met. This provides more flexibility and control over the lead routing process compared to standard assignment rules.
Flow Builder: Flow Builder is the modern automation feature within Salesforce, allowing you to build lead routing rules and systems using a modern interface and advanced rules.
Apex and custom code: For more advanced lead routing requirements, you can develop custom Apex code or use external applications to create more sophisticated lead routing logic. This approach offers still greater flexibility and customization, but requires development expertise and ongoing maintenance.
Third-party lead routing apps: There are various third-party apps available on the Salesforce AppExchange that can help with lead routing. These apps offer advanced features, integrations, and automation capabilities beyond what's available with native Salesforce tools.
You can set up effective Salesforce lead routing using any of these tools, but you won’t reap its full benefits if your data isn’t clean.
There are some common data-related issues that can negatively impact lead routing in Salesforce:
Let’s look at these issues in detail.
Missing or inconsistent information in Salesforce lead records can make it difficult to apply routing rules effectively. It's essential to enforce data entry standards and validate lead data to ensure accuracy.
For example, if you routed leads based on geographic location to specific sales teams, inconsistent U.S. state names (NY vs. N.Y. vs New York) could cause the leads to be misrouted to the wrong rep. That would weaken the sales process and deliver a worse experience for customers, who may find themselves bouncing between reps.
Routing leads to the wrong people also leads to workload distribution issues. When you have to manually reassign leads outside of your automated lead assignment systems, rep workloads are likely to become unbalanced.
Finally, inaccurate lead routing data can distort reports and analytics, making it difficult for management to make informed decisions about sales strategies, resource allocation, and process improvements.
Duplicate Salesforce leads can cause confusion and inefficiencies in lead routing.
First, reps will step on each other’s toes when they are assigned to duplicate lead records. This leads to wasted time and resources, confusion among your team, and mixed messages for the customer, who may be contacted by multiple sales reps.
Duplicate records also lead to slower lead response times. Sales reps may need to spend extra time identifying and merging duplicate records or coordinating efforts with other team members. Slow response times can harm the chances of engaging and converting leads effectively.
Duplicates distort reports and metrics as well. This makes it difficult to accurately assess sales performance and lead conversion rates, leading to misguided decision-making from the top down.
Stale or outdated information can cause leads to be routed incorrectly.
Leads containing outdated information—such as incorrect contact details, old job titles, or previous company affiliations—will likely be routed to the wrong sales reps or teams. This will cause confusing interactions and a poor experience for leads.
Outdated data also slows sales reps, causing them to spend time chasing down leads that are no longer viable. If a sales rep contacts a lead based on outdated data, they may find that the lead is no longer interested in the product or service, has already made a purchase, or is no longer with the company.
As with other Salesforce lead routing issues, outdated data also impacts a company’s ability to effectively report on its sales efforts and make data-backed decisions.
Because Salesforce has so many automation features that can be used in lead routing systems, it’s easy to design something overly complex across the different tools. This makes it hard to identify and resolve underlying problems in lead journeys.
You need to strike a balance between creating comprehensive routing rules and maintaining simplicity for ease of management. Misconfigured or conflicting rules can result in leads being assigned to the wrong reps or not being assigned at all, causing missed opportunities and lower conversion rates.
Complex routing rules can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to maintain as well. This can divert valuable resources away from other important tasks.
Inaccurate lead-to-account matching is another consistent problem in Salesforce lead routing programs.
Ensuring that leads are properly assigned to their company is absolutely necessary for account-based marketing. Sales reps need a full picture of every account that they are assigned to. Unassociated leads floating around in your CRM are likely to be overlooked when engaging with their account.
When leads are not accurately matched to their corresponding accounts, they may be assigned to the wrong sales rep or team. Those reps may not have the appropriate knowledge or expertise to handle the specific account, leading to a less effective sales process and lower conversion rates.
Sales reps may spend time and effort engaging with leads that have already been associated with a different account or are being managed by another team member. This can lead to duplication of effort, reduced productivity, and confusion among team members.
And when leads are not accurately matched to accounts, sales metrics and reports can become distorted, making it difficult for management to accurately assess account performance and develop data-driven strategies.
To optimize lead routing, it's often necessary to import data from external sources, such as marketing automation platforms or data enrichment services. This is because companies don’t always collect every single data point that they need to effectively route and assign leads.
But integrations and data syncs with third-party sources and apps come with their own issues. When those integrations break or are unable to deliver the data for one reason or another, sales teams are forced to work with incomplete lead data. This can make it difficult to apply routing rules accurately, resulting in misrouted leads or delays in lead assignment.
If that data is not brought over into Salesforce, that can result in distorted sales reports, making it difficult to assess performance and issues in your sales processes.
And if you don’t have an integration or data sync available, manual data entry or import processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, leading to inaccuracies in lead data that can negatively impact lead routing. Automated data integration can help to reduce errors and ensure that lead data is up to date and accurate, but then you have to manage those integrations.
To mitigate these issues, it's crucial to maintain clean, accurate, and up-to-date data in Salesforce and regularly review and optimize lead routing rules and processes.
Insycle is the perfect tool for solving many of the issues associated with Salesforce lead routing.
Insycle's RevOps Acceleration Assign app, you can easily segment leads in advanced ways, route them to the appropriate reps while taking into account their availability, and ensure that you balance workloads in the process.
At its heart, most lead routing in Salesforce is reliant on consistent, predictable data in your lead, contact, and account records. Automation tools in Salesforce evaluate the content of specific fields, and push leads toward rep and team assignments based on that data. When that data is inconsistent or of low quality, the chances of the lead being errantly assigned—or being abandoned and left unassigned by your lead routing system—are much higher.
Using Insycle, segment and filter leads in advanced ways for routing, using any field in your Salesforce CRM database.
For example, you could route leads based on job title:
Or you could route leads based on locations:
Or get even more advanced, routing leads based on multiple fields. With Insycle's Asisgn app, your routing can be as deep and detailed as necessary to improve experiences for prospects and leads.
Effective lead routing programs take rep workloads and availability into account when assigning Salesforce leads. Then, you can ensure that leads are contacted as quickly as possible.
With Insycle, businesses can automate lead assignment and load balancing across all teams in Salesforce CRM. Insycle can route leads in bulk or automatically on a set schedule, directly to the ideal sales rep.
For lead routing, you have three assignment rule options:
The Balanced lead balancing rule can be applied to a specific time period:
Insycle can balance assignments across selected sales reps for the current month, quarter, or year.
This gives you unparalleled control over rep workload assignments, ensuring no single rep is overloaded with assigned leads. Then, you can provide an exceptional sales experience to each account.
Additionally, reps that leave the organization can be removed from your assignment templates with just a few button clicks, ensuring less cleanup when there is turnover.
But Insycle also offers simple yet powerful rep availability settings to ensure that reps are not assigned leads when they are not available, helping you meet time-to-talk KPIs.
Insycle allows you to set availability settings for each individual sales rep. This way, fresh leads are never assigned to a rep who are not able to help them quickly, providing a better experience.
Yyou can set the rep's time zone and their available working hours, then Salesforce leads will only be routed and assigned to this rep when available.
Additionally, you can set dates that specific reps will be unavailable—such as a sick day, vacation, or training day.
With Insycle’s deep lead routing and load balancing features, you get unparalleled control over your deal flow processes. But Insycle takes it a step further, allowing for near-instantaneous lead routing to happen after a lead hits HubSpot CRM.
Additionally, Insycle's Data Management modules can help you to standardize, associate, and clean up data to improve lead routing accuracy.
Insycle makes standardizing field data simple so that leads are always properly routed and reporting is easy and straightforward.
In Insycle, you can view the variations contained within each field. Then, you can select the different variation buckets, and standardize them all to a consistent standard.
This can be done for any free text or any picklist field in Salesforce.
Insycle also makes it easy to identify and merge duplicates in advanced ways, with unparalleled control over how the data in your chosen fields is used for matching.
In the example below, we are identifying duplicates using five different fields. With each field, you can select Exact Match or Similar Match or choose to ignore certain aspects of the data such as symbols, numbers, whitespace, or common terms like “Inc.,” “LLC,” or “co.”
Then, you can control which data is retained in the master record after merging on a field-by-field basis. For example, you could choose to keep the email from the record that most recently opened a marketing email, and keep the company from the most recently updated record.
Advanced Salesforce lead routing solutions require advanced data. But to use those fields, you need to ensure that they are consistent and use a standardized format.
Insycle can help you to standardize any text field in your Salesforce CRM. For example, you can format phone numbers to follow a range of popular phone number formatting conventions.
Insycle can also help you to clean any field. For instance, you could ensure that your first name field is appropriately capitalized, ensure your U.S. state field uses standardized abbreviations, or identify leads that are using role-based emails like “sales@company.com” and may be of low value for your sales efforts.
Insycle allows you to match leads to accounts in Salesforce using any field in your database as a matching field.
Like with deduplication, you have advanced control over how the data in the matching fields is used and evaluated by Insycle to make the assignments.
This process can also be automated to run on a set schedule, ensuring that all of your free-floating unmatched leads are detected and matched to the appropriate account continuously, catching and fixing potential lead routing issues before they hit your sales team.
Because third-party lead routing apps are a popular choice for many Salesforce companies that want a more advanced or specialized lead assignment solution, there are always nuances that need to be considered from one lead routing app to another.
For example, inconsistent data can break syncs between third-party apps and CRM systems. When you integrate Salesforce with HubSpot, for instance, inconsistent data in your U.S. state fields can cause the data sync to break. Therefore, you need to standardize that field and ensure that it is consistent across both Salesforce and HubSpot to keep the sync intact.
Another common issue comes from managing record associations between Salesforce and third-party apps. For example, in PandaDoc, document-to-company or deal links work differently, happening in PandaDoc instead of the CRM’s built-in association features. This creates a whole different situation where the company needs to thoughtfully maintain those links. But when you merge or delete records, the association will break. That means that you need to merge or delete records carefully, ensuring that the correct master records remain so the sync doesn’t break.
Insycle can help with all of these and other issues associated with maintaining integrations between Salesforce and third-party lead routing apps.
Insycle is a complete solution to address the various challenges associated with lead routing in Salesforce. By standardizing data, merging duplicates, automating lead-to-account matching, and enabling more complex routing with clean data, Insycle streamlines the lead routing process and optimizes sales efforts. By ensuring high-quality data, Insycle allows organizations to take full advantage of Salesforce's lead routing capabilities, ultimately leading to improved sales performance and higher conversion rates.
But, Insycle is more than just a lead routing solution. It is a comprehensive data management solution for Salesforce. With its powerful data cleansing, deduplication, mass updating, standardization, formatting, and collaboration features, Insycle empowers organizations to maintain accurate, up-to-date, and complete data across their Salesforce database. By improving data quality, Insycle enables businesses to make better-informed decisions, enhance their sales strategies, and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction and retention.
If you're looking to improve the data quality in your Salesforce organization and unlock the full potential of lead routing, we invite you to learn more about how Insycle can help. Discover the transformative impact that a comprehensive data management solution can have on your sales performance and overall business success.