As a sales director or manager, one of your challenges is to make sure that your sales reps contact your high quality lead right away which would result in increase in your sale. There are number of metrics to measure the speed of contact but the challenge is always on what kind of solution would fit your needs. Some companies use marketing solutions which provide lead scoring, assignment and nurturing rules which can prompt the sales reps to contact the lead right away. Some companies might have custom solutions for lead scoring and lead assignment like triggers or apex jobs. This post is for companies who have custom solutions for lead scoring and assignment or use independent apps for both.

1. Identify the reasons for the delay on contacting the lead right away.

Most of the times you would find that the speed of contacting your lead would happen on unique situations or different times in a day. For e.g leads entering your website or in salesforce on week ends would have to wait till monday morning to be acted on . The same thing applies to leads entering your org in your out of office business hours. So an ideal root cause analysis of delays with timings would help to narrow down the problem.

2. Push vs Pull Strategy.

Once the root cause analysis is done, lead scoring rules can be changed to score the leads highly waiting on a queue unassigned and not acted upon. This would put the leads as a high priority.  Some organizations use a push strategy where they would assign leads on a round robin fashion and would assign leads to all the salesrep in a pile which would keep the queue empty on a regular time interval.

Pros

1. Leads are assigned to reps faster.

Cons

1. Sales reps would be bombarded with leads and they may not get to the lead quicker.

Pull Strategy

Some times we can build a pull solution where a sales rep can push a button for getting the next lead and salesforce can push the lead to the rep based on rules. Once a follow up action is done, sales rep would push the next button to pull the next lead.

Pros

a. Ownership falls on the salesrep to work on a lead faster since he cannot get to another one till he makes an action on the current one.

b. There is no mass lead blocks and reps will not end up with a pile of leads with no action.

Cons

a.  If there is a lot of complex lead assignment rules and the volume of leads increases, salesforce governor limits would cause problems in implementing this solution.

Push with Pull Solution.

This might be the best solution where push and pull reach the limits. Leads would be scored on a higher points based on the date when they got created and time they are waiting to be assigned. A round robin apex batch process can push the leads to the sales reps right away at regular intervals.   The rep can pull the lead by clicking the get my lead button which would get the lead right away to him. If there is a delay in getting to the lead, the round robin batch can assign the lead to the next available sales rep based on time criteria.

3. Handling holidays and week ends.

For leads which are created on week ends and out of office hours, the lead scoring solution should assign points say 5 for every hour and the lead score cannot exceed a maximum number like 25 or 50 points on a day. This way leads dont just get scored based on creation date alone and other criteria like the time of decision, amount and other criterias are weighed and assigned more points. So the highest quality lead with a highest score should have other business criteria weighed 75% and un assigned scored 25% depending on your need. The same scenario would exist for your out of office leads

4. Measuring your speed to lead ratio using salesforce.

If you are using log a call action the time difference between the creation date and the first log a call action would provide you the speed to lead value . So if the lead is created at 7 am on Monday and call happened at 9 am same day, the speed to lead is 2 hours. If you use a CTI integration , the phone system can indicate the exact time the call happened and a combined report with salesforce lead data and call log would tell you the speed to lead.

So using the above approaches, sales teams can improve the speed to lead ratio effectively using salesforce. Please feel free to comment on this blog or email me at buyan@sforcemaximizer.com for any questions. Please click like if you like my blog.