A company’s focus in the early stages of existence is likely to get leads through the door and build a sustainable sales pipeline. But as a business (and sales team) grows, lead distribution becomes increasingly more important.

Not only does an effective process help to create alignment between marketing and sales – which is a key stepping stone in successful revenue operations – it also saves time that can be spent on more strategic activities focused on accelerating revenue.

But if done poorly, you run the risk of stopping deals in their tracks due to friction between departments and unfit sales reps.

In this post, we’re walking through the steps you must take to create a lead distribution process that will streamline operations and boost sales.

Step One: Qualify Your Leads

First things first – if you want to create a lead distribution process that is most effective, you must screen leads for quality before you pass them to a sales rep.

That’s where lead scoring comes into play.

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a specific value to every lead that comes through your door based on the lead’s qualifications and demonstrated behaviors. Some common attributes to consider when scoring your leads include their job title, industry, how they’ve engaged with your website, what content they’re reading and the company’s revenue.

To determine your value system for assigning points to leads, start by taking a walk down your data history lane. Look at your customers to see what attributes they have in common. Then do the same for your past leads that didn’t convert. This exercise will help you uncover trends in characteristics that indicate whether or not someone is a good fit for your product or service – and what constitutes a high vs low weighted rating in your lead scoring model.

Taking it one step further, you also must consider what to do with the prospect next.

Insert: a prospect fit matrix.

A prospect fit matrix serves as a “cheat sheet” for assessing if a lead is a good or bad opportunity. For example, let’s say someone views 10 different pages on your site relating to a product’s features, benefits, specifications, pricing, reviews, etc. This signals the prospect is likely very interested in your offerings. However, when you look at the lead’s information, you see the company’s average revenue is only $100k, and your target market consists of enterprise-level companies.

With a prospect fit matrix, you can easily see where a prospect falls in terms of fit level and interest level and have a systematic approach laid out for triaging prospects depending on their category – delete the prospect, mark them unqualified or loop in sales to nurture the prospect or contact them immediately.

Screening leads before passing them to sales not only creates a smoother transition between departments but also saves your sales reps time to focus only on legitimate opportunities, helping boost your overall revenue stream.

(Bonus! Download our free prospect fit matrix template to help you start qualifying leads more accurately and efficiently.)

Step Two: Choose Your Lead Distribution Approach

Chances are you’re already using one of the following strategies for lead distribution. However, just because you’ve started using a certain approach doesn’t mean it’s the best fit for your business or should be considered your end-all process.

Let’s walk through the common lead distribution approaches to help you make an informed decision for your next growth stage:

  • Segment-Based Distribution: This approach assigns reps to only work with certain leads based on a specific segment such as company size, industry, annual revenue or (and probably the most common segment) territory. Whether you assign reps to different countries, states, industries, etc. is up to you, but as leads come through, they will simply be distributed to a pre-determined rep based on the category they fall into.
  • Round Robin: A common practice for organizations in the early stages (specifically those with five or fewer sales reps), Round Robin distribution simply rotates leads equally amongst your sales team. While this process requires little thought and is easy to automate, as companies begin to scale, teams using this approach often run the risk of compromising the prospect experience due to foregoing varying expertise levels and competencies.
  • “Tiered” or Weighted: This approach uses criteria such as an individual’s strengths and experience levels when assigning leads to reps to help increase efficiency and achieve maximum team performance. For example, let’s say you’ve recently hired a new sales rep. As this individual begins ramping up, you’ll likely assign them fewer leads to give them time to learn the ropes of your sales process before they dive into the deep end. On the other hand, your seasoned, high-performing reps should be receiving more (and higher qualified) leads putting you in a better position to close more revenue. While this approach has proven potential for improving output and overall team performance, the process often requires dedicated resources for ongoing implementation and optimization.

So which approach should you choose? The real answer is it depends on your available resources and growth stage. While the tiered approach gives you the best opportunity for matching leads to the right-fit reps, it might not be feasible at this stage in your business. To avoid trying to do too much too soon, start with the option that makes the most sense given the current size of your team. Then, as your business scales and more resources become available, continue to optimize your process until you’re efficiently distributing leads to your desired standards.

Step Three: Set Criteria and Standards

Speaking of standards, the sole purpose of using a lead distribution process is to properly match leads to the appropriate sales reps. This means you must look at specific criteria for your sales reps to identify which leads they are best suited to handle. Important factors that can impact the lead assignment process include:

  • Regional Knowledge: A sales rep with regional knowledge will have a better understanding of local market conditions, industry trends and customer preferences (which can be especially important when using a territory-based distribution strategy).
  • Expertise: If you offer multiple products or solutions, monitor your team members’ performance across the board. If a rep is outperforming in one product area, but falling behind in another, adjust your distribution process to only deliver the rep leads interested in a specific product.
  • Seniority: Prioritizing more important leads to a senior salesperson with the experience and confidence to overcome challenges or objections puts you in a better place to close the deal.
  • Overall Performance: Reps with a proven history of meeting or exceeding sales goals maximize your chances of converting more leads into paying customers.
  • Current Commitments: If a sales rep has too many deals in progress, consider assigning the lead to someone else who has more capacity to give the lead the attention they deserve.

Step Four: Optimize Your Distribution Process with Automation

Once you’ve identified the best approach and criteria for distributing leads, it’s time to create an implementation process.

This step is where you can stand out as a top-performing team (or fall behind if done incorrectly).

For example, manual distribution gives you full control to personally distribute leads based on the criteria and standards you’ve previously identified. However, as you can probably guess, this process is pretty labor-intensive, and if you have a larger sales team, you run the risk of wasting time and effort that would be better spent elsewhere.

For a scalable approach, consider automating the process directly within a CRM, like HubSpot. This will allow you to create custom score properties to quickly assign leads a score based on their fit and interest. With this information, you can then set up workflows with rules to automatically sort through leads based on your chosen approach and rotate them to specific contact owners that meet the required criteria.

Not only is automation significantly more scalable than using manual distribution, but it gives you a leg up by offering the benefits of weighted lead distribution without the operational burden. For example, you can easily rotate leads to the right reps at the right time, improving sales team efficiency and freeing up more time for optimizing other RevOps processes.

Get Started

As your business scales, your lead distribution process plays a vital role in supporting your revenue growth. However, we understand automating the process to reduce administrative burden can still be a time-consuming task for businesses, especially if you’re new to HubSpot.

To help you get started, our team can take on the heavy lifting and day-to-day maintenance to ensure your lead distribution process is working smarter, not harder. If you’re ready to boost your company’s revenue, contact us today.