Your revenue operations team can reliably get inbound leads into the hands of your sales representatives in roughly two minutes, executing every step of your lead management process along the way.<\/p>\n

Fast and reliable lead routing is extremely important for lead management.<\/h2>\n

Delays in your revenue processes, especially in lead follow-up, decimate funnels. Slow lead processing makes it 7x<\/a> less likely you’ll ever qualify your leads. Most RevOps pros understand this, but lead management is a deceptively complex set of processes, oftentimes built on the back of a house of cards.<\/p>\n

Consider the overall “jobs to be done” of the lead lifecycle:<\/h2>\n

\n
1. Lead Intake – Capture a lead from a given source (e.g., website forms, live chat, list uploads, Ad vendors, etc…)<\/li>\n
2. Validation – Ensure an email is valid before allowing it into any system of record<\/li>\n
3. Creation – Create leads in the system of record if there are not any existing records for the prospect already<\/li>\n
4. Enrichment – Programmatically enrich data required for routing or accurate scoring. Send those still missing important data to manual enrichment<\/li>\n
5. Lead to account match – If lead belongs to an existing account in system of record, associate to account<\/li>\n
6. Attribution – Give credit to programs driving engagement for each touch<\/li>\n
7. Scoring – Apply a score using demographic, firmographic, and behavioral attributes<\/li>\n
8. Routing – Check rules of engagement for a prospect in order to route appropriately (e.g., round robin, direct assignment, etc…)<\/li>\n
9. Sequencing – Start sales outreach asap<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

   Note: If you haven’t heard of “Jobs to be done,” check it out, <\/em>it’s worth a read<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

   Oftentimes these jobs are done asynchronously using a myriad of third-party tools, which despite everyone’s best intentions, leads to challenges with the reliability and speed of lead processing. These challenges are especially difficult for those on the front lines to troubleshoot.<\/p>\n

   Problems with orchestrating processes across multiple tools aren’t limited to lead management, either: If you work in RevOps, you’ve certainly earned some battle scars when trying to make the litany of software tools across your go-to-market org play nice.<\/p>\n

   On the one hand, the proliferation of SaaS means teams across the organization can find best-in-class solutions for their use cases. On the other hand, there are unintended consequences when adopting them, and dealing with that normally falls on the shoulders of ops. Likely, you’ll spend countless hours dealing with the various quirks of these tools, collectively increasing your technical debt more and more as time goes on.<\/p>\n

   Meanwhile, only the most well-resourced teams can allocate engineering resources to build homegrown solutions that resolve these issues. But nobody gets off easy. This approach has its own challenges. You must also account for the overhead homegrown has in terms of ongoing maintenance and adapting to changes as your go-to-market strategy evolves.<\/p>\n

   The reality is most of us heavily <\/strong>rely on purpose-built tools and native integrations from our SaaS vendors of choice. No matter how much your team has invested in technology, we still must deal with its inherent limitations. Maybe you’re spending too much time on manual processes (such as list imports), answering an onslaught of messages from teammates regarding data discrepancies, fighting endlessly to squash out duplicates, or filing too many vendor tickets trying to understand what’s happening inside the black box.<\/p>\n

   The bottom line is these gaps turn into roadblocks that cost your company serious money. The pain is even more apparent in a challenging economy, where tight budgets mean you’re expected to justify ROI while your budgets get frozen, if not cut. Here’s the harsh truth, 58<\/a>%<\/a> of business professionals say less than half of their applications have netted a positive ROI. Meanwhile, 66%<\/a> of marketing teams don’t believe they have the skills to use their existing technology effectively.<\/p>\n