How to improve lead allocation

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The assignment and management of leads among your sales team — commonly known as lead allocation — should be a coordinated, strategic sales process. In many cases, though, lead allocation receives little to no strategic oversight at all.
A laissez-faire approach might be easy, but it can cost your organization several performance benefits and diminish your overall sales ROI.
A truly optimized lead allocation process is achieved through ongoing testing and refinement. But certain best practices can improve your performance and deliver fast results for your organization.

Generating a high volume of leads for your business is great — but lead generation alone doesn’t guarantee success. The value of your inbound leads is only as strong as your ability to convert the right leads into customers.

Lead engagement and a strong selling strategy are key to closing the deal with high-value leads. As you manage your sales team and build a better internal operation, lead allocation becomes an important process for realizing each lead’s potential.

In the course of daily sales activities, it can be easy to overlook lead allocation and its implications on your sales and marketing ROI. Read on to learn how lead allocation can improve your use of internal sales resources and sales results.

What is lead allocation, and why does it matter?

Lead allocation is the process of assigning and managing leads once they enter your CRM. For some sales departments, lead allocation is something that just “happens” — leads go into a database, or they’re assigned based on a set structure, without anyone taking time to think about the process from a strategic angle.

This laissez-faire approach might be easy, but it’s far from efficient or optimized to produce the best sales outcomes. Strategic lead allocation takes a hands-on approach, combining expert sales insights with innovative technologies to turn this aspect of lead management into a value-added process.

When strategic oversight is supporting the lead allocation process, your sales reps can leverage the following performance benefits:

Faster lead responses: Leads can be allocated to the first available, qualified sales professional, rather than being distributed evenly without considering the sales agent’s workload and availability.
Automated engagement: The lead allocation process can facilitate automated lead qualification and engagement through emails, chatbots, and other tools that quickly respond to a lead and support the sales team’s performance.
Better utilization of sales efforts and resources: An optimized approach to lead allocation manages internal resources, including your sales team, to increase productivity and reduce operational waste.
Optimized routing to leverage expertise among your sales team: Specific lead data can be used to determine whether a given lead should be routed to sales agents with relevant experience or a certain specialization.
Insights into sales team performance: When lead allocation is managed through a software solution such as Lead Center, the insights can be used to evaluate performance, guide coaching and training, and optimize management practices.
Agility in implementing constant refinements to your strategy: By monitoring performance and identifying areas for improvement, lead management software can push your team’s success even higher.

Tips to improve the way your business allocates leads

The way you allocate leads determines how much success this aspect of your sales strategy can generate for your business. Although a truly optimized allocation process is the product of testing and refinement over time, there are certain best practices for lead allocation that can improve your performance:

Qualify leads before allocating them. Qualification can help you determine how to prioritize incoming leads or whether you’re better off engaging leads through a nurture campaign before reaching out directly through your sales team. Qualification might also help you determine whether to route specific leads to specialized sales agents.
Allocate leads based on projected response time. It can be tempting to start with the oldest leads and catch up on lagging responses. But chances are those leads have already withered away. Instead, start with your freshest leads and make sure they're allocated and contacted within your target response time. Lead allocation software makes it easier to manage leads with these priorities in mind.
Set workload goals and allocation thresholds specific to each sales team member. Each of your team members might have their own challenges or expectations in terms of productivity. Administrative obligations and other job responsibilities may affect availability, and individual goal-setting and coaching might target different goals for each worker. Lead allocation software can help manage the workload for each individual.
Reallocate leads when performance goals aren’t being met. When individual and teamwide goals are not being met, sales managers can take a high-level view of the performance and make necessary changes to lead allocation practices.
Adopt sales and lead management software that supports efficient lead allocation. For all of the value lead allocation offers, managing this process manually can be impractical for sales teams that are already facing heavy workloads and a high volume of leads. To turn lead allocation into a time-saving process, lead management software is essential.
Revise your lead allocation strategy as your operation grows. As you learn more about your sales team and your lead management practices, you can refine and optimize your lead allocation process to shorten response times, improve sales engagement, and drive higher conversion rates across your entire team.

The role of technology in better lead allocation

To truly leverage the efficiency of improved lead allocation, sales departments need a software-driven approach that takes advantage of automation and data analytics to raise the bar for success.

A business communication hub like Lead Center supports these end goals through the following capabilities:

Allocating leads according to established business rules: Your sales department can set its own rules when determining how and where to route all of your leads, from inbound calls to filled online forms.
Automating steps in the qualification process: Qualification helps you determine how to prioritize your sales efforts and where to put your internal resources. Automation allows this to happen without any sales team involvement, freeing up agents to handle other tasks.
Using call tracking tools to gather lead information across the sales pipeline: Thanks to data pulled from across the CallRail platform, Lead Center can score leads and provide agents with supportive data that comes from a variety of sources, including past marketing and sales engagements.
Managing lead allocation and tracking sales team performance metrics: Managers can use performance data from the software to help drive more revenue across the department.
Using analytics tools to evaluate performance and continue optimizing your allocation efforts: The insights and optimizations generated through lead management software are iterative, which means they continue to build on past achievements over time. The more you use lead management software to analyze and optimize your lead allocation, the more opportunities you’ll have to continue pushing your performance to new heights.

Embracing a collaborative approach to lead allocation

Lead allocation allows your sales team to operate more like a cohesive team, leveraging each team member’s individual strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.

Want to see for yourself? Find out how Lead Center, along with the rest of the CallRail platform, can push your sales performance higher — sign up for a 14-day free trial.