It’s no secret that it can be quite difficult to manage all inbound leads into an organization. When a lead form from a survey or marketing event is completed, the lead often populates in the CRM software or other related sales account management software. While this lead populates in a CRM, sales and marketing departments spend lots of time to find the correct account that matches with the lead, as well as the salesperson who should be responsible for reaching out to that lead.
This process of matching and routing leads to the correct accounts can take countless hours of manual work and can exhaust sales and marketing teams before they have the opportunity to even reach out to these leads.
Lead-to-account matching and routing software solves this problem by automating the process of matching and routing inbound leads. With an automatic lead matching and routing solution established, leads and potential customers will receive communication at a faster pace, and with information that’s more relevant to them.
An emerging software category: lead-to-account matching and routing
Lead-to-account matching has become increasingly popular over the past couple of years as more and more organizations are adopting scaled account-based strategies. As companies grow their sales and marketing teams, they must manage larger inbound lead volumes. As larger lead volumes come in, automated lead-to-account matching and routing becomes absolutely essential. This is becoming a fundamental strategy for marketing and sales departments to drive more revenue and conduct effective engagement with prospects.
By matching a lead to the correct account and responsible salesperson, businesses can ensure that the salesperson understands all past interactions with the vendor, as well as the correct names of all leads associated with the account. This drastically improves the customer experience as it indicates to the customer that the salesperson has the correct information on their account.
Additionally, lead-to-account matching can also help users get a real sense of account-level engagement. When leads are linked to the correct account, users can track the true account engagement with marketing campaigns and initiatives. Also, without correct lead-to-account matching, it makes attribution extremely difficult to track.
What is lead-to-account matching and routing?
Lead-to-account matching and routing is the automated process of matching new leads with the connected account in a CRM, and then routing that lead to the salesperson responsible for handling that account.
While CRMs have the native capabilities to handle lead-to-account matching and routing, the process is manual and time consuming. Lead-to account matching and routing software, on the other hand, automates this process, which is why it’s incredibly helpful to have this as an integration within the organization’s CRM.
The benefits of lead-to-account matching and routing
Besides saving sales development representatives countless hours of manual lead matching, lead-to-account matching and routing software has a variety of other benefits:
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Cleaner, more accurate data: Lead-to-account matching solutions automatically identify any duplicate contacts in the company’s CRM. This way if a new lead comes in that’s already linked to an account, it will not create a duplicate contact. This allows for cleaner, more accurate data within the CRM.
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Fewer lost leads: Forbes estimates only 27% of leads ever get contacted. That’s a shockingly low number and one of the main contributing factors to this is lost leads. Sometimes, leads simply never make it to the correct account because they were never routed there in the first place. With automatic routing and matching, this eliminates the issue of leads never reaching the right account owner and sales representative.
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Faster outreach: Reaching out to qualified leads quickly is absolutely critical to communicate with potential customers while the company’s brand still holds their attention. Automatic routing significantly reduces lead follow up time. Additionally, this improves sales team productivity and efficiency which is critical in driving more revenue.
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Better customer experience: Not only do lead-to-account matching and routing solutions make sales teams more efficient, but it also dramatically improves the customer experience. When a lead is matched correctly in a CRM, sales teams can view all past activities with the relevant account. This allows them to understand possible pain points with the account that might be relevant to improving customer success.
Looking forward
Lead-to-account matching and routing will continue to have a positive impact. As workflow automation increases in popularity in the coming years, it is expected of lead-to-account matching and routing solutions to grow exponentially in adoption.