I went into a retail store a few weeks ago. I should have known better, but I was leaving for a vacation and desperately needed to buy a swimsuit.
I poked around online, but realized what I wanted couldn’t be shipped in time. So I drove to the mall. Ugh, gross.
I browsed the store, desperately avoiding eye contact with the floor reps, until I gave up on finding what I was there for. I asked for help. A very nice 16-year-old associate listened to my questions, but had no idea what I was talking about.
So she got a manager. Manager confirmed they did have inventory, but it was in the back.
She radio’ed someone to go get it and walked away.
I stood there for like 10 minutes. That 600 seconds was punctuated by several chipper “Hi, have you been helped?” moments with a few other staff members.
I tried to find the manager again for help, but no dice.
Finally I just gave up and left.
When our CX feels like the mall circa 2018
As B2B marketers, we create awesome, lead-magnet content. We map it to the buyer’s journey, and build out drips to stay top of mind for prospects.
When someone finally raises their hand in response, this is our moment to shine.
We are missing huge opportunities if our hard-earned leads end up being volleyed from rep to rep once they get in the door.
What opportunities are you missing if your smoking hot lead feels like they’re standing in the middle of the retail floor being asked “have you been helped” on an infinite loop and not getting the info they need?
The gap in data needed for effective lead routing
Salesforce makes it easy to build lead assignment rules based on explicit criteria — location, company size, industry, and more. Pardot lets you add things like demonstrated interest, level of activity, score/grade to make that routing even smarter.
Other critical things to ask are:
- What other dependencies are there?
- Are they already in the system, or is this a net new individual?
- Is their account/company in Salesforce already?
- Is there an open opportunity with their company, or has one of their colleagues bought from us in the past?
The answers to these questions are critical to get your leads to the right person at the right time.
This is even more pronounced if you’re ramping up an ABM strategy. For example, let’s say you’ve invested in targeted advertising, direct mail, and personalized content for a list of 1,000 named accounts. If a new lead from one of those organizations raises their hand… do you really want that hitting the BDR queue?
Where LeanData takes this to the next level
LeanData is lead routing on steroids. A few of our customers are using it right now… and my elevator explanation is that it extends native Salesforce/Pardot functionality to build more context into the routing equation.
When a lead comes in the door, LeanData looks for related Accounts and lets you build routing logic that references that account-level opportunity history, activities, cases/support tickets, and all of the rich context of marketing interaction that you need for effective routing.
It is such a powerful thing that Salesforce and Pardot have all of their data on the same platform — and LeanData taps into this shared repository of interactions to help match and appropriately route leads.
(Let me know if you’d like to see a demo in our sandbox environment — I’m geeking out hard on this platform right now.)
A different end to the retail story
Imagine if the swimsuit retailer in the story above (who shall not be named) had more context to manage their walk-ins, including any buying or browsing history from other people in the same household?
If they would have seen my hubby Googling “can you swim in the Dead Sea” (yes), known that I mostly buy things in/black/dark black/blackest black, known the category of product I was looking at, past time-to-close, and more — then the conversation when they tried to make a sale would have been very different.
Does this challenge resonate with you? What “whoops” moments have you run into with lead routing? Let’s hear it in the comments!
To read more on LeanData, check out their recent post on the Pardot blog.
The terrible customer experience that left me red-faced when I realized what I had done is Support type requests. Somebody would fill out a support form, making it’s way into SFDC as a Case, and the Pardot Marketing Machine would start in with it’s engagement studio programs topical to the product interest of the prospect.
Before a human could get back to the support request.
#fail!
I created a “Customer Experience” suppression list that essentially delayed most engagement studio programs by 2 weeks for new prospects so they didn’t get pounced on. Most prospect creation paths had some sort of immediate response, so this helped with the email cadence.
Eek! I bet a lot of marketing teams have done something similar… hard to think about all of the inter-dependencies sometimes!