Lead Scoring and Routing

Not everyone who enters your sales pipeline is ready to buy, so pursuing all leads is a hit-or-miss endeavor that often results in wasted sales resources. Though all leads require nurturing of various degrees, when it comes to shifting gears from simply marketing to leads to actively selling to them, you should strike only when the iron is hot. That being said, the opportune moment to seize a sales opportunity varies from business to business. You may want to follow up with a lead after they download a free ebook, after they visit your pricing page, or maybe after they click a link in your email. But realistically, it takes a variety of touchpoints and engagement indicators with your brand to truly deem a lead “hot.” What you need is a consistent framework to bridge the gap between sales and marketing thereby allowing you to channel qualified leads from your marketing funnel to designated sales reps in real time. This is the essence of lead scoring and routing.

Lead scoring by definition is a systematic way to rank leads based on their profile, engagement with your business or both, by assigning a point value indicating which leads are worth investing sales resources on and which leads need further nurturing. By using lead scoring, you can easily identify hot and cold leads without any tedious sorting, allowing you to deliver only the hottest, most qualified prospects to your sales team. The process of feeding those leads to designated members of your sales team is called lead routing.

A designed representation of lead scoring where a contact receives points for engaging with a business.

What is lead scoring and routing?

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Why implement lead scoring and routing?

Knowing who your hottest and most engaged prospects are ensures that your sales team isn’t wasting time cold calling or following up with dead-end leads. Once you’ve established the criteria for what makes a good lead and decided on a process for pursuing each one, you can begin routing those leads to your salespeople or feeding them into targeted follow-up funnels automatically.

Identify your hottest prospects

Ranking your leads by point value automatically gives you the opportunity to quickly seize the best sales opportunities. Not only does this boost the efficiency or your sales cycle, it shortens it substantially by allowing you to focus your sales efforts on only qualified leads.

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Identify your hottest prospects

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Close more deals with a smaller sales team

Feeding qualified leads into a lead router spares your sales reps from having to handpick leads that may not be ready to buy. Instead, it hand-delivers to them a manageable quantity of leads that can be routed to a designated rep by time zone or various other criteria. Allocating your sales resources to the right leads in such a way results in focused sales conversations with greater purchase inclination.

How Does Ontraport Fit in With Lead Scoring and Routing?

Automated lead scoring and routing in Ontraport can be set up in a matter of minutes. Ontraport makes it easy for your business to define specific lead qualification criteria and quickly get only the hottest leads into the hands of your sales reps. As leads interact with your business, their engagement prompts an automatic increase in their lead score, bringing them closer to one or more predetermined thresholds — upon which you can trigger a number of actions such as adding them to a lead router or lead nurturing funnel, sending them a product discount, etc. As a result, you’ll be left with a more defined and efficient sales process free of uncertainty for your reps.

“Lead scoring and routing continue to be dreadfully underutilized in the entrepreneurial arena. The boosted efficiency of your sales workflow is night and day.”

- Martin Cogburn, Campaign Manager

Examples of Lead Scoring and lead routing using Ontraport

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Qualify your leads

Not all leads added to your database are ready to buy. In fact, most aren’t. Enter lead qualification in Ontraport: Lead qualification lets you score leads based on behavior and explicit contact information. Once you've established a lead scoring framework, Ontraport delivers leads of only the utmost quality to your sales team automatically. This happens by assigning leads a point value until hitting a threshold upon which leads are routed to designated sales reps on your team or added to a cold lead nurturing funnel for further attention.

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Offer a discount

A hot lead may not always warrant a sales call; the same goes for lower-ticket items. Sometimes the simple touch of a product discount will suffice. In Ontraport you can set a lead score threshold to trigger an automated email containing a personalized coupon code. Once a new lead has accrued a high enough score based on your settings through various engagements with your brand or other criteria, they'll receive the email with an incentive to purchase.

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Use round robin lead routing

Creating a Round Robin Lead Router in Ontraport allows you to evenly distribute leads one-by-one to each of the sales reps on your team. Everyone will end up with the same number of leads over time. Simply switch on the Round Robin Lead Router and add as many users as there are on your team. In a sales team with four sales reps, each rep will receive 25% of all leads. Should you need to offset the distribution of leads for any reason, a weighted lead router (below) would be your tool of choice.

Use weighted lead routing

Not all businesses find it prudent to distribute leads evenly among their sales reps. You may have a sales rep with more experience than others or one with a greater workload capacity. For those who meet this profile, there are Weighted Lead Routers in Ontraport. Use a Weighted Lead Router to assign a greater percentage of leads to certain sales reps and a lower percentage to others. Each qualified lead is randomly assigned to a user seat in the lead router with the probability in accordance with your preset percentages. In the long term, all sales reps end up with their share of leads as specified by you.

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Use lead routing by location

For businesses operating internationally or for those with leads in multiple time zones, leads can be routed to sales reps by location or time zone using Ontraport. Using Ontraport's geolocation feature, the system can identify the location of any lead who has not given you their address and pass them to a designated sales rep. Sales reps can be prompted to connect with their leads using Ontraport tasks in which they're able to see the location and contact information of each lead in their queue.

Use lead routing by referral

For businesses partnered with affiliates whose referrals require VIP treatment (or special attention), Ontraport lets you route leads to designated sales reps by referral. Any hot leads added to your contact database with a flagged affiliate's name attached can be routed to someone qualified to correspond with and sell to them. So let's say one of your sales reps deals with all contacts referred by Jane Smith: Should any leads enter your database after clicking on Jane Smith's unique affiliate link, they'll be automatically routed to the right rep with a task to call them — no manual sorting necessary.

Learn how Ontraport’s sales automation suite can streamline your sales process & grow your business

Persuasive sales funnel system

Get started today with Ontraport’s sales pipeline software. Use this free, prebuilt funnel to easily handle lead’s objections and earn more online sales without having to pick up the phone.

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Visualize your contacts and pipelines with Card View

A new contact display option in Ontraport’s CRM provides an overhead view of your funnels and pipelines for better customer relationship management.

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Manage contacts by stage

With Ontraport’s CRM, you can view your contacts in a list, or you can choose to use Card View, which displays your contacts’ information like business cards and organizes them within stages in your business.

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Ready to streamline your sales process and close more deals?

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“I simply cannot believe how powerful Ontraport is … The ability to know each and every touchpoint that prospects have with my business is so important. We never read an email from a client or prospect without knowing their entire relationship with our business. We would be lost without Ontraport.”

— Matthew J. Watts, FreedomPreneur Business Academy

Ready to streamline your sales process and close more deals?

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— Matthew J. Watts, FreedomPreneur Business Academy

Frequently Asked Questions

I’m new to sales process automation — what is it, and why is it such a big deal?

There are lots of time-consuming sales tasks that Ontraport can do for you automatically. Our sales process automation tools can follow up with your leads, keep your pipeline organized and moving, manage your team’s workload and more. Then you can spend more time doing the work that matters most: actually selling your product or service.

I want to get more conversions, but I’m busy. Does Ontraport have any done-for-you sales funnels?

Ontraport has a whole library of prebuilt funnels, so you can get up and running without learning all the ins and outs of the platform. You can launch an entire sales funnel, follow up with leads, segment your list of prospects and more — and each system only takes minutes to launch. The best part is, you’ll get a Setup Wizard that walks you through every step.

I want to give my leads the best experience possible, even as I grow. Can Ontraport handle personalization at scale?

Ontraport is built to grow right alongside you, so it’s easy to create a personal sales experience for every lead on your list — no matter how big your business gets. Since all your sales data will be stored on one centralized platform, you’ll have everything you need to deliver more engaging, more effective experiences across every channel.

My business uses outbound lead generation to find customers. Can Ontraport help with that?

Ontraport is great for driving both inbound and outbound sales. We have lots of tools to deliver personal, multi-channel messages and connect you with all the right leads at the right times. Plus, you’ll get all the tracking features and KPIs you need to measure and optimize results.

I want to use Ontraport to manage my B2B customer journey and B2B sales funnels. Will it have all the features I need?

Ontraport is perfect for nurturing B2B customers throughout your sales process. You’ll be able to keep all your deals organized, offer more personalized follow-up, keep your team on the same page and more. And with multiple sales pipelines, you can even view and manage every step of your B2B sales process from one screen.

I like the idea of done-for-you sales funnels, but what if I want my campaign to work differently than the template?

Ontraport’s sales pipeline software and prebuilt funnels were built based on feedback from thousands of business owners, but of course, everyone likes to — and should! — put their own spin on things. You can easily adjust any part of these funnels — the copy, design, automation settings and more — however you’d like. You can also skip these systems and start from scratch to build anything you can imagine.