Add lead routing automation to your sales team so you’ll follow up with every lead consistently – and won’t miss any opportunities for a sale.
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Lead routing
Course Instructor
- How lead routing can make onboarding new sales team members easier
- How to evenly divide hot leads between team members
- How to distribute leads to each team member based on the percentage you decide
- How to create automations to route leads automatically
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Transcript
If you’re like me, the thought of cherry-picking your leads and following up with just the ones you like makes you cringe. While some leads will naturally be a better fit for your product or service, each one has the potential to bring money to your business.
As a salesperson, your goal should be for no lead to get left behind.
With Ontraport, you can set up a lead routing system that divides all your incoming leads among your sales reps the way you’d like. This helps keep things fair for your sales team and ensures that no leads get left in the dust.
If you have more experienced sales reps on your team, you can route more leads to them and fewer to your newer reps while they get their bearings. We all remember how tough it was to be a newbie on the job, right?
I’ll show you how to set up a lead router in Ontraport. In this video, you’ll:
To start with, lead routers assign incoming leads to contact owners — a.k.a. those responsible for touching base with incoming leads.
So if you want to see which rep a lead is assigned to, you’ll open up that contact’s record and check out who the owner is.
By default, when contacts enter your Ontraport system, the account admin will be the contact owner. And if you have multiple users or roles in your Ontraport account, like sales reps, managers or customer service reps, you can make those folks the contact owners for leads.
With a lead router, you can assign tasks to contact owners, like setting up a sales call with a lead. Or, you can send customer-facing emails that appear to be from the contact owner.
You can learn more about these settings in our “Tasks” video series.
But for now, back to lead routing. You’ll decide on a lead routing method to use: Round Robin or Weighted Random.
Round Robin lead routing evenly divides hot leads between team members in the order that they enter your system. This is good for sales teams that want to divide and conquer as quickly as possible.
So if you have three sales reps — Sam, Jose, and Kelsey — the first incoming lead will go to Sam, the second to Jose and the third to Kelsey. Your fourth, fifth and sixth leads will go in that same order: Sam, Jose and Kelsey; over and over again.
Weighted Random lead routing distributes leads to each team member based on the percentage you decide in advance.
There are a few different use cases for this type of lead router.
If you have a sales rep who’s just leaps and bounds ahead of the others in sales savviness and is the deal-closer for most of your sales, you’ll most likely give this rep a larger percentage of leads, but still give the other reps a share so they can close sales as well.
You may also find this type of lead router useful when onboarding new team members. You might onboard them slowly by giving them a small portion of the leads, and then increase the percentage they get over time.
So say you have Sam and Jose, your veteran sales team reps with proven sales numbers. And let’s say you’re onboarding newcomer Kelsey as your third rep.
You could split the leads 40/40/20 so that Kelsey is given half as many leads for the first few months. When she gets the hang of things, you might switch the lead routing to Round Robin-style later. And when she starts really killing it down the road and brings in tons of new business, you can give her a raise. But that’s up to you!
Once you’ve decided between Round Robin and Weighted Random, you’ll create a lead router.
To start, go to “Contacts,” “Settings” and “Lead Routing.” Click “Add New Lead Router.”
Choose one of the two routing styles I just talked about. For this example, pick “Round Robin.”
No matter which one you choose, your next step will be to add your sales team to the router.
Team members will need their own user seats to be added to a lead router. If you need help with adding new user seats or setting up roles and permissions, check out our “Orientation” and “Setup” videos.
Now give your router a name — you can always change it later so don’t get stuck on picking the perfect name. Click “Save” when you're done.
One more note before I move on to the next step: you can add as many lead routers as you want, and assign and reassign leads to routers anytime. So don’t worry too much about creating the ‘ultimate’ lead routing strategy right now.
Now that you have your lead router set up, the last step is to simply start adding leads to it!
Like snowflakes, every business’s sales strategy is different, so you might approach this next step differently. I’ll give you a quick rundown of possibilities so you can figure out your next move.
Go to your “Automations.”
You’ll want to edit any automations that involve incoming leads. Maybe you have a demo request process, or a newsletter signup automation.
For the sake of keeping things easy, simply create a new, blank automation.
Create a trigger for “Contact is created.” Note that this trigger will apply to all new contacts.
To make this apply to just your leads, add a condition. Use something like “Contact has tag” or a field that identifies leads but again, it’ll depend on your setup.
Under that trigger, insert an “Add to Lead Router” element. Using the dropdown, select the router you just made and click “Done.” Nice.
Finally, add a “Go to” element under the default trigger and drag the arrow so that it connects to your lead router step. This manages any contacts who are added to this automation map manually or through form settings, for example.
Now add an end step and click “Save.”
That’s it for lead routing! Now, you have a basic automation that takes all your incoming leads and assigns them to your reps however you see fit.
The next thing to consider is where this element type belongs in your automations. Also, you’ll want to follow up these lead router elements with tasks, like setting up a sales call with a client or sending a check-in email to a lead. For more info on how to do this, be sure to watch our “Tasks” videos.
If you watch our “Lead scoring” lesson, I’ll show you how to set up a system that lets you know who your hottest leads are so you can follow up with them right away.
As a salesperson, your goal should be for no lead to get left behind.
With Ontraport, you can set up a lead routing system that divides all your incoming leads among your sales reps the way you’d like. This helps keep things fair for your sales team and ensures that no leads get left in the dust.
If you have more experienced sales reps on your team, you can route more leads to them and fewer to your newer reps while they get their bearings. We all remember how tough it was to be a newbie on the job, right?
I’ll show you how to set up a lead router in Ontraport. In this video, you’ll:
- Decide what type of lead router you want to use
- Add your lead router and your sales team, and
- Create a lead routing automation.
To start with, lead routers assign incoming leads to contact owners — a.k.a. those responsible for touching base with incoming leads.
So if you want to see which rep a lead is assigned to, you’ll open up that contact’s record and check out who the owner is.
By default, when contacts enter your Ontraport system, the account admin will be the contact owner. And if you have multiple users or roles in your Ontraport account, like sales reps, managers or customer service reps, you can make those folks the contact owners for leads.
With a lead router, you can assign tasks to contact owners, like setting up a sales call with a lead. Or, you can send customer-facing emails that appear to be from the contact owner.
You can learn more about these settings in our “Tasks” video series.
But for now, back to lead routing. You’ll decide on a lead routing method to use: Round Robin or Weighted Random.
Round Robin lead routing evenly divides hot leads between team members in the order that they enter your system. This is good for sales teams that want to divide and conquer as quickly as possible.
So if you have three sales reps — Sam, Jose, and Kelsey — the first incoming lead will go to Sam, the second to Jose and the third to Kelsey. Your fourth, fifth and sixth leads will go in that same order: Sam, Jose and Kelsey; over and over again.
Weighted Random lead routing distributes leads to each team member based on the percentage you decide in advance.
There are a few different use cases for this type of lead router.
If you have a sales rep who’s just leaps and bounds ahead of the others in sales savviness and is the deal-closer for most of your sales, you’ll most likely give this rep a larger percentage of leads, but still give the other reps a share so they can close sales as well.
You may also find this type of lead router useful when onboarding new team members. You might onboard them slowly by giving them a small portion of the leads, and then increase the percentage they get over time.
So say you have Sam and Jose, your veteran sales team reps with proven sales numbers. And let’s say you’re onboarding newcomer Kelsey as your third rep.
You could split the leads 40/40/20 so that Kelsey is given half as many leads for the first few months. When she gets the hang of things, you might switch the lead routing to Round Robin-style later. And when she starts really killing it down the road and brings in tons of new business, you can give her a raise. But that’s up to you!
Once you’ve decided between Round Robin and Weighted Random, you’ll create a lead router.
To start, go to “Contacts,” “Settings” and “Lead Routing.” Click “Add New Lead Router.”
Choose one of the two routing styles I just talked about. For this example, pick “Round Robin.”
No matter which one you choose, your next step will be to add your sales team to the router.
Team members will need their own user seats to be added to a lead router. If you need help with adding new user seats or setting up roles and permissions, check out our “Orientation” and “Setup” videos.
Now give your router a name — you can always change it later so don’t get stuck on picking the perfect name. Click “Save” when you're done.
One more note before I move on to the next step: you can add as many lead routers as you want, and assign and reassign leads to routers anytime. So don’t worry too much about creating the ‘ultimate’ lead routing strategy right now.
Now that you have your lead router set up, the last step is to simply start adding leads to it!
Like snowflakes, every business’s sales strategy is different, so you might approach this next step differently. I’ll give you a quick rundown of possibilities so you can figure out your next move.
Go to your “Automations.”
You’ll want to edit any automations that involve incoming leads. Maybe you have a demo request process, or a newsletter signup automation.
For the sake of keeping things easy, simply create a new, blank automation.
Create a trigger for “Contact is created.” Note that this trigger will apply to all new contacts.
To make this apply to just your leads, add a condition. Use something like “Contact has tag” or a field that identifies leads but again, it’ll depend on your setup.
Under that trigger, insert an “Add to Lead Router” element. Using the dropdown, select the router you just made and click “Done.” Nice.
Finally, add a “Go to” element under the default trigger and drag the arrow so that it connects to your lead router step. This manages any contacts who are added to this automation map manually or through form settings, for example.
Now add an end step and click “Save.”
That’s it for lead routing! Now, you have a basic automation that takes all your incoming leads and assigns them to your reps however you see fit.
The next thing to consider is where this element type belongs in your automations. Also, you’ll want to follow up these lead router elements with tasks, like setting up a sales call with a client or sending a check-in email to a lead. For more info on how to do this, be sure to watch our “Tasks” videos.
If you watch our “Lead scoring” lesson, I’ll show you how to set up a system that lets you know who your hottest leads are so you can follow up with them right away.
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