Lead distribution methods

Lead distribution is the process of assigning incoming leads across your sales team.

There are several ways how to do lead distribution:

• manual by team lead
• cherry picking
• round-robin
• automatic assignment

All leads by default goes to the person who is responsible for checking all the incoming information received in incoming inquiry. It can be a different person, the the sales rep. It can be various type of information such as:

• geography (location)
• industry
• company size
• product they interested
• job title

Example of lead qualification criteria’s (in addition to general criteria’s):

• Number of employees
• Number of equipment

The person who is responsible for lead qualification should first analyze all incoming data.

In addition searching in Internet or other sources can be also useful. The goal is to grab as much information you’ll need to analyze and make a decision. In some companies you receiving some of this data from the phone or video call with the potential customer.

We call this process this process lead qualification. As a result, leads can be qualified or disqualified. Each company individually matches the criteria for leads to be qualified.

Once lead is qualified, you should then do lead scoring. Criteria’s for lead scoring:

• Budget
• Needs
• Timeframe or deadline

However, you can use other criteria’s as well. For example, brand power.

The final stage is to assign lead manually to a certain sales rep. Based on the lead qualification + scoring data and sales reps information. Each of your sales have different skillset, experience and of course current workload. Everything is important.

For me small sales teams with experienced leader who will be responsible for lead routing you can formally skip this stages. The benefit in this case is you’ll speed up the process.

This method will work great if you have a small team, you don’t have a lot of lead volume, lead response time is not that important.

Cherry picking method is manual lead distribution done by sales reps. They actually looking at the bucket of all leads and picking interested leads.

The advantage in this case, you will have quicker first response compare to 1 person doing the same. Secondly, it your sales will be more involved and motivated.

At the same time, some of leads can’t be taken by no one and the company may lose some opportunities. It’s also harder to scale.

Round robin means that all leads will be equally distribution for each of the sales rep. Imagine you have 20 leads and 4 sales reps. The system will automatically assign 5 leads to each sales rep.

Advantages: fast and fair assigning process and no need any resources like we have in manual distribution.

Disadvantages: experiences lead distribution person can optimize the process and you’ll have more sales since right people will get suitable leads.

This method is most sophisticated and involved CRM and other Apps. Based on the preset condition your software should do lead qualification and scoring process automatically and then choose the right person based on the skillset, expertise, and even availability. This method is similar to manual lead distribution but done by the software.

The biggest advantages are you’re not suppose to involve in this process no one and spend very expensive resource on this. Secondly, your first response rate will be faster then with manual distribution. It’s easy to scale and not lose without losing effectiveness.

Disadvantages: software can cost a lot, you also need to spend some budget on setting up the system. If the system will not be setup correctly, you can lose a lot of sales.

With tremendous of grows AI software this process can become less resource taken but even more expensive.

For the small sales team the simple and flexible methods are manual lead distribution. One the team will grow, your sales process will be more organized and solid, you can shift to combination of round robin + automatic lead assignment. It will help you to scale and grow. Once your sales department will grow you can change your system to be more and more sophisticated including AI technologies.