When I think of the challenges of equal division, I always remember a story I read in kindergarten. In that story, two cats who were unable to divide a piece of bread equally seek help from a monkey. The monkey, being a monkey, leverages the situation and wins the whole bread for himself. The moral of the story may be a little different, but it reminds me that equal divisions are tough to implement. And more so in sales than anywhere else.
Ask any Sales / SDR Manager or Sales Ops person and they will fear the words “your Round Robin isn’t fair”.
Even though round robin lead distribution sounds fairly simple – just assign everyone an equal amount of leads – there can be many variations and exceptions.
Consider these scenarios
- Raymond, an SDR, is flying away to Paris for a week to propose to his fiancé. In this period, do we still assign him the leads or do we skip him over?
- Amy is going to see a dentist this afternoon after postponing it three times (she’s still scared of the drill sound). Should we still assign her leads while she’s away?
- Chloe and Chris have just joined the team. They have been through the on-boarding sessions, but they’re still new to making calls. Should they be assigned as many leads as all the other seasoned reps?
- Mike has already been assigned 20 leads since morning. There is no way he can contact any more leads today. But he’s next in line again – what do you do?
These are just some scenarios, in which you may want to make an exception to keep things completely equal.
Why would you ever divide unequally?
There is one great answer for that – if you want to grow your revenue fast, you have to make some exceptions. In competitive industries, it is often the company that responds to a lead first that ends up winning the deal. According to a study by Insidesales.com, “the odds of the lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted”. Also research by Harvard Business Review shows that only 37% of companies contacted a lead within the hour. According to the report this was a disastrous trend for companies that delayed responses beyond the hour as that reduced your chances of qualifying the lead by seven times. Also if you responded after 24 hours, it reduces your chances by sixty times. Phew!
So what does that mean? Speed to lead = Speed to revenue.
Are you still keeping your customers waiting?
When you select a lead or contact routing product, ensure it offers robust round robin capabilities to ensure you never keep a customer waiting for a response. LeanData’s industry-leading Routing solution recently announced the re-launch of its best in class Round Robin capability, which has been beefed up with several high demand features –
- You can create multiple round robin pools with different members and settings (e.g. a separate pool for website leads and another for event leads)
- Different access levels to pool information and settings for pool members and managers
- Allowing managers to set up schedules such as working hours, vacations, and regional holidays
- Using custom weighting to route more leads to one or more pool members (based on skill level or availability)
- Capping limits to balance rep workloads to ensure no one is overworked with too many leads routed to them in a certain period of time
To learn more about these features, sign up for a demo today.