Increasing revenue with optimised lead routing

Christopher Hanlon is a marketing operations and analytics consultant for startups, scaleups, SMBs and technology companies. When he starts at a company, he looks at the high-intent leads they’re receiving to understand the processes those leads go through after filling out a form.

He looks at who these leads are going to, their response time, what percentage of leads are booking meetings and then what meetings are taking place. As he explained:

“When I first spoke to this client, they said 1 in 12 of their form fills led to an opportunity. They were happy with this number, but when I looked into it, I saw that leads were going to an info@contact address. No one knew who was responsible for these leads.” 

“In actuality, plenty of those 11 other leads could have led to an opportunity.”

The lead response rate was anything up to a week; in some cases; they weren’t responded to at all.

Christopher realised that reps were cherry-picking the best leads, and even in cases where leads were being followed up on, the back and forth of trying to find a time to book a meeting stalled these conversations. 

Only 8% of those form fills led to an opportunity, and 30% of those were closed won. So effectively, 2.4% of contact forms led to revenue. As he shared:

“Due to the long time between contacting a prospect and the back-and-forth with reps booking times, 40% of the people booking meetings were cancelling or just not showing up.”

He also established some basic qualification rules that allowed the form to be routed to the correct reps from the correct regions or territories.

Ensuring people were presented with an appropriate calendar at the point of form fill allowed them to book a meeting on a live calendar at a suitable time with the best-suited person rather than waiting up to a week for someone to maybe get in contact. As he explained:

“We set it up so that if a lead came through from a target account, they would get routed directly to the AE. If they were from the right size company in the right country, it would go to an SDR for a 15-minute qualifying call.”