How Cisco Improved Lead & Account Assignment Accuracy by 150%

HIGHLIGHTS

• Traction Complete’s suite of tools helped Cisco regain control over a large volume of daily incoming leads and improved territory-based record assignment accuracy by 150%.
• Complete Leads empowered the team to deduplicate and go beyond traditional lead routing including assigning contacts, accounts, and custom objects.
• Complete Hierarchies allowed the team to save time by managing territory changes in Salesforce with a click of a button.

OVERVIEW

Cisco is a worldwide leader in IT and networking. Founded in 1984, the Fortune 500 company develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment, and other technology services.

THE CHALLENGE

Cisco faced several challenges including an overwhelming number of daily incoming leads that needed routing, a tedious process to manage territory ownership in Salesforce, and a lack of visibility into their lead assignment accuracy.

Slow Speed-to-Lead

On average, Cisco received a new lead every thirty seconds. Each lead required cleansing and enrichment, followed by assignment to the right sales rep. Their existing lead routing tool struggled to process their volume of leads in a timely manner which resulted in a backlog of records that took minutes to process before assigning.

Tedious and Manual Effort

Cisco uses a territory model that groups accounts together based on unique criteria and then assigns a corresponding territory ID number and sales rep. Every time a rep joins or leaves the organization, territory owners need to be changed. With their previous solution, ownership changes required a manual data load, which hindered the team’s ability to keep up with Cisco’s constantly changing sales environment.

“Our prior tool didn’t have the functionality to handle our lead volume that we were assigning daily, and we struggled to keep an accurate database with current lead ownership.”

-Cameron Barnes, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at Cisco

Lack of Visibility

Lastly, Cisco didn’t have an easy way to report on accuracy of their lead assignments compared to their territory model.

“Before we were hoping that our assignments were accurate but we didn’t have good visibility.”

 

SOLUTION

Cisco had been using the Complete Leads matching engine and auto-merge functionality previously to deduplicate leads upon entry. The team realized they could leverage the full suite of Traction Complete tools including Complete Leads’ routing functionality and Complete Hierarchies to better meet their needs for lead assignment and territory management.

Seamless Lead Assignment

Complete Leads allowed the team to regain control over their large volume of daily incoming leads. With Complete Leads being 100% native to Salesforce, Cisco’s data never left their environment which meant they could cleanse, enrich, and assign leads in seconds rather than minutes.

Effortless Territory Management

Complete Hierarchies enabled the team to group accounts together in a single custom object based on territory ID and manage territory ownership changes in Salesforce. Now, when a rep leaves or joins, the team can simply switch the territory owner with a click of a button and all related records including accounts, opportunities, leads, and contacts are dynamically re-assigned. Thus, saving time and improving data quality.

Increased Visibility

With Complete Leads and Complete Hierarchies together, the team can compare the results of their lead assignment to their territory model. Before Cisco implemented Traction Complete, their lead and account assignments were over 60% inaccurate. With Traction Complete, they were able to update all 2 million records to be 100% accurate.

“A lot less of our team’s bandwidth is focused on maintaining and double-checking the quality of our assignment routing. We are very confident in the assignments that we have in place.”

 

THE FINAL WORD

Complete Leads allowed Cisco to overcome painful bottlenecks in their lead routing with faster assignments. Paired with Complete Hierarchies, the team has the flexibility to change territory owners and reassign related records. Together, Cisco was able to dramatically improve the accuracy of their lead assignments, save time, and maintain a clean database.