5 things to know before you renew your lead routing software in 2024

Introduction

It’s no secret that the demands of RevOps leaders continue to increase. The pressure is on to do more with less, and you’re relying on your tech stack to help with the heavy lifting.

Meanwhile, ROI can be challenging to measure with one tool alone, especially when RevOps teams have many different tools in their tech stack.

Instead, it’s about the support you can receive and how it aligns with your strategy. That’s the reason Mallory Lee, VP of Operations at Nylas, agrees that it’s “too complicated to try and narrow down ROI to software itself.”

So the question is, how do your tools and tech stack support your marketing, sales, and customer success teams?

Think about it this way – is your vendor only reaching out when it’s time for renewal? Are you getting the support you need throughout the year? Have you been seeing increasing prices, yet the value doesn’t add up?

Here are the top factors to consider when renewing your lead routing in 2024.

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5 things to consider before renewing your lead routing software in 2024

Are you really receiving customer success, or is it customer support?

The key difference is having basic customer support and working with a customer success team toward a roadmap. Are you submitting a ticket and waiting several days? Or are you getting immediate support via Slack?

Customer success knows and understands your goals and use cases. They should be your partner, an extension of your company.

For starters, you need to ensure they are working proactively with you, whether it’s consistent check-ins, bringing you advice, and not being afraid to introduce new ideas or use cases that can improve how you use their solution – without the added price tag. They understand you and are trying to improve the way that you use their system and service.

What does life look like without customer-driven support?

You reach out when you need support, have someone randomly assigned to you, and hope that they can address your challenges quickly. But if it’s their first time working with your company, they won’t always understand your struggle or the full extent of what you’re trying to do with the product. Or maybe it’s impossible to connect to someone who can help you.

Think of it this way – when you go to the grocery store, what creates a better customer experience? Have someone scan and bag your items or go to self-checkout and figure it out yourself?

On the surface, self-checkout might seem faster and more convenient. But what happens when you can’t scan a product, don’t know the item code, or encounter any other challenge? Not only are you waiting for someone to help you, but there could be several other people who also need immediate help.

When lead routing is the backbone of your inbound engine, and you become more mature and complex in your use cases, you need to know it’s not going to break and that someone is there to help you when you need it.

Questions to ask your lead routing partner:

What does your day-to-day support look like?
What happens when you run into a problem? How will they walk through issues with you?
What touchpoints can you expect over our contract period?

Has your lead routing use case changed as you’ve scaled?

It goes without saying, but the solution you use should help grow your revenue. But as your business grows and your go-to-market strategy changes, can this solution support new use cases and everything that you need and want to do?

If the answer to that is no, are you getting the full value for what you’re paying for that solution?

Take Cisco, a worldwide leader in IT and networking. As the company grew, its previous routing tool couldn’t process the volume of leads (on average, one every thirty seconds). Not to mention, each lead required cleansing and enriching, and they struggled with their lead assignment accuracy.

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.

A good lead routing tool, built to scale, can help you:

Route based on geography, territory, partner, hierarchy, and account owner
Improve match rates and ensure that every record is assigned to the right account
Manage and customize complex routing rules
Allow teams to manage their own rules without impacting other important flows
Assign records via round robin using standard, weighted, capping, or availability-based rules

Cisco was able to use Complete Leads’ routing functionality to regain control over its large volume of leads. They were able to cleanse, enrich, and assign leads in seconds. On top of that, the company’s lead and account assignment accuracy was improved to 100%.

Questions to ask your lead routing partner:

Are they thinking about feature development and do they communicate their roadmap?
Are you involved in feature development?
Do they have a plan to scale your use case to impact your business (not just usage to charge more)?

Are you using a point routing solution or can it route more than leads?

It’s not just important to consider if your lead routing tool meets your immediate needs. But what else can your solution do for you and your team? Can you route opportunities, cases, custom objects, and beyond?

Think of it this way. Lead routing tool A can handle automated lead routing, matching and enriching records, and improve the accuracy of your lead assignment.

But what if lead routing tool B can do all those things and, on top of that, allows you to route custom objects and trigger other automation based on your assignment flow?

“If your software offers some features that give customers a unique way to implement a strategy, that’s better. That’s where you really win. Because if you can bring them the best strategy that’s only possible with your tool, then you’re the logical choice.”
Mallory Lee, VP of Operations at Nylas

Olive Tree Holdings, a private investment company specializing in multi-family real estate, found that Salesforce Flow couldn’t manage large lead lists. They resorted to APEX code to manage deduplication, enrichment, field updates, and assignment. However, because they were using countless lines of APEX code, they sacrificed the ability to be nimble and make changes on the fly.

Not only was Traction Complete able to help them with routing and matching needs, but by being native to Salesforce, it was able to quickly and asynchronously process large volumes of data. They went beyond lead routing and used Traction Complete’s automation engine to get rid of 700 lines of custom APEX code.

What could you do with a solution that goes beyond lead routing?

Assign opportunities and cases
Assign custom objects
Assign territories and account ownership
Assign any record or mass modify records or opportunity teams

Questions to ask your routing partner:

Can your lead routing tool fill in cross-functional needs within the business?
Does this tool have use cases that go beyond lead routing?
What other kinds of custom objects and routing criteria does this tool support?

What are the gaps across your entire tech stack that could be consolidated?

Speaking of having a point solution versus a tool that does more, how does your lead routing solution fit into your entire tech stack?

RevOps leaders are being pressured to do more, with less. That also applies to their budget and the tech stack that they’re using.

Does it make sense to pay for two different tools when you can work with a vendor that offers a consolidated solution?

Working with a consolidated solution or suite of apps also has benefits from a customer standpoint. Aligning with one solution enforces that your entire go-to-market or revenue team will holistically be able to deliver across the end-to-end customer journey.

If you’re working with two different solutions and get advice from two different customer service reps, you might receive conflicting answers if your data isn’t moving seamlessly between the two systems.

Also consider how your tools are helping the rest of your business — the marketing operations team might use solution A to route inbound leads, but the sales team is left using another tool to do account assignments to their account hierarchies (or even, doing it manually).

Questions to ask:

What can your tool do beyond routing use cases? (while you may not be ready now to expand usage, you want to know they can)
As the company grows, how can you expand usage with this tool?
How does your tool fit within the larger revenue data lifecycle, or with my tech stack? (understand from their standpoint where they play within the full tech stack)
How does your tool serve the rest of your business?

What does your security look like?

When considering what tools and third-party applications to use in your Salesforce CRM, it’s important to understand how these integrations can impact your data security.

Many apps on the AppExchange take data outside of your CRM for processing or operations. But ultimately, the safest place for your data is inside your Salesforce CRM. That’s why when choosing what tools are best for your organization, you can greatly limit risk by using an app that’s 100% native to Salesforce.

Solutions like Traction Complete, which are 100% native to Salesforce, share the same data security practices as Salesforce itself. They process all operations within the same platform and use Salesforce’s data security as its own.

Questions to ask:

Are the tools you’re using 100% native to Salesforce?
How does your tool’s security architecture work?
How does it process your data? How fast?
What kind of global data security certifications does the tool have?
What kind of processes are in place in the event of a disaster?

Conclusion

The bottom line is this — the demands of RevOps leaders are high, and you owe it to yourself and the business to be using the best solution.

Whether your go-to-market strategy has changed, your use case has changed, or your customer experience has changed over time, these are all good reasons to look at other solutions on the market.

Here’s a quick checklist to review:

Have you been with an incumbent for several years?
Are you considering renewing your entire tech stack?
Do you blindly renew or do you look at competitors?
Are you being pressured to consolidate your tech stack into one solution?
Do customer support teams only reach out to you when it’s time for renewals?
Are they thinking about feature development and do they communicate their roadmap?
Are you involved in feature development and their roadmap?
Do they have a plan to scale your use case to impact your business (not just usage to charge more)?

To learn more about our flexible, sophisticated lead routing solution and our customer success team, book a demo today.