Traction Complete vs. LeanData: Comparing the Automation Solutions

RevOps teams need more than lead routing – they need an automation solution that bridges customers across different teams and the entire revenue cycle.

Note from the Author:
We didn’t set out to write this blog but sometimes, when misinformation is shared, it’s important to respond. As a credible solution provider, we always welcome healthy competition and strive to play on an even playing field.

However, there are times when we must step in to provide clarity. Our goal with this content is to offer fair commentary on the value and innovation of our product suite, and how it compares to other solutions in the market.

As an incumbent, LeanData provides a lead-to-account matching and routing solution that helps B2B businesses improve their sales motions. They also offer products to automate meeting scheduling, as well as identify and map buying groups.

While they’ve been a market leader for years, the role of RevOps has evolved. The needs of companies are constantly changing and becoming more complex. As such, technology and lead routing tools also need to innovate and adapt to these growing needs. 

LeanData is a great solution if you’re only trying to route leads and contacts. The reality, however, is that most companies have much more complexity around their data management, automation, and GTM requirements. Businesses either need a wider tech stack to cover everything that LeanData is missing (such as account hierarchies or data cleansing), or they need a single platform that brings all of those solutions together.

In this article, we’ll walk through:

• Three signs it’s time to replace your lead routing tool
• Why you should choose Traction Complete over LeanData
• Frequently asked questions between Traction Complete and LeanData

The bottom line is this – today’s lead routing and automation tools need to support workflows across the entire revenue lifecycle. 

Do you have the right solution to keep up with your business’ growth? 

Or is your lead routing solution a little too lean? 

3 Signs It’s Time to Replace Your Lead Routing Tool

Your lead routing tool can’t keep up with your growth

The growth of your business can bring complexity that your current lead routing tool can’t manage, resulting in challenges like: 

• Leads going unassigned or routed to the wrong sales rep. 
• Leads taking too long to process, impacting speed-to-lead.
• Not being able to route leads based on geography, territory, or other factors.

If LeanData or another lead routing tool you’re using struggles under increased lead volumes, new or complex territories, or different lines of business, you’ve reached a point where the current tool can no longer serve your needs. 

Asana, a global leader in web and mobile work management, is just one example of many businesses that outgrew their previous lead routing tool. 

As the business grew, Asana’s RevOps team dealt with added layers of lead routing complexity, lagging response times, and complex assignment rules that became impossible to maintain. They also needed region-specific routing rules but had no efficient way to build them out.

Between leads and accounts being assigned to the wrong sales rep, as well as slower response times, Asana was struggling with missed revenue opportunities. 

This isn’t a problem that can be solved by adding more licenses – it’s about the tool being unable to handle your GTM complexity and growth without breaking down. 

Your RevOps team is overwhelmed with fixes

The role of marketing operations and sales operations is to optimize the processes, efficiency, and effectiveness of their respective teams. 

But if you’re using a lead routing tool that causes more headaches than it solves, most of your day is spent dealing with bugs, troubleshooting errors, or making changes to the lead assignment flow. 

This process isn’t sustainable nor scalable and reveals another red flag – that your current lead routing tool lacks the flexible architecture that your business needs. 

Your RevOps team doesn’t trust the data

If your current lead routing tool can’t accurately match leads to accounts or effectively deal with duplicate records in Salesforce, your business won’t be able to trust the data in your CRM. 

Here are some signs that you can no longer trust the data provided by your current lead routing tool: 

• Lead assignments are audited for accuracy
• Reports are constantly questioned 
• Gut feelings are favored over data-driven insights
• You don’t have an effective strategy to deal with duplicate records

Reliable data isn’t a nice to have – it’s a must have in order for your RevOps teams to make strategic decisions, drive revenue, and prove ROI. 

To rebuild that data, your business needs a solution that not only routes leads efficiently but also prioritizes data quality and ensures reliable insights for your RevOps team and the wider business. 

Cresta, an AI-powered platform designed to improve customer service and sales teams, realized that firsthand as they struggled to scale their lead routing process and maintain data hygiene. 

Their lead routing workflow was difficult to update and required leads to be manually reviewed before being assigned. On top of that, new accounts were constantly being added to Salesforce by sales reps. The team didn’t have a process to ensure those accounts were connected to an appropriate hierarchy or territory, which impacted their ability to trust the data. 

Why Choose Traction Complete Over LeanData?

Traction Complete offers a competitive advantage over LeanData in terms of lead routing capabilities, lead-to-account matching accuracy, and data deduplication. Our solutions are also backed by Salesforce Ventures, after receiving funding in 2023.

By using a flexible and powerful automation engine that’s native to Salesforce, businesses can scale their use case while having all of their data live within Salesforce. Not only are they able to benefit from having a single source of truth, Traction Complete users also reduce overall tech spend by consolidating their tech stack under one solution. 

Customers are also supported by an award-winning customer success team that helps users from migration, to implementation, and everything that comes after. 

When it comes to lead routing, here are just a few of many reasons why Complete Leads is the more compelling solution.

Ease of use and scalability with a drag-and-drop visual flow builder

Complete Leads uses an intuitive drag-and-drop flow builder to create and modify lead routing rules. Instead of navigating a complex spider web of routing logic, it’s user-friendly and easy to understand your entire lead assignment process at a glance. 

One common reason that LeanData users make the switch to Traction Complete is because over time, it becomes too difficult to troubleshoot and optimize their assignment flow – especially when working with a large, confusing web. It’s even more challenging for someone new starting at a company to understand and make sense of the routing logic. 

Need to build or adjust routing flows? You can do it in minutes, not hours or days. 

Want to identify any gaps or inefficiencies in your routing logic? They’re easy to find. 

Complete Leads also includes a visual history log that helps users understand how and why an account was routed. This allows you to review routing logic in an intuitive, visual format. 

On the other hand, while other lead routing tools appear to offer robust features, they’re complex to set up and manage advanced routing scenarios. 

In order to get the most value out of other tools tools, you might experience: 

• Extended time for setup and deployment
• Ongoing maintenance of complex routing logic
• Difficulty when trying to make changes to routing rules

Champions of complexity

Traction Complete also offers a competitive advantage by actively seeking to understand complex customer use cases and how to solve them. 

Paired with our award-winning customer success team, Complete Leads excels at solutioning, managing, and supporting complex use cases.

While other lead routing solutions allow for no more than one flow per object in Salesforce, Complete Leads allows users to build multiple flows for different objects. 

By referencing fields across any object, users can also go beyond basic lead routing and enhance their use case by building automation around accounts, contacts, mass updates, and other custom objects. 

Unsure about whether you need multiple flows or a lead routing tool that can handle complex use cases?

Here are some common scenarios that other lead routing solutions may not be able to handle: 

• Assigning leads from and for partners
• Managing lead assignment for complex enterprise accounts or account hierarchies
• Managing leads that come from different channels and sources
• Leads and accounts that are owned by inactive sales reps
• Automating any object within Salesforce, including custom objects
• Making mass updates in account ownership and propagating the change to child objects

Better at processing large volumes of data

In addition to being able to handle complex routing, Complete Leads can quickly and efficiently process large volumes of data. 

76% of IT leaders state that speed of application or project delivery is a critically or very important KPI. However, in many cases, the overall speed of the lead routing process is often sacrificed. 

This often occurs with: 

• Salesforce Flows that add cumbersome automation and complexity to a user’s Salesforce Org
• A Salesforce process causing an “Apex CPU time limit exceeded” error
• Other lead routing tools that process data in large batches or queues, leading to slow processing time or processing errors 

Complete Leads has a major competitive advantage from a development standpoint in terms of speed and processing. 

Complete Leads is configured based on data, not MetaData. Data is much more lightweight to push into a production environment, whereas trying to push MetaData into a production environment can be extremely challenging. 

Complete Leads also performs operations in small batches, firing off asynchronous processes without inhibiting the assignment flow or causing slow processing times. 

Traction Complete is 100% native to Salesforce

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

As your business grows, so does your duty to protect and safeguard the business and personal data of your customers. 

While many other apps on the AppExchange take data outside of your CRM for processing or operations, the safest place for your data is inside your Salesforce instance. Using an app that’s 100% native to Salesforce greatly limits any risk.

Customer success over customer support

Traction Complete’s customer success team understands your goals, use cases, and ensures that you’re working towards a roadmap. 

And born from the now Salesforce-acquired Traction on Demand, Traction Complete brings over 1.7 million hours in Salesforce consulting experience. However, unlike our predecessors, our customer success and support doesn’t come through paid consulting. 

Our team proactively works with you through consistent check-ins, best practices, and new use cases that can improve how you use Complete Leads and our other solutions – without an added price tag. 

What does life look like without customer-driven support? 

Without a dedicated customer success team, when you need help making changes to your lead routing tool or other solution, you’re likely submitting a ticket or going through a user guide. 

In either case, you hope to address the challenges quickly. But having someone randomly assigned or going through a comprehensive guide doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the full extent of what you’re trying to do with the tool. 

On the surface, it may seem faster and more convenient. But when lead routing and automation is the backbone of your revenue engine, and you become more mature and complex in your use cases, you need to know that someone is there to help when you need it.

Full account hierarchy automation in Salesforce

Account hierarchies in Salesforce play a huge role in being able to visualize larger companies and how its branches or subsidiaries are connected. 

Challenges like account conflicts, opportunity overlaps, and commission splits start at the lead level and are often caused by assigning enterprise subsidiaries to SMB and mid-market reps. 

Without account hierarchies, businesses can’t effectively: 

• Build out an enterprise GTM strategy
• Accurately route leads that come from enterprise accounts
• Automate and align ownership of accounts that are subsidiaries of enterprise businesses
• Accurately define account value
• Align sales and marketing efforts
• Identify new growth opportunities

In most cases, building out account hierarchies is a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process – one that can’t be solved with just a lead routing solution. 

The options for creating and maintaining account hierarchies in Salesforce include: 

• Manual chain linking: The process of manually selecting a parent account for each record to create a chain of relationships.
  
  This process, however, is time-intensive and difficult to scale with an enterprise GTM. 
• Automated chain linking: This method simplifies hierarchy building by leveraging Salesforce Flows or third-party data orchestration tools.
  
  These tools can automatically populate the parent account field by referencing a third-party database and stamping the correct record onto the account. However, this process is limited because it has a dependency on existing parent accounts, as well as consumes excessive processing resources. 

Another key advantage offered by Traction Complete is leveraging Complete Hierarchies to automate building account hierarchies in Salesforce, empowering users to trace each record’s connection to a parent company, gaining clarity on ownership, revenue contributions, and relationship history. 

Frequently asked questions between Traction Complete and LeanData

Q: How does Traction Complete’s lead routing capabilities compare to LeanData and other competitors?

Traction Complete allows users to create multiple assignment flows as opposed to one flow that handles different objects. Additionally, admins can share the different assignment flows with other users, who can modify the specific functionality that was delegated to them – without impacting or slowing down the wider team. 

Traction Complete is also able to solve for complex use cases such as nested flows, mass reassignment, and hierarchy-based routing and reassignment. 

Finally, because Complete Leads processes data in small batches, as opposed to large batches or queues, it doesn’t run into slow processing or processing errors. 

Q: Which lead routing tool for Salesforce offers the best speed-to-lead?

On top of having an inherent advantage in how fast Complete Leads can process routing flows, users can also drive speed-to-lead with a number of features: 

• Multiple SLA timers provide more flexibility for SLA tracking and enable teams to identify bottlenecks at different steps of the sales processes. This also provides more flexibility than other competitor tools. 
• The pause step, which is a time-based feature, allows users to perform any action.

Q: What’s an example of lead routing complexity LeanData users encounter that Traction Complete can solve?

When users are limited to only one workflow, it creates a limited space in order to do everything that the business wants. 

Not only does that singular flow need to do everything for the lead object, it also becomes cumbersome to manage and scale as your business’ use case grows. 

For example, some businesses may have separate lead record types based on lead source – these would need to be treated, routed, and tagged in different ways. 

With one flow, it’s difficult to accomplish all that – or even to make smaller changes such as managing sales reps that join or leave the company. 

Q: How does Traction Complete handle deduplication, data matching, and data hygiene compared to LeanData?

Complete Leads leverages the Salesforce Matching & Duplicate rules for fuzzy matching. Not only is the matching algorithm very capable, it allows our products to be 100% native to Salesforce, which is more secure and efficient. 

Unlike LeanData and other lead routing competitors, Traction Complete also offers data hygiene solutions for mass deduplication without the use of other additional tools. Leveraging our suite of solutions, users can proactively and reactively merge any object in Salesforce, including custom objects. 

On top of being able to dedupe any object, Traction Complete also offers the ability to set up rules for winning criteria and field-by-field data retention – as opposed to a flat merge that can create challenges around GDPR, CASL compliance, and other marketing automation. 

Overall, users benefit more from Traction Complete’s intelligent and comprehensive proactive and reactive deduplication tool for Salesforce.

Q: What kind of support do customers receive during and after implementation?

Traction Complete is proud to have a 98% customer success rating and a five-star rating on the Salesforce App Exchange. 

We also have more than 115 five-star ratings on G2. 

More than that, here’s a look at the support that customers receive before, during, and after implementation: 

• Onboarding and success planning: You’ll work with your Salesforce-certified Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Account Manager (AM). As you get to know the Traction Complete team, you’ll work together to define goals, milestones, and timelines for implementation.  
• Installation and configuration: Your CSM will help you install and configure Traction Complete’s suite of products based on your unique needs and requirements, offering guidance, best practices, and suggestions to scale your GTM motions. 
• Testing and go-live: Before final sign-off, users undergo a UAT testing process to ensure that the tool is working as expected. 
• Initial and ongoing team training: The help doesn’t stop after deployment. You’ll continue to work with your CSM and AM to receive tailored enablement sessions focused on the unique needs of your team. 
• Regular feedback and adoption: On top of being regularly available, Traction Complete schedules routine feedback and adoption, ensuring that the products evolve with your needs and continue to deliver value.

Q: Which solution is more cost-effective?

Tracton Complete allows companies to consolidate their tech stack, receive better customer support, and reduce costs. 

We recognize that pricing is an important consideration for organizations looking to optimize their RevOps strategies. That’s why as we work to understand each client’s unique business needs, we can tailor our pricing to ensure it aligns with their specific requirements and goals. 

Not only does Traction Complete offer the competitive, flexible pricing, our solutions offer: 

• The ability to scale: As businesses evolve, Traction Complete’s suite of data management solutions is designed to grow with them.
  
  Specifically, this means being able to expand their use case and capabilities without the need for costly migrations or overhauls.  
• A complete solution: By offering a consolidated solution for lead routing, account hierarchies in Salesforce, data deduplication, and mapping out buying groups.
  
  This eliminates the need to purchase multiple tools from different vendors, streamlining operations and keeping all of your RevOps solutions inside of Salesforce. 

Build for the future with Traction Complete

As businesses grow and their GTM complexity scales, they need a tool that can adapt to their changing use case.

Otherwise, they’re leveraging additional tools to cover the gaps – or worse, they’re unable to automate and manage data the way they want.

If you answer no to any following questions, it might be time to discover a more comprehensive, scalable solution:

• Does your tool help with speed-to-lead?
• Are you able to easily track SLAs?
• Do you have effective measures for data hygiene and deduplication?
• Do you work with a dedicated customer success team?
• Has your lead routing use case scaled with your business?
• Does your data live inside of Salesforce?

The silver lining? If you’re finding that LeanData or another lead routing solution isn’t cutting it, making the switch to Traction Complete is easy. Plus, it serves as a perfect opportunity to reevaluate and optimize your processes.

To learn how easy it is to make the switch to Traction Complete, you can can watch our on-demand demo: Why It’s Time to Replace LeanData (and How to Do It Right) or book a free demo.