Why automation is the future of lead management (and RevOps)

Your revenue operations team can reliably get leads into the hands of your sales reps in about two minutes, covering every step of your lead management process.

Fast and reliable lead routing is critically important to lead management.

Delays in your revenue process, especially in lead tracking, descending channels. Slow lead processing makes you more likely to qualify as a lead 7 times more . Most RevOps professionals understand this, but lead management is a complex set of processes, often built on the back of an array of cards.

Let's take a look at the "To Do" of the lead lifecycle as a whole:

Lead Acquisition – Acquire leads from a given source (e.g. website form, live chat, listing upload, ad provider, etc.)

Authentication – Make sure the email is valid before allowing it to any records system

Generate – Generate leads in the records system if there aren't any existing profiles for the lead yet

Enrichment – Programmatically enrich the data required for accurate routing or scoring. Send those important data that are still missing to manual enrichment

Leads to account matching – If the lead belongs to an existing account in the records system, link to the account

Attribution – Gives credit to programs that drive engagement per touch

Grading – Apply scores using demographic, dynamic, and behavioral attributes

Routing – Check engagement rules for leads to route them appropriately (e.g. rounding, direct assignment, etc.)

Sequence – Start approaching sales as soon as possible

Note: If you haven't heard of “To-Dos”, check it out, well worth reading .

Sometimes these jobs are performed asynchronously using a multitude of third-party tools that, despite everyone's best intentions, lead to challenges in terms of reliability and processing speed. potential customers. These challenges are especially difficult for those on the front lines of troubleshooting.

The problems with cross-tool orchestration aren't limited to lead management: If you work in RevOps, you've certainly earned some battle scars trying to mass-produce. Software tools across your shopping organization work well.

On the other hand, the rise of SaaS means that teams across the organization can find the best solutions for their use cases. On the other hand, there are unintended consequences to adopting them, and dealing with that often falls on the staff's shoulders. Likely, you will spend countless hours solving various problems of these tools, culminating in your technical debt growing more and more as time goes on.

Meanwhile, only the best-resourced teams can allocate technical resources to build home-grown solutions to these problems. But no one goes easy. This approach has its own challenges. You also have to account for homegrown costs in terms of ongoing maintenance and adapting to changes as your go-to-market strategy evolves.

In fact, most of us relies primarily on purpose-built tools and native integrations from the SaaS vendors we choose. Regardless of how much your team has invested in technology, we still have to address its inherent limitations. Maybe you are spending too much time on manual processes (such as importing lists), responding to attack messages from teammates regarding data discrepancies, fighting non-stop to eliminate duplicates or sends too many vendor tickets to try to understand what's going on inside

The bottom line is that these gaps will become a roadblock to your company at a serious cost. The pain is even more apparent in a challenging economy, where tight budgets mean you're expected to demonstrate ROI while your budget is frozen, if not. cuts. This is the harsh truth, 58 % Business experts say less than half of their applications achieve positive ROI. Meanwhile, 66% marketing teams do not believe they have the skills to use their existing technology effectively.

*Marketing unskilled groups to use their technology effectively. Eco-friendly image*

Oh wow. Let that sink in. Do you know how much we are spending on software here?

Chin up. Do not worried. Have hope! In fact, all of this is POSITIVE. There's a lot of room for improvement here if you work in RevOps. That's a great opportunity that you can tackle.

Everyone loves the heroic RevOps.

The future of revenue operations

Considering how difficult it is to manage the revenue stack, it's no coincidence that leaders are rethinking their approach to better support their company's revenue strategy. Instead of taking a “tools first” approach and designing constraints, smart teams choose a process-driven approach, choosing open, API-driven systems to fit the stack. their.

Process-first thinking is not new: we always would like to do things this way. We just lacked the resources and tools to deliver.

But guys, times, they are a changer! The line between technique and activity is blurring as practitioners become more and more technical. They are learning how to leverage APIs to connect the system, writing SQL to query the datastore and use JavaScript to tool tools. Building technical skills opens the door to truly process-driven operations professionals by integrating, orchestrating, and automating processes across your go-to-market organization, for example as lead management. And how are they putting these technical skills into practice?

By learning how to leverage Common Automation Platforms (GAPs) like Tray pedestal . These automation platforms close the resource gap for semi-technical operations professionals, empowering them to build automated multi-step processes known as “workflows”. These workflows focus on work that needs to be done first, not done by the technology vendor.

Introduce RevOps Frameworks: Lead Management

Throughout this series of posts, we'll cover a workflow framework that ensures the lifeblood of your sales process is in good working order, getting there, GREAT health.

Using a lead management framework built on the Tray Platform gives your team control and visibility into every possible aspect of the lead funnel. You can literally measure the reliability and speed of your channel at every step. Meanwhile, you'll prepare yourself for a future in which Citizen Automators (you) build processes tailored to your organization's needs, without ever having to worry about whether your software tools “do it” or wait for technical support.

Platform: Leading Pipeline Process

At the heart of this framework is a workflow we call “Lead processing pipeline. ” The pipeline is responsible for arranging each necessary lead management job to be performed. From adoption to creation to enrichment and more, you can use this process on any lead, regardless of source.

Before diving too deep into the framework, we'd like to introduce our process-driven approach and explain why we believe it's a smart choice that opens up possibilities for RevOps teams. .

We host a series of in-depth studies on each of the workflows that support the above framework Blog Tray.io if you are interested. We dive into the practical details, so you'll have a practical guide to building your own lead management workflow on the Tray Platform. You can also get your hands dirty by asking try Tray Platform here .