Lead Routing Software - How to Route High Value Prospects
If you're already familiar with the general concepts of lead routing - you can skip the introduction and jump straight to my recommendations.
Lead Routing is the process of collecting incoming sales leads and assigning them to members of your sales team. For larger companies, it's often automated to save time and ensure that potential customers receive quick service.
Before choosing and implementing a lead routing system, it's important to understand which factors are most important to you and your company. Some questions you should answer are:
(1) Is my sales team specialized? Are there some incoming leads that need to be serviced by a specific (or subset of) my reps?
(2) Do leads need to go through my SDR team before they talk to an account executive?
(3) Do I need to assign leads based on geographical territories?
(4) Do I need to route leads to different team members based on the lead source?
(5) Do I need to check each lead in my CRM to see if it's already been assigned to a rep?
(6) Do I want to filter out "low quality" leads?
(7) Do I need to make sure that each of my reps are getting their "fair share" of incoming leads?
(8) What apps in my tech stack need to integrate seamlessly with my lead routing software?
I recognize all of these questions might seem overwhelming. Fortunately, many of them may not apply to your use case. Early stage companies tend to have much simpler routing requirements and only as the sales team grows the lead routing rules balloon in complexity.
Once you've answered the above questions, the last thing to consider is how much you are willing to compromise on your lead routing requirements. The faster & more flexible you are in sharing your team's time with a prospect, the better their experience will be.
Unfortunately, complex routing requirements go directly at odds with providing prospects flexibility. For example, would you rather force an enterprise lead to wait for a week to talk to your team if your only enterprise rep is on vacation? Or are you willing to connect him with a mid-market rep that's available tomorrow? That's for you to experiment with and decide.
Recommendations
Now, on to my recommendations (sharing the table of contents below in case you want to jump ahead to a specific section).
- Best lead routing software for round robin
- Best lead routing software for complex distribution rules
- Best lead routing software on a budget
- Best lead routing software for one person sales teams
- Best lead routing software for companies with a big budget that want more
- Best lead routing software for developer led orgs
- Best lead routing software to optimize speed to lead
Best Lead Routing Software for Round Robin
Both Calendly and Hubspot Meetings offer great Round Robin scheduling tools.
To create a round robin link in Calendly, you'll need to add all of your sales team to a Calendly Team plan ($20/user/mo). You'll have the option to optimize for availability (allowing prospects to pick any slot from your team's pooled availability) or optimize for equal distribution (where Calendly will hide availability from a particular team member if they've received an unfair share of meetings).
To create a round robin link via Hubspot Meetings, you'll need to upgrade to Sales Hub starter ($10/mo/user, min two users). You'll have the option to optimize for availability or prioritize the contact owner (Hubspot will check if the contact exists in your CRM and is already owned by a rep, in which case they'll only be shown times to meet with their assigned rep).
Both Calendly & Hubspot offer a secure, trusted Round Robin Scheduling platform for an approachable price.
Best Lead Routing Software for Complex Distribution Rules
If you need to route leads based on region, company size, or product type, you should check out Chili Piper. Chili Piper was founded specifically to address the import, and thorny, problem of enabling complex lead routing while also integrating with the rest of the revenue tech stack.
Revenue Hero was founded to offer much of the same functionality as Chili Piper at a lower price point. It's particularly attractive for smaller teams with complex needs because unlike Chili Piper, there's no platform fee.
Calendly recently announced their own routing product. Initally calendly was the inch deep, mild wide scheduling app. As a result, it left space for Chili Piper and Revenue Hero to sprout up and win the enterprise sales market. Calendly is working to win the market back and continues to ship more complex routing functionality.
Best Lead Routing Software on a Budget
Both Calendly and Hubspot Meetings are great for teams on a budget.
You can create an individual meeting link for free on the Calendly Basic plan. You can also create a free individual meeting link for each of your team members using Hubspot Meetings.
For more advanced integrations, routing, and round robin set ups, you'll need to upgrade. Fortunately the Calendly team plan is only $20/user/mo while Hubspot Sales Starter is $10/user/mo.
Best Lead Routing Software for One Person Sales Teams
Calendly is great for one person sales teams. If you have a one person sales team, you likely don't have much routing to do other than potentially filtering out unqualified leads.
You can create a personal meeting link, for free, under Calendly's basic plan.
If you're already using Hubspot for your CRM, you should also consider creating a free personal meeting link with Hubspot Meetings.
Cal.com is also free for individuals and leaves you plenty of room to grow as you onboard more team members.
Best Lead Routing Software for Companies with a big budget that want more
Qualified.com and Drift are more expensive and offer more full fledged marketing insights than the other products mentioned. Both products deanonymize website traffic, meaning they give you data on who's visiting your website, what actions they are taking and when. They also both offer live chat bot functionality which enables revenue teams to proactively message website visitors and encourage them to book meetings.
Both products are primarily for enterprise companies and have the price tag to prove it!
Best Lead Routing Software for Developer Led Orgs
Cal.com is the best scheduling and lead routing tool for developer led orgs. It's completely open sourced with a great API and thorough documentation.
Their team plan ($15/user/mo) has plenty of built in functionality to support Round Robin, advanced routing, and team workflows. Where Cal.com really shines though is if you and your team have the desire and resources to build custom solutions on and around the open platform.
Best Lead Routing Software to Optimize Speed to Lead
Cuda is the best scheduling platform that want to optimize speed to lead. Companies that use Cuda see substantial improvements in conversion by pushing high intent leads to instead video calls, rather than having them schedule a time for a later date.
