Pipedrive Lead Distribution — 3 Tips to Amaze Your Prospects

A fast friendly response to online sales enquiries when the prospect is actively getting quotes from 2-3 of your competitors is critical.

“The conversion rate of an online lead reduces by 7 times 1 hour after sign-up.” — Harvard Business Review

It’s also the first impression of your business and an opportunity to amaze the prospect with a rapid call back. The prospect can’t help but imagine that your post-sale service/support will be at a similar level and this massively helps win the deal against competition. Check out this Fast Company article on the power of delightful moments in the buyer’s mind (here’s the 👉 video).

Most businesses can’t have reps dedicated to calling back every lead within 5 min (that would be a full-time job!).

So how do you achieve a 5-10 min response time to demo/quote requests with 3-10 reps who are responsible for closing deals and responding to new leads?

Fast and Slow Lanes

The trick is to clearly define what is urgent/not-urgent and put them in fast/slow lanes so your reps can respond accordingly.

What is an urgent lead? Ask yourself: “Is this person actively requesting a call back from 2-3 competitors?” If the answer is yes, then it’s urgent. If no, then it’s not urgent.

Some examples of Urgent:

• Demo/Quote request on your website
• Any leads purchased from a lead provider like Zillow, Trulia (lead providers are selling that lead to 3-4 other sales teams)
• Leads from paid advertising

Some examples of Non-Urgent:

• Downloading an ebook on your website
• Watching a demo video on your website

A follow-up 1-2 days later works well here, it gives the prospect some time to read/view the content.

By bucketing your leads you enable your sales team to prioritise their time with a split like this (in order of priority):

1. Respond quickly to Urgent leads when I’m available (i.e. not at lunch or with a prospect)
2. Focus on closing my existing deals
3. Work the non-urgent leads that are earlier in the buying process during blocked follow-up time. Maybe 1hr/day M-W-F

Lead Distribution

Now you’ve got your leads split into fast/slow lanes, you need to route them to the sales team accordingly.

Urgent - Fast Lane

For urgent leads where the focus is on delighting prospects with a 5-10 min response, you want to connect the lead with the salesperson who is available now (i.e. not at lunch). Keep your standard routing rules (eg: round-robin), but if the salesperson doesn’t claim the lead in a certain time (eg: 10 min) it needs to be escalated to the next salesperson who can respond immediately. This also establishes a culture of urgency within the team…snooze you lose.

Non-urgent - Slow Lane

If it’s not a competitive situation where response time is critical, use your standard routing rules (e.g. round robin, skill/experience based routing) without escalation and reps can follow-up in their daily follow-up time blocks.

Plays & Scripts

Establishing ‘plays’ for certain lead types is great for a couple of reasons:

• Faster onboarding for new reps
• Standard follow-up plays for specific lead types/topics (eg: someone who downloaded an ebook on how to repair a flat tyre) enables you to refine that play over time with the team.

Urgent leads (eg: request for quote/demo) is a really a straight forward call to ‘qualify and schedule’ the next step.

Non-urgent leads are earlier in the buying process so the your script requires a bit more structure to help the prospect figure out if it makes sense to move into a commercial discussion. It’s best to develop educational talk-tracks related to each trigger (eg: specific ebooks, watching a demo video, browsing the pricing page etc). This SP3O framework is a useful framework to use when developing your messaging around each trigger.

Segmenting your leads by urgency will enable your team to respond faster to urgent leads and delight your prospects from the first contact with you business. I hope this approach is useful, let us know how it works for you and if you have any other tips to add.