Key Benefits of an Automated Lead Prioritization for Sales Teams

Introduction

As sales teams grow, the effort in managing them increases exponentially. Most organizations opt for a sales CRM or sales automation solutions to help them streamline their sales process. An important facet of sales is the lead prioritization activity. While teams are small, managers or team leads take care of assigning priority to leads, so it is not much of a hassle. Although would be inappropriate to deploy the critical capacity of sales managers in operational work, which should be dedicated to strategic activities and improving sales processes. So, what’s the solution? Automated Lead prioritization. Let’s try to understand more.

Why every business should have a lead prioritization framework

Every sales team should have a lead prioritization framework or logic to segregate leads by quality. It could be the ability to convert better, based on historical trends. Else simply deal size or aligned to the organization’s focus on a set of products/services offerings. The idea is simple, to give the salespersons a pecking order of leads to focus on a particular order. The team members should know the critical leads whom they need to connect quickly or follow up rigorously until they get a response from them.

Leaving onto the judgment of the end salespeople which leads to picking up first makes your sales process highly inefficient. This makes the sales process inconsistent across the set of sales team members, making it less reliable and more prone to human errors and lowering sales conversion.

Manual vs Automated Lead Prioritization

While it is a fact that lead prioritization has various benefits for any sales organization, it is essential to evaluate why automated lead prioritization should be the absolute goal for your sales process. The workforce is never cheap in any geography. Moving to an automated lead prioritization process saved critical time for team leaders and sales managers. They should utilize this time to focus on high-value tasks, such as process improvement, operational efficiency, and business growth. The second important aspect of supporting automation in lead prioritization is speed. Sticking to a manual process increases the lead time across the sales lifecycle with the human dependency attached. A system-led automated approach will instantly prioritize your incoming leads. Lastly, with dynamic lead prioritization, any leads allocated to salespeople are prioritized, helping sales teams by preparing a list of tasks in order to be executed by them. This system-driven task or lead prioritization approach reduces training, re-training, and onboarding needs drastically.

Some other key benefits of automated lead prioritization

• Better forecasting of sales
• Accurate Predictive analytics
• Minimal Lead Leakages in Sales Funnel
• Better Sales Conversions

How should you build the automated Lead Prioritization solution?

Evaluate a sales CRM solution with a robust lead scoring engine. The system should be able to ingest all attribute types captured during the lead generation cycle. Some of the commonly used attributes are Lead Channel, demographic information, product type, budget, territory, and others you may identify by historical conversion trends. For digital-first businesses, it becomes relatively simpler to add more variables to their scoring framework. Prospects who fill additional data fields can be assigned an extra weight or ones who verify their contact number via OTP get additional points.  Next, having a robust scoring engine is an extremely important piece of the entire prioritization process.

Assign weights to attributes to compute a lead score for each lead that you receive across demand channels. This way, the most important leads are always at the top of your queue, so you don’t miss out on opportunities because they fall through the cracks. A score given to each lead depends on how interested they seem in your product or service, how qualified they seem based on the information collected about them during their research period, and what their purchase intent is.

Dynamic & Predictive Lead Prioritization in the Sales Lifecycle

Post the primary lead prioritization, salespeople begin engagements with prospects and get a detailed response from them on their requirements. For successful opportunities, a dynamic lead prioritization approach will score qualified leads with fresh input attributes. These inputs could be budget, response, interest levels, requirement starting date, etc. This way salespeople will have a dynamic lead prioritization at every stage of the sales funnel, constantly guiding them on the most priority leads among the set of leads assigned to them.

Mature sales processes with significant historical data points can build predictive lead scoring models using machine learning. Predictive lead scoring will analyze numerous historical data points to build patterns that successful customers follow and use the insight to predict future prospects using similar patterns and have a higher propensity to convert.

Conclusion:

Automated lead prioritization brings immense benefits to your business and helps salespeople with improved productivity. While automated lead prioritization is a good start, it should never be only a one-off effort. The Lead Scoring and Prioritization framework should constantly be adjusted to incorporate it to remain accurate. This is especially important with growing organizations with dynamic sales processes, additional data fields, and new channels for lead generations being constantly experimented with. One often not so-talked benefit that automated lead prioritization brings forth is that salespeople engage with interested prospects more than not really spam others who show less likeliness to buy your product or service.

Chakra Sales is a modern sales execution solution to productize your sales process from Lead to Order, eliminating manual activities and multiple data entries. By integrating all associated tools, Chakra Sales creates a unified interface for sales activities with automated data capture and activity logging.

If you are looking for a customized sales solution for your fast-growing organization, do consider a free demo with Chakra Sales.