Lead Management:

How to Automate the

Entire Lead Lifecycle
Table of
Contents

03 06 07 10
Lead Management: The Key Technology to Lead List Uploads: Lead Enrichment:
How to Master the Automating the Lead Kick off the Lead Complete Lead Data
Lead Lifecycle Lifecycle Lifecycle Faster for Faster Follow-Up

14 21 25 27
Lead-to-Account Lead Routing: Takeaways About this Guide
Matching: Segmentation Drive Higher Sales
and Smarketing Productivity

2
Section 1: Lead Management Overview

Lead Management: How to Master the Lead Lifecycle

Need to convert more leads? Here’s the biggest hidden problem in lead management

For marketers, lead management is a serious But did you know that one of the most important Up to 50% of all prospects will choose the
challenge, and the most important aspect is factors when qualifying and converting more vendor that responds first[2]. Following up
converting leads to opportunities. Research leads isn’t something you solve with more within an hour makes marketers 7x more likely
suggests that the top priority of 69% of strategic programs or cleverly-designed to qualify leads - that is, to have “a meaningful
marketers is converting leads[1]. campaigns? It’s speed. Specifically, how quickly conversation with a key decision maker.”[3] (In
you follow-up with leads after your first touch. comparison, the average response time for all
If you work in marketing, you probably don’t need leads is 42 hours[4]).
fancy reports to come to this conclusion. Even
though it’s always important to feed the top of
your funnel with net-new leads, pushing new
leads through to opportunity and closed-won
stages is probably also a priority for your team (if
not the priority).

So how do you push more leads down-funnel?

You probably already have ideas on this
one, too. Important tactics include nurture
programs, segmenting and prioritizing the
best leads for sales, creating buyer persona-
specific content, and optimizing your sales
development outreach.

Marketers’ top priority is converting leads to customers.

3
OK. So how can you follow • Lead segmentation (scoring, account
matching) - Ideally, marketers use some kind
up with leads faster? of filtering process (or processes) to segment
leads before follow-up. This can include
Follow-up is one of the most important parts of
steps such as scoring to identify the hottest
a lead’s lifecycle, which starts after the initial
leads for sales, or lead-to-account matching
capture in any campaign, and ends once the
to match new leads to existing accounts to
lead is either converted to an opportunity or
ensure sales teams don’t waste their time
routed to some other appropriate follow-up.
chasing leads from accounts already in play.
But along the way, marketers need to perform
These processes increase sales productivity
crucial operations to get leads ready for follow-
and mean a higher win rate overall.
up. Each of these operations comes with its own
important steps - and its own baggage that can • Lead routing - After your leads are properly
slow down the process: segmented, operations professionals need to
route the hottest leads to their sales teams.
• Lead list uploads - After capturing leads from
After matching leads to accounts, marketers Not all firms respond quickly enough to leads.
any source, marketers first need to upload
can then assign the hottest leads to sales
their leads to their system of record, such as
team members that own those accounts, route
their marketing automation platform (MAP)
warm leads to sales development reps (SDR)
to set the stage for follow-up and additional
for outbound follow-up, or send cooler leads to
campaigns.
nurture programs.
• Lead enrichment - Once leads are loaded
Every step in this lifecycle is important.
into the system, marketers need to ensure
Unfortunately, many marketing teams
each lead is fully-formed and contains
experience challenges at one stage or another.
sufficient data for follow-up. (The hottest
Breakages at any of these stages can lead to
lead in the world isn’t actionable if it’s
painful delays that make you less likely to ever
missing key information like company, title or
speak with a decision maker, and make it even
phone number.) Ideally, this also includes a
harder for your sales team to turn those costly
seamless transfer of lead data from your MAP
leads into closed-won deals.
to your CRM. Only about half of marketers are actually
taking action on integrating their data.

4
What causes breakdowns about half are doing anything about it[7]. Here’s time are you spending on manual processes
the problem: your most important marketing daily, such as vetting lead spreadsheets, or
in the lead lifecycle? applications probably aren’t seamlessly copy-pasting lead data from one source to
integrated to the customized use cases you another? Manual lead management processes
Here are some of the most prominent challenges
need for your organization. This means your cause many challenges, like introducing
that prevent marketers from following up with
most important lead data remains locked human error, not to mention eating up tons of
leads fast enough? Within 5 minutes?:
up within each of your apps. Without robust time, which means your response time gets
• Siloed data - A recent survey of 400 executives integrations, none of your individual apps can longer and makes you significantly less likely
found that 87% of companies feel their data is provide important insights on the full picture to convert.
siloed among different sources[5] - locked up in of how your leads engaged with you...and the
So how can marketers tackle these challenges
various applications or databases with no way best way to follow up.
without having to resort to time-consuming,
to take action on it. This is frequently the case
• Process breakdowns - Research suggests error-prone manual work?
for marketers, whose lead and customer data
that 60% of sales professionals spend at least
locked up in their MAP isn’t necessarily synced
an hour on manual data entry daily. How much
with data in their CRM, outbound solution,
or elsewhere. Not having unified, synced
data leads to constant lead management
headaches, including duplicate lead lists that
incorrectly inflate lead counts, routing leads
at the wrong stage to the wrong destination, or
accidentally continuing to contact leads that
have opted out.

• Poor integrations - One of the most common

causes of data silos is a lack of robust
integrations - connections among software
apps at the API level - among marketers’ tech
stacks. While some surveys find that 97%
of marketers believe tech integrations are More than 60% of sales professionals spend at least an hour on
important for growth[6], others show that only manual data entry daily.

5
Section 2: The Key Technology to Automating the Lead Lifecycle

The Key Technology to Automating the Lead Lifecycle

Solving lead management challenges with a General Automation Platform

Thankfully, there’s a better way to solve lead • Sophisticated automation: GAPs automate • Scalability: The best GAPs scale with your
management challenges and plug up leaks in processes among multiple cloud apps, such team’s data usage and needs, and are built
your marketing funnel. (Without committing as setting a process to automatically update to help you collaborate with your team, not
more hours to mind-numbing manual lead information and trigger appropriate bottleneck your progress by limiting access to
spreadsheet work.) campaigns in CRM, outbound email individual connectors or individual users.
automation, and other apps whenever leads
Marketers from around the world are using Let’s explore how this new technology is already
engage with your campaigns or website. The
General Automation Platforms (GAP) to unsilo helping marketers successfully automate
best GAPs have flexible logical operators such
their data, deeply integrate their marketing important lead management processes.
as if/then conditionals, looping, and branching
apps, and automate key processes to cut out that help you build sophisticated, multi-step
the manual errors and move faster. General workflows to do exactly what you need with
automation platforms have these capabilities: your leads.

• Full API integration: GAPs can connect • Ease of use: Another important feature to
any cloud-based app (including MAP, CRM, look for is a completely visual, user-friendly
outbound, webinar, database, project builder. One that lets anyone - not just
management, and many others) at the API engineers - easily build workflows to process
integration level. APIs are the fastest, most and upload lead lists, route enriched leads
efficient way that cloud-based software to the right owners, and execute customized
communicates with other software, and the follow-up - faster, without errors, and without
best GAPs deeply connect applications to flow
having to code.
data even from highly customized instances.

6
Section 3: Lead List Uploads

Lead List Uploads: Kick off the Lead Lifecycle Faster

Why automate lead list uploads? Speed, efficiency, and reliable lead data

As we now know, the speed of lead follow-up

is one of the most important factors in driving
more conversions. And in the lifecycle of leads
that begins after capture and includes lead
enrichment, lead-to-account matching, and
lead routing, uploading lead lists is the very
first step in the process. Until your leads are
actually ingested into your marketing stack, you
can’t enrich them, segment them, or route them
to sales.

If you are manually formatting, de-duplicating,

collating, and uploading your lead lists, there’s a
good chance the people on your marketing team
responsible for the process aren’t very happy
about it. (They may even be chanting “Down with
the Data Loader!” once you’re out of earshot.
Next time you’re on your way out of the office,
You’ve probably seen this screen before. It’s probably not a welcome sight. We’re sorry.
listen carefully.)

7
However, since marketing teams are always on How to automatically A General Automation Platform (GAP) is
the hunt for new leads, most teams source their built specifically to integrate cloud-based
leads from multiple channels, including email, ingest lead lists into applications like your MAP, CRM, outbound email
social (paid and unpaid), search (again, paid your stack automation, and others. GAPs also automate the
and unpaid), events, webinars, and many others. entire process to take place whenever you need,
The process never ends, and it often means As we’ve covered, the biggest barriers between such as an instant response to any incoming
painstaking manual work double-checking and you and error-free lead list uploads are: lead, or to process in batches on a regular
vetting lead data spreadsheets. schedule. The best ones also have advanced
• Data issues (errors, formatting, etc.)
helpers to seamlessly sync, cleanse, and flow
Some estimates suggest that companies spend
• No robust integrations to sync data across data, and can even accept lead lists in a variety
upwards of 40 hours per month processing leads
apps, error-free of different ways, such as via FTP, webhooks, or
for upload[8]. As we mentioned earlier, letting even submitting them via email (as we’ll cover in
leads sit for as little as one hour makes you 7x • Manual spreadsheet wrangling our example below).
less likely to ever speak with a decision maker,
and puts your sales team that much farther from • Repetitive field mapping Let’s go over exactly how to automate lead list
turning any of those costly leads into actual uploads with a GAP.
closed-won deals.

What if you could automatically complete every step of this process in minutes, not hours?

8
Part I: Automating lead • CSV Processor: This step uses an advanced Part III: Creating leads
helper that processes CSV files. Since each
list uploads lead in the CSV will have its own row with and triggering follow-up
Here’s the first leg of an automated workflow in a
information including first name, last name, campaigns
email address, and other details, the helper
GAP that automates the lead upload process:
begins the process of pulling the lead data, The final part of our journey creates the
• Email trigger: The process starts with an row-by-row, from the submitted spreadsheet. uploaded leads within our MarTech stack and
email trigger whenever someone emails a new begins the follow-up process:
lead list in CSV format to an email address
Part II: Loading in leads
specific to this workflow. The sender could
be a member of the sales team uploading the row-by-row
spreadsheet from their badge scans after
The next part of our automated workflow loads
an eventful day at a conference, a marketing
in lead data stored in our CSV file row-by-row:
operations manager pulling in leads from
a successful campaign, a third party lead • Loop helper: The loop helper iteratively runs
vendor, or even an external contractor through repeated processes until they’re
submitting manually-enriched leads. complete. In this case, it uploads row after row
of leads from the submitted CSV file.
• Create lead: This workflow step creates a new
• Text helper(s): The last two steps here are text lead record in the marketing platform (in this
helpers that verify and properly format the case, Marketo).
lead owner field.
• Request campaign: Finally, the workflow
triggers appropriate campaign follow-up
within Marketo.

This workflow runs within minutes and lets us

take in lead lists from any source and rapidly
upload them into our system to create new
• Check CSV: This step uses an automation lead records for follow-up. Read how sales
helper to verify that lead data is properly engagement leader Outreach automates lead
formatted for upload. list uploads to save hundreds of hours per year.

9
Section 4: Lead Enrichment

Lead Enrichment: Complete Lead Data for Faster

Follow-Up The key to clean, reliable data that means more wins
Lead enrichment is another important step valuable leads. (This is part of the reason bad to tackle this problem, matching leads based
in the lead management process across the data costs companies an estimated $3 trillion on email domain, company name, and other
full marketing lifecycle for leads. If you’ve ever annually in the US.[10]) information. Research suggests that 90%
reviewed a list of your company’s leads after of companies use at least two different
a campaign, you’ve probably seen the telltale Your options: Use lead enrichment providers[11] since each vendor has
gaps in lead details - first name, last name,
company name, phone number, company size,
enrichment solutions a unique dataset.

address, or any other fields you need to qualify and/or manual data • Manual lead enrichment: Another common
practice for marketers is to utilize a manual lead
and route leads according to your business enrichment enrichment service, paying human researchers
priorities/rules.
around the globe to fill in the gaps that your
Trying to manually enrich your own leads
You can’t just ignore those incomplete or enrichment solutions couldn’t match.[12]
yourself isn’t practical. It’s a time-consuming
unenriched leads. They cost your business process that would require you to play detective, So, getting your incomplete leads enriched
time and money to capture. And they could scouring company websites, Google, and tends to be a matter of using a lead enrichment
still become high-value opportunities. But you individual LinkedIn and social media profiles. solution, manual lead enrichment, or both.
can’t act on them if they’re missing important Seems simple enough.
data. To make matters more challenging, That’s why it’s common for marketers to look for
anywhere from 20-25% of your contact external help. There are, of course, two primary But lead enrichment poses another challenge
database decays every year[9]. Why? People who options: that isn’t as easy to deal with.
have engaged with your company may change
• Lead enrichment solutions: Excellent tools
jobs. Their company may move. And so on. Not
such as Clearbit, Datafox, DiscoverOrg, and
having fully-formed lead data can slow, if not
D&B Optimizer use sophisticated software
completely halt, your ability to follow up with

10
How to flow enriched other app that needs enriched leads, you’re such as chat messaging, to ensure you have an
looking at a much less fun alternative. That’s engaging, personalized experience the next time
lead data to the rest of right, manually importing spreadsheets, a your prospects visit you.
your stack time-consuming and error-prone process. And

There’s still the matter of getting those enriched

as we mentioned in our earlier article about Example use case:
leads back out to the rest of your marketing and
lead management, taking longer to follow up
with leads drastically reduces your chances to
Enriching Intercom users in
revenue apps. convert them. bulk with Clearbit
How to automate the
You need to flow those enriched leads into The messaging platform Intercom is handy for
your marketing automation platform (MAP) for interacting immediately with both customers
follow-up campaigns into your CRM for sales flow of enriched data into and prospects. But all customer messaging
record-keeping, to your messaging platform to your stack is most effective when you’re working from
ensure customer conversations are based on refreshed, enriched data that’s up to date. With
up-to-date data, and to many other destinations To review, the challenges that stand between you a General Automation Platform, it’s possible to
within your tech stack. and getting enriched leads into the rest of your pull in a list of all people you’ve engaged with
stack are: in Intercom, enrich their lead data as needed,
Traditionally, there have only been two ways to
then update leads in Intercom to ensure your
get them there: • Potential lack of native integrations from your
lead data is in sync even within your messaging
system of record (CRM, MAP)
• Native integrations - Most enrichment tools platform. Here’s how.
have native integrations - pre-built, out-of- • Potential lack of native integrations among all
the-box connections - to popular software your additional apps
apps. While these can be useful, they often
• Lack of support for your custom business
lack the custom functionality you need for
needs, such as custom field mapping
tasks specific to your business, like mapping
data to custom fields. Also, there probably GAPs are built to solve these problems and
won’t be native integrations for all the apps in flow data, like enriched leads, freely among
your stack. Which means you’re left with... your CRM, MAP, and other applications. They
• Manual work - If you don’t have a customized can even, as in the example below, flow this
integration from your enrichment tool to every lead data out to different marketing channels,

11
Part I: Inventory of Part II: Confirming
messaging platform users enrichment status
Here’s the first part of an automated workflow The second part of this automated workflow
in a GAP that automates the syncing of pulls up the leads from Intercom and ascertains
enriched leads to a messaging platform, in this whether they’ve already been enriched.
case, Intercom:
• Intercom - list users: This operation pulls up
• Manual Trigger: The process starts with an on- the full list of leads currently in Intercom.
demand trigger to kick off the initial steps to • Loop helper: This loop helper iteratively checks
pull all existing Intercom leads for enrichment. each user that this automated workflow has
(Note: With a General Automation Platform, found in Intercom for updated, enriched info.
this could just as easily be a scheduled trigger
that runs this update on a monthly, weekly, • Object helper: This step ascertains whether
daily, or hourly basis.) the lead contains email and other enrichment
information.
• Intercom - count users: The next operation
reaches into the integrated Intercom instance Boolean if/then helper: This step then starts a
and pulls up a list of the total number of all follow-up loop for Intercom leads that are, in fact,
leads in Intercom. missing lead data. If the loop ascertains that a
lead is missing data, it passes that lead to the
next step to be enriched. (If the lead is already
enriched, the process more or less ends here.)

12
Part III: Enrich leads with • Intercom - update user: The final step in this
process then flows any updated leads directly
Clearbit and update within into Intercom to update them within the
Intercom Intercom instance.

The final leg of our automated workflow enriches You can create and run workflows like this
any leads that need it, then updates the in minutes, rapidly enriching and syncing
enriched leads in Intercom. all Intercom leads on the spot. Read how
DigitalOcean enriches data with geolocation
• Clearbit - Get enrichment info: For any leads information from its customer data platform.
found to be “true” (not enriched), the workflow
pulls up all relevant company info (including
company, location, company website URL, and
any missing contact information) to append as
needed.

• Get attributes: This helper compares the

missing attributes between the previous
lead info in Intercom and the enriched data
available in Clearbit and fills in the gaps.

13
Section 5: Lead-to-account matching

Lead-to-Account Matching: Segmentation and Smarketing

Productive sales efforts vs. dead ends

Lead-to-account matching is a subtle but Person At Your Company].” There are several with the wrong person, causing high-value
important way to tighten sales and marketing issues that might cause this problem: “new” opportunities to stall.
alignment and increase sales productivity, as leads might appear that actually roll up to an
These problems are costly at the enterprise
well as a key component of account-based active opportunity that belongs to a different
level, where deals frequently involve a
marketing (ABM). Lead-to-account matching sales team member; partner-targeted leads
committee of 6-7 decision-makers[13], which
is easy to define: An automated process that that should belong to your company’s partner
means an increasingly higher likelihood of
matches (and filters out) any incoming leads to channel erroneously end up in front of sales;
losing deals with longer delays. Delays can
existing accounts. It prevents your sales team leads from target account lists from ABM or
also significantly change the impact of your
from actively prospecting leads that are already outbound campaigns also erroneously end up
marketing budget on sales pipeline and
part of accounts that are either already part of in the wrong place; and in some cases, leads
marketing return on investment (ROI), as well
active opportunities or are already customers. might be duplicates.
as on sales productivity.
Sadly, this functionality is typically limited
Prospecting the wrong accounts takes up
in most cases, particularly within standard
hours your sales team could’ve spent pursuing
marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and
net-new opportunities (or legitimate account
other broad marketing solutions that offer no
expansion opps). Reports suggest that although
customization or flexibility.
the top sales priority for 75% of companies is
Sales professionals pitching to existing still, predictably, closing more deals, 48% of
accounts is obviously an embarrassing mistake companies are concerned with improving the
that leads to confused prospects or customers efficiency of the sales funnel. This includes
who might reply, “yes, we already know your making sure the leads your sales team receives
company and are talking to [Some Other aren’t dead ends, or that they don’t end up

14
Why sales productivity
matters: Minimize
data issues, maximize
prospecting
You probably don’t need an explanation on why
your sales team’s time is valuable. Your sales
team would ideally prefer to focus 100% of their
time on prospecting and closing deals. Data
errors, like accidentally prospecting leads that
are already in pipeline, waste the limited time
of sales reps, who are already struggling with
The #1 sales concern: More wins, of course. #2? Funnel efficiency.
other time-consuming processes that eat up
their prospecting hours. In fact, 35% of surveyed
sales reps spend about an hour a day on data
entry, rather than actually selling. (Another 27%
spend upwards of one to two hours or more.)

So how can you solve this problem?

35% of reps spend about an hour a day on data entry. Not selling. Image courtesy Hubspot.

15
The past: Use a lead-to- verify every new lead. And they know that 50%
of sales go to the vendor that responds first.
account matching tool,
or try your luck at manual How to build custom CRM
matching integrations to automate
Unfortunately, up until very recently, there lead-to-account matching
weren’t many options to tackle this problem.
Again, the biggest problems that arise in
• Use a lead-to-account-matching tool: While managing lead-to-account matching are:
there are some tools out there that can Example use case: Lead-
• Point solutions might handle matching well,
handle the task of lead-to-account matching,
but can’t do much else to-account matching
they sadly can’t handle all the other data-
related tasks that not only cost sales teams
within Salesforce
• Lack of native integrations to other apps leads
thousands of hours every year, but also cause to delays before and after matching • Most companies use a CRM such as
expensive delays in getting leads to sales in Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar, or
the first place, such as lead enrichment and • Manually digging through accounts slows
Oracle CX as a system-of-record to store lead
lead routing. In other words, an out-of-the-box sales follow-up and jeopardizes deals
and account info and record sales stages.
lead-to-account matching tool might solve one Unfortunately, many marketing and sales
• Hours of wasted time your sales team could’ve
piece of the puzzle, but it won’t solve the larger teams find themselves spending far too much
spent winning deals
problem of sales reps wasting hours wrangling time popping in and out of their CRM instance
data. They also lack native integrations to A GAP solves these problems by offering robust to manually update lead and account info as
continue the lead lifecycle process once integrations with any cloud-based app, and part of non-revenue processes, like verifying
matching is complete. the ability to automate processes like lead-to- whether a seemingly “new” lead is already
account matching, enrichment, uploads, and part of an existing account. Using a General
• Try to handle the problem manually: You
others. Let’s walk through an example of using a Automation Platform, you can automate lead-
could certainly ask your sales reps to be more
GAP to automate lead-to-account matching in to-account matching and never waste your
conscientious about confirming new leads
Salesforce, complete with options for fuzzy name sales teams’ time (or get confused customer
against existing accounts. But you know their
matching and filtering out probable spam emails. emails) again.
job isn’t to dig through account structures to

16
Part I: Identify new leads • Text helper - Was This a Test Lead?: This step whether it includes any common spam email
uses a quick, 100% code-free text query to strings (like “[email protected]”) or personal
on demand check whether this lead was a test run by the email domains, which will determine if the
marketing operations team. workflow can use the email domain to check
The first leg of an automated workflow in a
for a match or not.
GAP that automates lead-to-account matching • Boolean If/Then: If the lead was a test, the
starts with an on-demand trigger that begins workflow stops here. However, if this was not a • Boolean If/Then - Worth Searching?: This step
the process as soon as a new lead comes in: test lead, the workflow proceeds to the next leg. compares email domain and company name
against the above spam names and generic
Part II: Compile basic emails lists, as well as making sure those

lead info and confirm values are not null, to determine whether
these values should be used to search for a
follow-up value matching account.

The second section of this automated workflow

confirms the lead contains a legitimate email and
begins a test to see whether it’s worth trying to
match it against our CRM’s existing account list.

• Data Helper - Set Lead ID: This step uses a

data helper to temporarily store and compile
• New Lead Captured: The process starts with lead info to be queried by the rest of the
a trigger that begins whenever a new lead is workflow in the following steps.
captured in the MAP (e.g. Marketo, Eloqua, or
• Text Helpers - Company Name / Email Domain
HubSpot).
/ Domain -> Company: These text helpers split
• Salesforce - Get New Lead Info: Next, the and parse the contact info of the lead to check
workflow pulls up the lead’s information in the these values against existing values in the CRM.
CRM, in this case, Salesforce.
• List Helpers - Spam Names / Generic Emails:
These list-based helpers then quickly screen
• the lead’s contact information to determine

17
Part III: Convert leads • Salesforce - Company Name Fuzzy Match: Part IV: Determine the best
This step performs a fuzzy match of the lead’s
that belong to existing company name against existing account follow-up for leads “worth
accounts based on names. pursuing”
company name matching • Boolean If/Then - Account Found?: This true/ The “false” leg of the previous Boolean takes
false Boolean step checks to see if a match care of leads that had an email domain we didn’t
The “false” leg of the previous Boolean loop
was found. If it was, the next step will convert want to use to match to accounts, so we simply
uses the company name only (not the email
the lead. Otherwise, it will do nothing. used the Company Name field to try to find a
domain which it found to be “not worth
match. The “true” leg runs a search in CRM to see
searching”) to check if the lead matches to • Salesforce - Convert Lead: Finally, if this lead’s
whether the contact exists in Salesforce, using
existing accounts and if so, to convert them to a company name fuzzy-matched to an existing
the email domain.
Contact on that Account. account, this step converts the lead to a
Contact on that account.

NOTE: Again, while the workflow in this example

ends at this step, the best GAPs can set multiple
steps or follow-up workflows to sequentially
cascade into each other. A common best
practice for workflows of this type is to route
enriched leads into a lead-to-account matching
workflow like this, then trigger a subsequent
workflow for lead assignment and routing to
sales. GAP power users might also build in
account stage lookup steps that automatically
• Salesforce - Find Contacts: The workflow
update the lead’s status if that particular
queries Salesforce to see determine whether
account has not progressed to further segment
the lead’s email domain exists on other
leads and ensure they only route leads from
contacts within the CRM.
active accounts to sales.

18
• Boolean If/Then - Contact Found?: The next • List Helper - Find Exact: This operation
step figures out what to do with the lead performs an exact match query against the
whether a matching email domain was found, lead’s email address.
or not.
• Boolean If/Then - Exact Match?: If the

Part V: Determine whether condition is determined to be “true” - that is,

the exact same email address already exists
the lead already exists and within CRM as a Contact, then no action is
close out the process taken. The workflow has determined that the
lead is already part of an account and doesn’t
Since the workflow has now determined the need to be converted.
lead’s email domain does match other contacts
in Salesforce, it now needs to determine whether • Salesforce - Convert Lead: If the Boolean loop
the exact same email address exists already. determines that this lead does not, in fact, • Salesforce - Company Name Fuzzy Match:
already exist in CRM, it then converts the lead As in a previous step, the workflow takes an
to the matched account. apparently “new” lead and performs a fuzzy
name match to confirm whether the lead’s
Part V: If the lead is “new,” company exists in CRM.
take appropriate action • Boolean If/Then - Fuzzy Found?: The workflow
and close out the process then determines which actions to take if there
is, in fact, a fuzzy match.
The workflow has determined whether the lead
is “worth” pursuing based on having a “good” • If “True” - Salesforce - Convert Lead: If the
email domain, but it previously needed to workflow determines there is, in fact, a
figure out whether, via Boolean Loop, it exists in company match for this new lead, it then calls
Salesforce. Above, we covered what the workflow Salesforce to convert the lead and ends the
does if it does, in fact, find the contact in CRM. In process here.
this leg of the workflow, we cover what happens
if the lead’s email domain is not already
recorded in CRM:

19
NOTE: Again, this lead-to-account-matching Part VI: (The End!) Convert • Salesforce - Convert Lead: If, as the result of
workflow is just for example. It would be the previous Boolean loop, the workflow finds
possible to have the next steps after this route if an exact match is found, an exact match for the lead’s company name, it
the lead to sales. and close out the process then converts the lead within CRM and closes
out the process. If it fails to find an exact
• If “False” - Salesforce - Exact Match? Since the workflow has already determined match (after having previously failed to also
[Domain]: Having failed to make a fuzzy that the lead is “worth” pursuing, that it does find a fuzzy match), it does nothing, having
company match for this new lead, it then not already exist within Salesforce, and that its effectively determined that it’s not possible to
performs an exact match query in Salesforce. company name does not have a fuzzy match in convert at this time.
Salesforce, the workflow closes out the process
• Boolean If/Then - Exact Domain Match
based on whether the lead’s company name has NOTE: Again, while this example lead-to-
Found?: The workflow then runs another if/
an exact match in Salesforce. account matching workflow ends here, with a
then step to determine which action should be GAP, it could easily contain additional steps,
taken after running an exact match query for or cascade into a different workflow, that
the lead’s company in Salesforce. then continues the follow-up process, such as
routing leads to sales via a round-robin process
or divvied up by other business rules like
territory assignments.

Many rapidly-growing companies and

enterprises build automated workflows like this
to instantly fuzzy-match and exact-match leads
to accounts. Advertising leader AdRoll uses a
GAP to integrate leads from multiple sources,
enrich them, and prepare them for sales, driving
13% more sales appointments.

20
Section 6: Lead routing

Lead routing: Getting the right leads to

the right people in sales
Lead routing is one of the last parts of the lead How to route leads: (And once you’ve routed your leads, you need
management lifecycle. It’s also very important, to kick off the follow-up process, which usually
especially as your company, sales team, and Built-in features vs. runs through entirely different apps. Unless
lead count scale. Lead routing is the process point solutions your follow-up apps for outbound are directly
of sending the right leads, once you’re done connected to your CRM and can accept a direct
with lead uploads, lead enrichment, and have Not having proper lead routing means leads get flow of routed lead data, you’ve got more delays
properly organized and segmented them (such assigned in error, or are not re-assigned after and more extra work ahead of you.)
as by lead-to-account matching), to the right having lost a previous owner - in both cases, this
means missed opportunities for your business. For rapidly-growing firms and enterprises that
people on your sales team for follow-up.
That means headaches for your operations have thousands (if not millions) of leads to
Lead routing tends to be an automated process team as they manually re-assign leads based on manage, manual routing just isn’t feasible. In
based on lead assignment rules set by your territory, account size, product line, or your sales the past, this often left marketing and sales
operations team. Most commonly, operations organization’s structure. As your company scales operations teams with limited options:
teams using CRMs like Salesforce will use and lead volume grows, these delays cost your
• CRM built-in lead assignment features: Your
Salesforce lead assignment rules they set company real revenue by delaying follow-up and
CRM often acts as a system of record for sales
based on a variety of factors, such as account providing a poor sales experience to prospects
account information, as well as a strategic
owner, territory designations, or in some cases, who got a duplicate call or email...or none at all.
home base for planning, forecasting budgets,
by random draw. In addition, lead assignment handled manually
and assigning sales territories. However, built-
within CRM can eventually become extremely
in lead routing features tend to be limited,
complex as you scale to larger sales teams
with simple assignment rules that offer little
with more members, more territories, and more
to no customization. CRMs also tend to have
custom business rules.

21
 limited integrations - the ability to directly How to automate lead Example use case: Routing
connect to and pass data between additional
software apps, such as marketing platforms or routing, without the leads to SDR team plus
outbound email sequencing. operational headaches auto-sequencing
• Lead routing point solutions: There are some To summarize, the challenges you may be This somewhat simplified example goes
very good lead routing point solutions on facing with lead routing right now include: through a routing process kicked off by pulling
the market that focus on this important use in lead info from a webhook - a notification of a
case, but sadly, as with CRMs, they frequently • Limited routing options in your CRM or source web-based event, in this case, a website visit.
offer limited (or no) integrations for the other of truth In this process, the GAP takes the information
applications in your stack. Again, this means from a website visit and then verifies it against
• Limited integrations between your CRM and
updating routed leads will require manual lead data within the marketing automation
other revenue apps
work. In addition, as mentioned above, unless platform (MAP), such as Marketo, Eloqua, or
your point solutions have direct integrations to • Limited integrations between a lead routing HubSpot. The GAP then randomly assigns the
other apps like your outbound email solution, point solution and other apps lead among sales development representatives
you’re still stuck with delays. (SDR), and after the assignment, automatically
• Operational headaches as you manually re- loads that lead into an outbound email
assign improperly-routed leads sequencing tool, such as Outreach or Salesloft,
to kick off the first sales touch.
You can solve these problems with the
sophisticated logical operators and flexible API NOTE: The example shown here is purposely
integrations of a GAP to set custom logic for streamlined for educational purposes. A more-
your sales team across product lines, account sophisticated workflow could easily incorporate
size, territory, or other modifiers, and flow additional custom logic, such as sequencing
routed leads among any other applications, follow-up actions by qualification criteria, or by
not just your CRM, but also to outbound email which offers leads engaged with. This type of
sequencing to kick off the sales cycle. workflow could also segment leads by account
size or other criteria to flow certain leads to
automated sequences while routing other leads
directly to SDRs for manual follow-up.

22
Part I: Identify new leads • FALSE - Set Owner Data: If the Boolean
operator determines a “false” outcome - that
and begin lead assignment the lead owner field is not set properly - it
process corrects the owner field.

The first steps in our journey involve identifying • TRUE - Random Number: If the Boolean
an inbound lead, verifying against MAP records, operator determines a “true” outcome - that
and beginning the assignment process. the lead owner field is properly set for being
sales-ready - it generates a random number
to decide which member of the SDR team gets
the lead assignment.

• Workflow Branch: This branching helper then • Data Helper - Load Owner Data: Next, the
opens up branching logic to account for the workflow, having determined the owner of this
multiple members of the SDR team. lead, loads the owner’s identity to transfer into
outbound sequencing, in this case, provided by

Part II: Round Robin Outreach.

leads to SDRs and begin • Outreach - Find Prospect: Next, the workflow

outbound process loads the lead owner into Outreach and locates
that lead’s data within the Outreach platform.
The next leg of this automated workflow
• Webhook: The process starts with a webhook-
based trigger that begins whenever a new lead
assigns the lead to the appropriate SDR, then Part III: Confirm lead exists
is captured and validates it against records
automatically kicks off the outbound email
sequencing process.
in sequencing and begin
within the marketing platform.
outbound outreach
• Data Helper - Assign to: These steps in the
• Boolean If/Then: The workflow then workflow branch accept the data from the The final part of this automated GAP workflow
determines whether the owner field for the Random Number helper in our previous steps. briefly determines whether this lead’s
lead is properly filled out at sales-ready Depending on the random number generated, information exists in Outreach, then places the
status. the lead either gets assigned to SDR Jack or lead into a sequence to begin outbound.
SDR Jill.

23
 • Outreach - Add to Sequence: Having created
a new record for this lead in Outreach, it then
adds that lead to the appropriate outbound
sequence and starts reaching out to this lead.

Revenue teams already use GAPs to automate

important processes like lead routing and even
use sophisticated business logic to respond
faster and with personalized messaging to drive
higher response rates. Read about how some
companies use GAPs to personalize emails with
prospects’ Google search terms here.

• Boolean If/Then - Prospect Found?: This

Boolean step checks to see if the lead already
has an existing record in the outbound
sequencing tool, Outreach.

• TRUE: Outreach - Add to Sequence: If the lead

already has a record in Outreach, it adds that
lead to the appropriate outbound sequence
and automatically starts reaching out to this
lead.

• FALSE: Outreach - Create New Prospect: If

the Boolean determined that this lead doesn’t
already exist in Outreach, the workflow creates
a new record for this lead within Outreach.

24
Takeaways

Takeaways
You should now have a more-complete
understanding of the challenges across the full
lead lifecycle:

• Lead uploads

• Lead enrichment

• Lead-to-account matching

• Lead routing

You’ve also got blueprints into how you can

automate each of these important processes to
get rid of messy manual work and respond faster
to leads, increasing your sales team’s ability to
follow up more quickly and win more deals.

To learn more about how you can start

automating your lead management processes,
please request a General Automation Platform
demo.

25
Sources Cited
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view,” https://econsultancy.com/why-data- org/2016/09/bad-data-costs-the-u-s-3-
2. Fronetics, “50% of sales go to the vendor that integration-is-vital-for-marketers-trying-to- trillion-per-year
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of-sales-go-to-the-vendor-that-responds- 11. TOPO Blog, “Sales Development Technology:
first/ 7. eMarketer, “Most Marketers Are Integrating The Stack Emerges,” https://blog.topohq.
Data Across Their Tech Stacks,” https://www. com/sales-development-technology-the-
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Online Sales Leads,” https://hbr.org/2011/03/ integrating-data-across-their-tech-stacks
the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads 12. Tray.io Blog, “How to Speed Up Manual Lead
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4. Drift, “The Drift Lead Response Report,” Generation Statistics That Will Blow Your io/blog/automate-manual-lead-enrichment
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report-2018/ 13. Harvard Business Review, “The New Sales
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Imperative,” https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-
will-blow-mind-01968522
5. Forbes, “New Forbes Insights Report Shows new-sales-imperative
Organizations Feel Customer Data is Siloed 9. HubSpot, “Database Decay Simulation,”
and Exclusionary,” https://www.forbes.com/ https://www.hubspot.com/database-decay
sites/forbespr/2018/06/20/new-forbes-
insights-report-shows-organizations-feel-
customer-data-is-siloed-and-exclusionary/

26
About this Guide

Written by

Andrew Park
Director of Content
Tray.io

Additional contributors:

Loren Robeck Sarah Nelson

Marketing Operations Manager Senior Director of Demand
Tray.io Generation
Tray.io

27
Contact Tray.io
Telephone: +1-415-418-3570
Email: [email protected]
Website: tray.io
Blog: tray.io/blog

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