Yes, there is a better way to assign leads in salesforce

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Yes, There Is a Better Way to Assign Leads in
Salesforce
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• How quickly do your sales reps respond to new web
  leads?
• In 2007, the Lead Response Management Study by
  Dr. James Oldroyd reported that the recommended
  time for following up on a lead is five minutes.

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• Nine years later, InsideSales.com published Best
  Practices for Lead Response Management based on
  Oldroyds study. The five-minute rule still holds
  true. However, the average sales rep takes much
  longer than the recommended time to respond to
  leads.

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• Clearly, it is critical to respond quickly to
  web inquiries. According to a study from
  InsideSales.com, 78 of sales go to the company
  that responds to an inquiry first. And yet, the
  average time a company takes to respond to a lead
  is 40 hours. This gap offers a chance to get
  ahead of the competition by ensuring your lead
  assignment process is automated, fast, and
  accurate.

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• There is no one right way to assign leads. The
  best approach depends on a companys product and
  customer types. To complicate the process, speed
  is not the only criterion for lead assignment.
  Its also important to consider factors like
  territory alignment, existing relationships with
  a customer account, skills and availability of
  the assigned rep, and fairness in lead
  distribution.

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Sending Leads to the Right Rep in Salesforce

• Salesforce includes built-in Lead Assignment
  rules that are useful for small sales teams to
  get started. But the rules have limitations. They
  are not enough to support your organization as it
  grows and the rules become more complex. This
  image shows an example of basic Salesforce lead
  assignment rules.

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• Mid- to large-sized companies need many more
  rules, and entering those rules becomes a
  time-consuming process. In fact, just managing a
  few dozen rules is painful.

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• For example, you might use criteria like these
  to funnel leads to your sales reps
• Location
• Industry
• Company size or revenue
• Product interest
• Lead quality

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• Anne, an awesome rep, handles leads from
  companies in the healthcare industry that have
  revenues of 100 million or more and are located
  in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

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• Implementing that rule would involve entering
  multiple criteria, including a list of ZIP codes
  or county names. The image below shows an example
  of more complex lead assignment rules using
  revenue, industry, and location as the criteria.

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• Its quite typical for a mid-size company to
  create hundreds, sometimes thousands of rules.
  This is especially true with fine-grained
  territory assignments based on ZIP or area codes,
  or for companies doing business internationally.

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• Entering complex rules with point-and-click is
  cumbersome and prone to errors. To make matters
  worse, there is no easy way to test the rules to
  see if they work correctly before activating them.

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• The people who define the rules typically,
  someone in sales operations or the VP of sales
  may not have the tech skills and access to
  validate them. This results in miscommunication
  and more overhead.

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• If reps receive the wrong leads or leads remain
  unassigned, theres no way to figure out what
  happened. The system doesnt keep logs for
  assignments or an audit trail for rule changes.
  It would be valuable to have a monitoring and
  reporting tool to stay on top of whats
  happening, identify any stray leads, and take
  action so leads arent stranded.

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Balancing the Load

• Remember the five-minute rule? Anne may be the
  best rep for XYZ criteria, but it doesnt help
  the company if shes bombarded with too many
  leads and cant quickly follow up on them. Even
  if she has a balanced number of leads, what
  happens if she is at a meeting or out of the
  office when a lead comes in? The clock is
  ticking, and the lead is sitting in Annes queue.

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• Thats where Round Robin and Load Balancing can
  help. Instead of assigning leads to individual
  reps, they can be distributed to members of a
  group. Distribution strategies can vary from a
  basic Round Robin to Weighted Load Balancing.
  They can be combined with assignment caps, checks
  for absent users, or skills-matching.

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Complexity Increases as the Number of Sales Reps
Grows

• A company with dozens of reps has people coming
  and going often enough that the lead assignment
  rules will need frequent updates. On top of that,
  territories periodically change or get re-aligned.

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• Assigning the right person to a lead also
  depends on the current products and business
  lines that are offered. New ones get added, and
  old ones are removed. These changes occur on a
  regular basis in large companies. Acquisitions
  happen less often but when they do, they will
  affect the lead assignment process.

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• Another factor to consider is a team-selling
  setup in an internal sales organization. You may
  also have partners, such as resellers and
  solution providers, added to the mix. In this
  case, you may assign to both an internal rep and
  a partner, or you can choose just one of them.

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How to Turn Complex Lead Assignment Rules into
an Easy-to-Manage Process

• In summary, you want a lead assignment program
  that achieves the following goals
• Qualify the lead to determine which sales rep
  or team is the right one.
• Verify the sales rep is available.
• Ensure that each rep has a fair number of
  assignments.

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• Confirm that someone follows up with the leads
  quickly.
• Make changes to the rules easy, fast, and
  reliable.
• Monitor lead assignments with reporting and
  logs.

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• Confirm that someone follows up with the leads
  quickly.
• Make changes to the rules easy, fast, and
  reliable.
• Monitor lead assignments with reporting and
  logs.

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• The assignment rules in Salesforce are not
  designed to manage this process, and Salesforce
  does not offer Round Robin or Load Balancing
  capabilities. Fortunately, the App Exchange has
  an app like Decisions on Demand to give you
  powerful tools to address these challenges.

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• After setting up the rules, you can test them
  with a built-in Test Console. The unique Excel
  import/export capability makes it easy to update
  large rule sets containing thousands of rules. It
  includes useful distribution options like Round
  Robin and Load Balancing with weights, caps, and
  skills-matching.

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• Decisions on Demand for Salesforce boosts close
  rates, cuts overhead, and reduces errors. With
  this App Exchange app, your team can turn lead
  assignment into a completely automated process.