Assigning Newly Created/Qualified Leads At Named Accounts

[Anonymous]

I am trying to optimize our lead handoff process, and am wondering how other people in this community manage lead handoff for named accounts/already owned accounts.

Here is the scenario I am challenged by:

A lead at "Company A" becomes qualified and it's time to hand off to sales. Company A is already an owned account in Salesforce -- the account owner is "John". The territory is owned by "Tom" but since that particular company is already owned by John, the lead should go to John. Becuase the lead has not yet been converted, it is not yet associated with that account, so the challenge here is automating lead handoff to the correct named account owner (rather than the territory owner).

I could create a smart campaign with all the named accounts and direct leads at those companies to be assigned to specific account owners. The challenge here is that the territories have changed (and change somewhat frequently), so there are many accounts owned by someone different than what the territory rules might suggest.

I believe there are also tools (such as RingLead) that can help this process.

How are other people managing this?

Thanks!

Steve

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Stephen,

This is what we have designed :

A web service has been developed in SFDC (it can also be done with a trigger) that enables to associate leads with accounts, before they are handed over. The web service is triggered from Marketo via a webhook. Reconciliation is based on geography and domain names in emails, but some other criteria could be considered.

Once a lead is attached to the account, all relevant information is also being pulled to the lead, including the account owner, using formula fields and/or secondary Salesforce workflows.

Based on this info, we just run salesforce workflows to assign the lead to the right person. (it could also be done with a Marketo campaign).

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

And of course, there are some default territory and lead queue assignments that are done when no Named account has been identified.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much Gregoire.

I am not sure if you are available and are able to, but if possible, I'd love to take this offline for a bit more of an in-depth conversation. If possible, I'd love to see technically how this is done in a screen share or using screen shots. Please let me know what you think.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Steve

[Josh_Hill13]

I believe RingLead and LeanData can accomplish this in a similar way that Greg describes, but with less development on your part.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

The other interest of this method is that, once the lead is associated to the account, you can also replace salesforce standard lead conversion with an assistant made of a flow that will enable to reduce errors and make sure that sales do it right.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Gregoire,

What is the Marketo web service triggered by a webhook that you mention in the post?

Rob

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Rob

A web service developed in Salesforce. But not the preferred solution, as it has been more complex to set up than the trigger.

-Greg

[Ed_King]

Stephen,

Full disclosure before I put in my 2 cents. Our company is a LaunchPoint solution partner, but we use Marketo ourselves as well. Our solution is a data automation platform offered as SaaS.

As you point out, you can do this with Marketo but managing frequent changes and all the exceptions is a pain and difficult to scale. Lead-to-account correlation and lead routing is a popular use case a number of customers are using our solution for. The way we approach it is to allow your sales ops team manage a territory spreadsheet where they can manage all the territory and named account mappings with priorities to resolve conflicts. We continuously monitor updates to the account mapping spreadsheet stored in Google Drive and use the latest mapping to route the Marketo leads to the right SF Account. You can set up sequence of routing logic to check for name account first, then default to territory owner, or any other logic your sales team is using. If spreadsheet doesn't work in your environment, we can pull account ownership from SFDC in real-time as well.

If you're interested in seeing how this is done, I'm happy to show you a demo.  Happy New Year!

Ed

[Anonymous]

Ed I am interested in a quick demo if possible. Thanks