Do you allow your sales reps to claim event leads?

[Bryant_Chang]

Do you allow Sales Reps to "claim" event leads that they speak to at events?

I've seen different orgs allow or not allow this...

I see the value for sales to be able to do this, but feels this creates the opportunity for a process/ops nightmare. Especially as your sales org grows.

If your org does allow reps to claim event leads, how have you built this process?

Do you use routing/matching tools like LeanData to support this?

Did you run into other things like, deciding how many they can claim?

Or if you do not not allow, how did you explain to sales or create other incentives for them to support?

Thoughts?

[Josh_Hill13]

What's the use case YOU are trying to solve for?

What do you mean by "claim event leads"? Most firms I've worked at route event leads to the Account, Contact, or Lead Owner per whatever territory rules exist.

If you are setting up something like a Round Robin that is usually better than a free for all.

[Bryant_Chang]

Our current process to assign leads that reps have spoken to at events is very manual.

Goal is to update the process to be more automated, yet allow the functionality of reps to claim those leads.

If a rep has an engaging conversation at our booth, they want to be able to follow up with them even if the current routing rules would not normally assign to that rep.

thoughts?

[Brittini_Smith]

We don't.

We abide by the territory parameters we have set in place. You may have had an engaging meeting with a lead at a conference but you want your customer experience to be with the same salesperson throughout the customer journey. As a customer, I can understand a handoff from an event to my salesperson, but if I were to have the same person and then be handed off at a later time in my customer journey, I would be more annoyed.

[Vladislav_Vagn1]

I agree. One way around this would be to allow the event rep to claim people who are net new to your marketo/SFDC. Existing leads would be unchanged. 

[Bryant_Chang]

Thanks Brittini,

This is the reason we currently allow our business development reps who attend the conference that have conversations at the booth to claim those leads.

If the BDR has a great conversation at an event and promises to follow up with the prospect after the event, they want to be able to be assigned the lead in SFDC.

However, if we abide by the territory parameters/rules, and do not allow them to claim the lead, most likely would go to a different BDR.

[Vladislav_Vagn1]

We do. 

Basically, we have a rule that if the lead is already owned by somebody else and went to your event, you will not get the lead. However, if you are bringing in net new names, then those will be assigned to you if you wish. That way we do not mess up the conversation somebody else might already be having with the prospect.

For events with multiple sales reps, we have a field for "Manual Lead Assignment" where they fill out that column with the reps email address in their excel sheet and then we create a rule in the upload smart campaigns to basically say if email is X, then assign to X person in SFDC.

[Bryant_Chang]

Thanks Vladislav for the feedback.

We have a similar process, but running into maintenance/scalability issues with managing an excel spreadsheet across multiple users and maintaining new users or ones that have left the company in the rule set.

Have you run into similar issues?

[Vladislav_Vagn1]

Yes, unfortunately the drawback of using a manual method is that it is harder to manage.