Accurate and efficient routing plays a crucial role in delivering exceptional sales or customer experiences. When objects, such as leads or inquiries, reach the right person at the right time, it leads to customer satisfaction and improved business outcomes. For instance, responding quickly to prospect inquiries is mission critical for closing more deals. Ensuring that accounts and cases are promptly handled by the right Customer Success Manager (CSM) builds trust and fosters strong relationships that result in customer retention and upsell opportunities. Recognizing this, savvy companies have either built their own routing workflows or invested in routing software to automate this process.
Common Routing Challenges
While automated routing works great in theory, a routing system that is independent of the rest of your GTM system presents various challenges. Constant resource changes, driven by factors such as rapid growth or staff turnover, make it challenging to keep routing systems up to date. For instance, when an AE departs the company, their territory and quota needs to be reassigned, requiring corresponding changes in the routing logic. If the routing logic is built into Salesforce workflows, it is extremely difficult to update. These workflows are likely controlled by IT and changing them can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. It’s not uncommon for these changes to take days, weeks, or even months.
Using a third-party routing tool automates many routing tasks, however updating the routing tool logic to align with new territory assignments still requires manual effort. Considering that many organizations use more than one routing tool, this can add to the workload and complexity.
These challenges lead to gaps, tension, and finger-pointing between Sales and Marketing. The plan often becomes out of sync with operations, resulting in misrouted or even lost leads. The time it takes to make logic updates also leads to significant sales downtime. All of these issues negatively impact the customer experience and hinder the company’s ability to achieve its revenue goals.
Territory-Based Routing to the Rescue
Territories serve as the foundation of your GTM plan. When routing is in lock step with your territories it makes it easy to manage any changes to your GTM plan, improving RevOps efficiency and Sales productivity. Achieving this alignment becomes possible when territories and routing are integrated in one Territory Management platform.
A Territory Management platform enables RevOps to keep territories and routing in complete alignment because routing logic is tied to territories or teams rather than individuals. Then routing can be easily managed through rules-based automation. For example, organizations can establish policies that automatically route new leads, opportunities, cases, and accounts to territories based on factors such as role, capacity, expertise, rotation, or any other criteria relevant to their business. As a result, any changes to the GTM plan trigger automatic updates to the routing process without requiring additional effort from the Operations team. Organizations that use territory-based routing realize significant efficiencies that keep operations running smoothly and minimize sales downtime.
Furthermore, a Territory Management platform also enables RevOps to set and track Service Level Agreement (SLA) policies for routing. This functionality ensures that routing goals are met consistently. In cases, where goals are not achieved, the system automatically sends notifications or reroutes the object based on the criteria of your choosing. This proactive approach enhances accountability, creates seamless coordination between sales and marketing, and ensures a superior customer experience.
In summary, utilizing Territory Management software for territory-based routing delivers numerous advantages. By tying routing logic to territories or teams, automating routing processes, and providing SLA policy monitoring, businesses can achieve a harmonious alignment between their GTM plan and routing operations. This integration optimizes RevOps efficiency, boosts Sales productivity, and ultimately drives revenue growth.
