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5+ Basic Tips to Assigning Leads to Your First Sales Reps
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And now, a few more nuanced thoughts: “Use Going or Chorus or whatever, but you have to listen to them.” Carefully monitor leads per rep. Some reps can handle more leads than others. Notwithstanding round robin, if you are “lead rich”, you may not want to split the volume of leads 50/50.
Segment your leads as soon as you are big enough to, at least into Small Medium + Large. This is often around reps 4-5. Start with round-robin, but as soon as your leads start to bunch into different sized companies — Small, Medium and Large — you want to begin the process of specializing. Some reps will be better with the bigger leads. They have longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, and more complexity in questions and decisions … but also a bigger check size. Get the folks good at high velocity doing the smaller deals, and the folks better at solution sales doing the bigger deals. But you can’t specialize here with 1 or 2 reps. Reps #4 and #5 are usually about as early as you can start to do this. Maybe rep #3. I’m surprised how many SaaS companies wait even until $20m ARR or beyond to do this. “Segment your leads by industry when you are ready.” Promote SDRs quickly. The best source of new account execs are the best SDRs you already have. If you see an SDR quickly being able to close the smallest deals herself, give her a shot. They are already half-trained, after all. One big advantage in the early days is SDRs have an easy and clear promotion path. Later, it will get more crowded.
A few fundamental thoughts on lead routing: “First, start with round-robin. Like almost always.” Segment your leads as soon as you are big enough to, at least into Small Medium + Large. This is often around reps 4-5. Start with round-robin, but as soon as your leads start to bunch into different sized companies — Small, Medium and Large — you want to begin the process of specializing. Some reps will be better with the bigger leads. They have longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, and more complexity in questions and decisions … but also a bigger check size. Get the folks good at high velocity doing the smaller deals, and the folks better at solution sales doing the bigger deals. But you can’t specialize here with 1 or 2 reps. Reps #4 and #5 are usually about as early as you can start to do this. Maybe rep #3. I’m surprised how many SaaS companies wait even until $20m ARR or beyond to do this.
Promote SDRs quickly. The best source of new account execs are the best SDRs you already have. If you see an SDR quickly being able to close the smallest deals herself, give her a shot. They are already half-trained, after all. One big advantage in the early days is SDRs have an easy and clear promotion path. Later, it will get more crowded. “Assign the leads that haven’t been touched quickly enough, or recently enough, to the newest sales pro.” There’s a lot of complexity here, and it makes sense these days to add a full-time sales ops person as early as say, rep #10.
A few fundamental thoughts on lead routing: “First, start with round-robin. Like almost always.” Segment your leads as soon as you are big enough to, at least into Small Medium + Large. This is often around reps 4-5. Start with round-robin, but as soon as your leads start to bunch into different sized companies — Small, Medium and Large — you want to begin the process of specializing. Some reps will be better with the bigger leads. They have longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, and more complexity in questions and decisions … but also a bigger check size. Get the folks good at high velocity doing the smaller deals, and the folks better at solution sales doing the bigger deals. But you can’t specialize here with 1 or 2 reps. Reps #4 and #5 are usually about as early as you can start to do this. Maybe rep #3. I’m surprised how many SaaS companies wait even until $20m ARR or beyond to do this.
A few fundamental thoughts on lead routing: “Territories certainly make sense with field reps who … go to visit customers in person.” Segment your leads as soon as you are big enough to, at least into Small Medium + Large. This is often around reps 4-5. Start with round-robin, but as soon as your leads start to bunch into different sized companies — Small, Medium and Large — you want to begin the process of specializing. Some reps will be better with the bigger leads. They have longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, and more complexity in questions and decisions … but also a bigger check size. Get the folks good at high velocity doing the smaller deals, and the folks better at solution sales doing the bigger deals. But you can’t specialize here with 1 or 2 reps. Reps #4 and #5 are usually about as early as you can start to do this. Maybe rep #3. I’m surprised how many SaaS companies wait even until $20m ARR or beyond to do this.
A few fundamental thoughts on lead routing: “Instead, until you at least have a team of reps, just route the leads automatically, in order.” Segment your leads as soon as you are big enough to, at least into Small Medium + Large. This is often around reps 4-5. Start with round-robin, but as soon as your leads start to bunch into different sized companies — Small, Medium and Large — you want to begin the process of specializing. Some reps will be better with the bigger leads. They have longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, and more complexity in questions and decisions … but also a bigger check size. Get the folks good at high velocity doing the smaller deals, and the folks better at solution sales doing the bigger deals. But you can’t specialize here with 1 or 2 reps. Reps #4 and #5 are usually about as early as you can start to do this. Maybe rep #3. I’m surprised how many SaaS companies wait even until $20m ARR or beyond to do this.
Segment your leads by industry when you are ready. This sometimes can be later, or sometimes earlier. But if, say, 50% of your leads are in insurance and 50% are in technology industries, it can make sense to specialize reps here fairly early. They then can get good at telling prospects what say, Aetna and Cigna did with your product. Or what Google and Facebook did. Don’t do this until you are ready. But even if all the use cases seem similar, there will be important nuances by vertical. So segmenting here when you are ready makes a lot of sense. “If you see an SDR quickly being able to close the smallest deals herself, give her a shot.” Most importantly — implement an SLA as soon as possible. And take away leads that aren’t followed up with promptly. This is the #1 thing you should do once you have even 3 reps. Once reps’ plates get full, they just don’t give enough attention to the B leads. But the B leads can be gold. You need to add an SLA. In that agreement, you take away any lead not followed up within say, 2 hours, and assign it to the newest rep. And you take any lead that hasn’t been touched in say, 2 weeks, and assign it to the newest rep. Assign the leads that haven’t been touched quickly enough, or recently enough, to the newest sales pro. They’ll be more hungry.