How to Route Leads to Sales Teams in Your Business

Sell to Win Team Contributor Last updated on: March 8, 2024

If you had to sum up the goal of marketing and sales in one sentence, you might say it’s to find sales prospects and turn them into paying customers.

But getting users to that point can be a long process, involving moving them through the sales funnel.

Before you can even worry about sales, you first have to turn prospects into leads—that is, people with an interest in what your company offers. But once you’ve turned someone into a lead, what do you do next?

At some point, you have to transfer leads from your marketing team over to the care of your sales team, who will turn them into customers. That’s where lead routing comes in. But what is lead routing, and what does it look like?

In this blog post, we’ll cover what lead routing is, as well as how to route leads to sales teams. Keep reading to find out more.

What is lead routing?

Lead routing is the process of assigning leads across your sales team.

Your marketing team most likely handles lead generation, or the process of attracting leads in the first place. But once you have those leads, it’s time to turn them into customers—and that’s where the sales team comes in.

If you’re like most companies, your sales team is made up of multiple representatives who handle specific leads and clients. You can take the approach of simply assigning leads to your sales reps randomly. However, it’s often better to have an efficient system in place for how you assign leads.

That process is lead routing, and it’s what we’re going to walk through in this post.

How to route leads to sales teams

If you’re trying to assign leads across your sales team, you may be unsure how to do it. What should affect your decisions about which reps should get which leads?

That’s just the question we’re here to answer. Below are some steps to take when routing leads to your sales team. 

1. Respond quickly to leads

One of the first things to get right when managing leads is to respond quickly. If a lead expresses interest in talking with you or becoming a client, you don’t want to leave them hanging.

Why is this worth mentioning? Because if you spend a long time trying to decide where to assign a lead, it can be easy to wait too long, causing the lead to lose interest or go with a competitor instead.

If you want to retain your leads, it’s vital to respond to them quickly—which means you also need to route them to the sales team quickly. For that reason, don’t make yourself go through a whole decision process every time you have to route a lead. Instead, have a system in place that lets you distribute leads as soon as they come in. (FYI, Nutshell can do this for you automatically.)

2. Consider your leads’ place in the funnel

Not all leads are alike. Some are still very on the fence about working with you, while others are practically ready to buy right then and there. Depending on where leads fall in the sales funnel, you may want to assign them to a different sales team or representative.

This is important because treating a middle-of-funnel lead like a bottom-of-funnel lead—or vice versa—probably won’t go over too well. You’ll either end up pushing them toward a purchase before they’re ready, or wasting time repeating things they’ve already heard.

To ensure your leads receive the right sales treatment, assess their spot in the funnel, and then assign them to a sales rep.

3. Assign to the best sales model

Many businesses, particularly small ones, have a single sales team that handles all of their leads and clients. Maybe that’s the case for your company.

However, different products or services often require different sales approaches. For that reason, some companies have multiple sales teams—or multiple branches within a single team—that use different sales models. If that’s the case for you, be sure to consider which team should receive each lead.

For example, maybe you offer tech products, but you also provide tech consultation services. Your products will naturally require a very different sales approach from your services, so you may have different reps for each one—and even different pipelines altogether.

If that’s the case, and a lead comes along who’s interested in your products, be sure to assign them to a rep who specializes in product sales, not consultation service sales.

4. Assign to the most qualified reps

We’ve mentioned sales representatives a few times already in passing, but it’s worth taking the time to consider the strengths and weaknesses of your individual reps. Different reps will likely have different specialties or be familiar with different types of clients, making certain reps uniquely suited to certain leads.

Let’s say you offer metal fabrication services, and you get a new lead from an aircraft manufacturer. You could, in theory, assign that lead to any of your sales reps. But you take the time to consider each rep, and in doing so, you realize that one sales rep—Brent—has lots of experience selling to aircraft manufacturers.

Given that knowledge, it’s a safe bet that Brent will be particularly skilled at converting this lead. For that reason, it’s probably a good idea to assign that lead to him.

5. Use lead scoring

You may occasionally experience periods when you’re not getting a lot of leads. On the flip side, though, you might sometimes be getting too many leads at once. When that happens, you have to prioritize the order in which you route them to your sales team.

To help you do that, you can use lead scoring. Lead scoring is a process where you give each lead a numerical value representing how high of a priority they are. That value might be based on things like location or simply on how much you expect to earn if they become a customer.

You can then start by assigning the leads with the highest scores and ending with the lowest, ensuring you earn the maximum amount of revenue from your leads as a whole.

Nutshell can help you organize and assign your leads

Routing leads to your sales team is a vital part of your company, but you can’t do that unless you’re able to keep track of all your leads in the first place. If you need help keeping all your leads organized, you need a customer relationship management (CRM) platform like Nutshell.

Nutshell can help you organize your leads based on value, placement in the sales funnel, and more. That makes it far easier to route them to the correct sales reps when the time comes—something you can also do in Nutshell.

Want to try out Nutshell for yourself? Just check out our 14-day free trial today!

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