Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

Lead-to-account matching and routing solutions have become a critical piece of the infrastructure required to support these sophisticated GTM organizations. As marketing, sales and the emerging function of revenue operations have become more sophisticated and go-to-market (GTM) processes have become increasingly complex, the technology to enable GTM activity has flourished.

Despite its importance in leading organizations, the lead-to-account matching and routing category is still nascent today. Category growth has been strong with early adopter organizations, but it still lacks recognition in the majority of the market that the category serves. As one of the only options for addressing common revenue process challenges, TOPO has followed this category for the past two years and watched it gain strength through word of mouth. TOPO analysts expect to see further growth in the coming years as the category and its benefits become more widely understood.

AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS REQUIRED FOR EFFICIENT REVENUE PROCESSES

Lead-to-account matching and routing is the automated workflow solution that addresses two specific use cases in the revenue process—matching and routing.

• Matching is an automated workflow solution that maps the relationship between records in the revenue tech stack. The most common use case today, lead-to-account matching, matches new leads to the correct account record in the CRM.
• Routing is the solution that enables organizations to design, manage, and track the workflows used to assign records, such as sending leads to the correct individual according to an organization’s territory mapping. Routing solutions enable organizations to automate complex routing rules, manage changes (e.g., attrition in the sales force), and optimize routing decisions.

The initial establishment and growth of lead-to-account matching and routing solutions was largely due to Salesforce’s limited investment into its own native capabilities. As companies scaled and their operations became more sophisticated, it created the opportunity for third parties—most notably LeanData—to bring a more robust, flexible, and manageable lead-to-account matching and routing solution to market. 

In the last few years, with the increased adoption of scaled account based strategies, lead-to-account matching has become critical for more companies. Without it, leads cannot be quickly routed to the correct account owner and sellers cannot easily get a complete picture of leads and engagement within their accounts.

As companies scale and look towards revenue operations teams to improve efficiency and predictability in their GTM, automating repeatable manual tasks becomes significantly more valuable. Without automation, a sales development rep (SDR) or sales rep has to identify the correct account for every new lead. This often requires manually researching the contact, searching the CRM, and identifying the correct internal owner. The result of this type of manual process is often inconsistent matches, an incomplete view of engagement within the account, and missed opportunities for the account owner to engage new contacts in a timely manner.

Sophisticated organizations today are looking to automate a wider range of workflows in their revenue process, such as assigning accounts with high intent to SDRs for outbound prospecting and automatically assigning new customers to the correct customer success representative. We anticipate this trend to continue and lead-to-account matching and routing solutions will become a foundational part of the infrastructure that operations teams use to connect their tech stack across their end-to-end revenue processes. 

INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY LEADS CATEGORY BENEFITS

As go-to-market strategies evolve and increase in complexity, more organizations are implementing lead-to-account matching and routing solutions. The category is delivering significant benefits, seen in very high impact and satisfaction ratings relative to the 24 TOPO-tracked sales and marketing technology categories.

The primary benefits that an organization should expect to see include:

• Higher productivity: Automated processes replace manual lead triage and routing processes, freeing up SDR’s and rep’s time.
• Enhanced account insights: A complete picture of individuals, activity, and engagement within an account, including recent leads that normally would not have been converted to contacts in the CRM yet.
• Faster follow-up: With lead capture to routing measured in minutes, routing solutions enable companies to significantly reduce lead follow-up time.
• Cleaner data: Automated workflows identify duplicate contacts and reduce the creation of duplicate records.
• Increased flexibility: Ability to quickly modify and optimize go-to-market processes
• Fewer lost leads: Elimination of routing issues that result in leads never getting to the correct owner
• Improved customer experience: Immediately identify all inbound activity from customers and active prospects in order to deliver the most appropriate experience.

Organizations with high volumes of leads and complex routing see significant return on investment (ROI) from adopting a lead-to-account matching and routing solution. Closing operational gaps that resulted in leads that were never followed up on and significantly reducing lead follow-up times are both key contributors to ROI. 

Lead-to-account matching and routing has become a critical part of the technology stack for today’s high growth companies because it delivers on the benefits above, improves operational results (especially lifts in conversion rates), and allows quick responses to changing market dynamics (e.g., ensuring routing rules follow changes in territory design).

INCREASING GO-TO-MARKET COMPLEXITY DRIVES ADOPTION 

In today’s high growth organizations, lead-to-account matching and routing is quickly becoming a foundational component for managing complex workflows across the revenue technology stack. Now we expect broader category adoption as the greater B2B landscape adopts the best practices established by high growth market leaders.

• The rise of specialization across the revenue process. For world-class organizations, distinct functions handle various phases of the customer lifecycle. Sales development qualifies leads, sales closes deals, customer success onboards customers, and account managers grow deals. This specialization creates more complex workflows that cannot be easily developed and maintained directly in the CRM.
• Timely, quality lead follow-up is critical to marketing ROI as well as customer experience. Without automated routing, it is extremely difficult to meet this requirement at scale. This has led to the adoption by organizations with significant inbound lead flow and a direct impact on marketing’s contribution to opportunities and revenue.
• The widespread adoption of account based strategies. As organizations move to account based, they quickly realized that Salesforce could not provide a complete view of all leads, contacts, and engagement with an account. This CRM shortcoming accelerated adoption of category solutions.