Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Lead notifications by Territory


Quickly getting information about your inbound inquiries out to your sales team is critical to success. Each hour that goes by decreases the likelihood that you will be able to connect with the prospect.


In many cases, as we have talked about, there is a need to carefully and accurately score leads prior to handing them off to a field sales team. However, there are also situations where you will want all leads to go to a sales team (likely an inside sales team), and speed is the most critical factor.


In this case, with Eloqua, you can very easily do a quick, but effective lookup against a field in the incoming form. Perhaps you segment your inside sales team by geographic region, or perhaps by industry or even product line of interest. In each case, you can perform a simple one-step lookup to determine who to send the email notification to.

From the top menu in the forms area, choose "Manage Select Lists" to build (either manually or through an upload), a reference list that can reference incoming data values and provide an email address to notify.

In our example, we'll be routing leads by geography, so we'll create a Select List that has the Country value in the Option Name field, and the email address we would like to notify in the Option Value field.

With this built, all we need to do is to create an email notification step for the form. When we are asked to configure the recipient's email address, whereas we would normally use a constant value, in this case, we'll select "Form Field" as a source type.

We'll select the value that we want to reference, and then check the "Lookup" option (*). The Lookup option will then provide a set of select lists, and we'll select our "Reps By Country" list that we just created. Now, as the form is submitted, the Country that the visitor chose is referenced against our select list, and from there, an email address to notify is selected.

The lookup technique is a very useful technique in general, as you are able to greatly expand the options available to you when a form is submitted through its creative use.



Note that in this case, if you wanted to send notifications by Country for certain areas of the world, but by State for other areas, you could easily build two similar processing steps, one for each scenario, and have them run conditionally.

(*) Note: The "Lookup" option is not enabled by default, if you require it, please contact your Customer Success Manager to have it enabled.

5 comments:

Greg Forrest said...

Great new functionality and tip! I will be applying this to our partner referral global notifications this week.

Wade said...

This is great. I’ve been wanting to build a “quick lead delivery” system. I was inspired by a presentation at the Eloqua conference where some research indicated the best chance of getting a new prospect on the phone was calling them within 20 minutes of their form fill out/website visit etc. The odds drastically fell after that.

However, if we're using the Eloqua campaign module and the new leads don't get delivered to Salesforce until the top of the hour... what is a best practice for how reps should follow up and record/document their conversation?

We typically require all outbound activities to be recorded in Salesforce... but the Lead will not be in the system until :15 the next hour.

It’s great we can provide a profile view of all the form post values… I just worry about bypassing the usual Salesforce processes (and more advanced assignment rules). Any thoughts?

Steven Woods said...

Wade,
That's an interesting challenge if you've got the process optimized to the point that you are able to reliably place the call before the leads are passed over. Congrats on that.

If so, it may make sense to look at writing a lead record into salesforce.com early in the process and then updating it after the scoring has taken place within Eloqua. Hard to know without looking at your exact process, but should be able to do something creatively.

Reet said...

Is there a way to create lead notifications based on search keywords?

Steven Woods said...

Reet,
interesting thought...

You could use a combination of capturing most recent search into your forms, as talked about in this post - http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2009/04/capturing-lead-source-codes-in-your.html and then the techniques in this post to send the notifications.

Searches are never quite as "clean" though, so it would be an inexact science, but it would probably work fairly well.