Speed-to-lead with cleaner data

Challenge

Exterro’s growth and expansion into new markets and regions meant they needed efficient operations and data management processes to lay the foundation for future growth; however, their former in-house lead-to-account routing process posed several challenges.

“We have been growing tremendously, and with that growth we need optimized processes that are scalable and have longevity. We found that using typical or standard workflows and lead assignment rules became either unrealistic and confusing, or just not possible, particularly as we needed cross-object referencing.”

Cody shares how Exterro leveraged Salesforce’s Process Builder to tackle their complex routing requirements; however, this caused their CRM and Marketing Automation platforms to time out as they became overloaded.

Bustamonte shares, “I had two Process Builders, and each had 45 different evaluations. Pairing that up with other triggers and other automations that were running in our system caused looping—the inability to gain exclusive access to records because everything was trying to happen at once. We were getting thousands of CPU timeout errors. This was a huge problem.”

Moving away from the Process Builders, Bustatmonte returned to Salesforce Round Robin routing. Although they received fewer timeout errors, Exterro was still left with suboptimal routing that slowed down speed-to-lead. Without an efficient routing process, complex leads were being routed to inexperienced reps while more experienced reps were underutilized. Opportunities were even missed due to inability to reassign leads while reps were out of office.

After trying to solve the routing problem in-house, Cody realized they needed an external solution like ZoomInfo that could handle the complexities of their routing strategies and have the flexibility to scale with Exterro’s continued growth.

“With ZoomInfo’s data management solution, I could now do real time enrichment with third-party data, deduplication, duplicate prevention, and normalization.”

Cody Bustamonte

Salesforce Administrator & Marketing Operations Manager at Integrate

Solution

Exterro chose ZoomInfo’s data management solution as it provided the required flexibility and scalability for complex routing, checking all the boxes for Exterro’s CFO. Cody could also see that this all-in-one solution offered benefits beyond routing, “I could now do real time enrichment with third-party data, deduplication, duplicate prevention, and normalization.”

Cody began the process of data orchestration to start deduplicating incoming leads and normalizing the data, which helped level-set an issue Exterro was facing: customer email IDs being formatted in all capital letters. As they prioritized data hygiene, Exterro also began to enrich leads from their website in real-time with ZoomInfo’s firmographic and geographic data. This resolved the issue around lengthy form fills and created clean and complete records that laid the foundation for effective lead segmentation and routing. “We want to have a minimum number of fields on our forms to increase the conversion rate, but we also need to find out information about that person.” Cody adds.

Using both enriched data and automated cross-object segmentation based on related accounts enabled Exterro to assign leads to their specific routing strategy, team, or rep. They could now implement complex routing using simple rule-building tools to combine marketing qualified leads, regional territory, headquarter location, and product family in a single routing workflow.

Equipped with ZoomInfo’s robust routing capabilities, sales reps could answer questions such as, “Is this lead associated with an account? And if it is associated with an account, is this account already labeled for a regional territory? If so, change the regional territory on the lead. Is the lead an MQL? Then route it – maybe it’s a round robin, maybe it’s a specific person, or maybe it’s a team or a queue. We can now define that complex logic.”

The Results

Going beyond a simple routing solution, Exterro has harnessed the synergy of ZoomInfo’s end-to-end Data Orchestration Platform. This has helped them to prioritize data hygiene to ensure high-quality data, void of duplicates and non-standardization. Exterro can now seamlessly perform multiple, complex lead-routing scenarios that are increasing speed-to-lead and enabling sales reps to follow-up on leads in as few as four minutes. Exterro has saved even more time by automating data management processes and replacing the 90 evaluations in Process Builder with only 2 triggers that enrich, segment, and route leads.

“I get to be the hero at my company because I’m able to route leads quicker and cleaner and my CFO feels comfortable that she was able to purchase software at a price that she felt comfortable with.” Cody shares.

As the team continues to efficiently route leads and drive more positive sales outcomes, they are continuing to explore how they can use ZoomInfo’s OperationsOS data management platform to improve and scale their business.