Speed-to-lead optimization

Spectrum Enterprise, a part of Charter Communications, is a national provider of scalable, fiber-based technology solutions serving many of America’s largest businesses and communications service providers. The broad Spectrum Enterprise portfolio includes Internet access, Ethernet access and networks, Voice and TV solutions extending to Managed IT solutions. Our industry-leading team of experts works closely with clients to achieve greater business success by providing these right-fit solutions designed to meet their evolving needs. Their headquarters are in Stamford, Connecticut and they have over 10,000 employees.

Mergers and acquisitions have become a popular growth strategy for companies looking to expand into new markets or territories and extend customer lifetime value by expanding their footprint to more seats, additional departments, or more products and services.

Five years ago Spectrum acquired Charter, Time Warner, and Bright House Networks, and with those mergers came new product offerings. Spectrum wanted to hit the ground running fast with a new strategy in hopes to increase revenue and customer lifetime value by expanding their product footprint across their customer base.

With all these new product lines, sales groups, territories, databases, and data structures came operational complexities and challenges that hindered immediate growth. Fortunately, CRM Marketing Manager Matt Kromer was able to quickly overcome these challenges with ZoomInfo’s data orchestration tool, Route—formerly known as Ringlead, to accelerate the time-to-value of Spectrum’s M&A strategy.

“With the acquisitions, we implemented a land-and-expand strategy, where we had multiple sales teams representing different regions and products selling into the same account,” said Matt Kromer, CRM Marketing Manager at Spectrum.

Spectrum’s land-and-expand strategy required multiple sales teams representing different regions and products to sell into the same account. As Kromer describes, the territory and lead management process required to enable this strategy presented a complex roadblock in terms of Spectrum’s post-merger go-to-market. Some examples of routing workflow complexities include (but aren’t limited to), enabling several different sales groups to represent different products to nurture the same account, maintaining purposeful duplicates so multiple sales groups could sell into one account, and frequent strategy and territory changes required in order to make quick changes to territory assignments & routing rules.

Prior to implementing Route, Spectrum’s routing workflows were managed manually by a third-party team that took at least two days to assign leads. Not only was lead assignment slow, but it was also often inaccurate due to unintentional duplicates. Before switching to ZoomInfo’s data orchestration platform, “It could take us a few days to hand off leads. The lead would also get bounced around because it wasn’t initially assigned properly, and sales would waste time trying to find the right lead amongst duplicates,” Kromer explained.

Additionally, when territories changed or business strategies were revised, it would take Spectrum “months to make changes to routing workflows,” preventing Spectrum from being able to scale when business changes were made. “It could take us a few months to make routing changes. Now using RingLead I can make territory and routing changes in minutes,” said Kromer.

Spectrum was ready to drive new business strategies and needed a way to make quick changes to territories and routing workflows in an automated, scalable way. It was time to leave inefficient routing processes behind, so they could speed up lead response times and improve conversion rates.

“Having Ringlead and being able to take our lead assignment time from a couple of days to a minute or less has been a huge benefit for sales teams and for marketing,” shared Kromer.

Kromer was able to easily manage territories with Route’s segment builder and routing workflow engine. Additionally, Kromer was able to orchestrate proactive data cleansing and account matching as part of Spectrum’s routing workflow to prevent duplicates and ensure the right lead was routed to the right rep every time.

“After implementing RingLead, one of our sales reps called me to say it was the first time he’d received a correctly-routed lead in an entire year. By looking at the ‘Routing Log’ in Ringlead I was able to explain the logic that was used to send him that lead,” said Kromer.

As Kromer describes, reliable lead routing not only impacted conversion rates, but also increased the trust that sales had in the company’s processes, thus enabling enforceable sales SLAs.

Additionally, Kromer was able to significantly cut down the time it took to make changes to territory assignment rules when business strategies changed; that time went “from months to minutes.” “Our change management was lengthy. That’s why we would keep third-party groups manually assigning leads; we could provide them with updated process flows and files to do that manual assignment logic. But it could take months for them to make changes,” described Kromer.

With Route, he can make the changes programmatically and doesn’t have to worry about turnover at a third party or training issues with a process flow. They can make the changes based on their data within seconds.