A Complete Guide on Lead to Account Matching

As technology improves, sales and marketing keep getting more sophisticated and processes keep getting more complex. The infrastructure that underpins the modern sales department is made up of an increasingly complicated network of software, much of which didn’t even exist ten or twenty years ago, all of which contributes to precise, targeted, and highly effective marketing. A good lead-to-account matching software is an important piece of that puzzle. Here’s what you need to know.

What is Lead-to-Account Matching?

It’s important to have good lead generation. A long list of probable customers with their contact information is, for obvious reasons, an important and necessary tool for any sales team. The problem is that some of those likely customers will already be, well, customers. From your client’s point of view, it’s confusing to be cold-called by an organization you already have a relationship with. They may find themselves talking in circles with the caller for several minutes before it clicks that the caller doesn’t know who they are and isn’t calling about the complaint they filed last week. From the caller’s point of view, it’s equally confusing and equally frustrating. It’s also a significant waste of time, when multiplied by all the duplicate leads in the list. That’s where lead-to-account matching comes in.

A lead-to-account matching system is software that goes through your lead database and your account database and, when it finds a match, removes it from the list of leads. It’s the only way to clean up a large-scale database without sifting through it by hand, wasting even more time than you would have wasted by talking at cross-purposes with people who are already customers.

So What’s Lead Routing?

A phrase you’ll commonly hear when sales automation is discussed is “lead-to-account matching and routing.” The “matching” component, as we said, involves removing already-existing accounts from the list of leads so that every lead in the database is a potential sale. Lead Routing is, simply put, the process of determining who gets what leads. A sophisticated routing system designs, manages, and tracks workflows, taking into account the organization’s territory mapping, changes such as attrition in the sales force, and complex routing rules. Once, this work would have been done by humans. But software can automate the process, making it simpler and more efficient.

Why Use Automation?

Automating your lead matching and routing processes lets you scale your sales and marketing process. Taking out duplicate leads means less time wasted, and routing your leads in the most optimal way means greater efficiency. Now you can handle larger lead databases with none of the trouble and expense of using human administrators for your database management. A good lead to account matching and routing system deals with all of that for you. And now that sophisticated marketing operations have become the norm, you can be sure that your competition is using systems like these.

What Are the Advantages of a Good Automated System?

There are some things an automated matching and routing system does better than human actors, as well as more efficiently. Automated systems are better at market segmentation and targeting, which is increasingly important as marketing grows more and more specialized. It also provides more targeted lead routing, giving you more and better options about how to divide up your leads for maximum efficiency. And best of all, machines always show their work, providing you with detailed reporting so you can know exactly what went right and what has room for improvement.

But don’t take our word for it. For a free trial of LeadAngel’s fully automated matching and routing software, visit our website today. See the difference good automation can have on your sales process. For more information, contact us.