yvrsales

SDR

Routing SQOs to AEs

Hey! My company is struggling with how to route opportunities generated from our inbound SDR team to AEs. For context, we have a outbound team that is set up 1:1 with AEs, and then a inbound team that passes to all AEs (no pod or 1:1 structure). It's the inbound team that needs help here.

The SDR team is only about 8-12 reps at any given time, but the AE teams are a bit bigger and growing (~15 SMB, ~10 MM, ~10 ENT roughly).

Right now, when an inbound SDR qualifies a lead, they manually choose which AE is routed the booked meeting and the opp (based on segment, and based on a manual round robin system using a Salesforce dashboard and a spreadsheet). It's manual, tedious, time consuming and makes for errors in fairness.

In past roles, I have used Chili Piper for this problem and it was great but that was a much smaller company with 4 BDRs and 8 AEs total so just not totally sure how it does with larger teams or if there are other options people have found helpful.

How are other Sales team handling this? There must be a way to automate which AE is next up to receive a SQO so that the SDR doesn't have to scan a dashboard, or pull up multiple calendars to find availability.

🤓 Sales Tech

👨‍🌾 SDR

9

19 comments

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oldcloser

Arsonist

5

💀

"they manually choose which AE is routed the booked meeting and the opp (based on segment, and based on a manual round robin system using a Salesforce dashboard and a spreadsheet)."
There is no way this happens without bias. BDRs sending leads to the seller most likely to buy them lunch, etc. It'll never be equitable like that. I feel the pain. Zappier has a beautiful RR plugin that takes nothing to implement.
Seems like the answer is:
1. Separate AE's by segment.
2. Setup RR by segment with appropriate AEs in there by bucket.
Then:
3. Qualify lead
4. Hit RR button

yvrsales

Fire Starter

4

SDR

oh damn I didn't even consider Zapier for that. and yeah bias totally happens and then leadership gets really upset when things are off. I keep pushing for something more automated but for some reason they've been really resistant to it. I'll bring up Zapier option

oldcloser

Arsonist

4

💀

I know you're new around here... so not barking... but please upvote your replies if you find value.Thanks!

yvrsales

Fire Starter

3

SDR

happy to, thanks for letting me know

oldcloser

Arsonist

1

💀

Not to say it's mandatory.. in fact, you can feel free to downvote even if you just hate something. But, typically its expected when/if you find anything of value.

jefe

Arsonist

2

🍁

Good call. OC knows his shit, @yvrsales , so you should generally take note

CuriousFox

WR Officer

4

🦊

This feels like @poweredbycaffeine's turf

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

2

☕️

Thanks homie.

OP: do you have a sales ops team.

yvrsales

Fire Starter

0

SDR

hey! sorry for the delay - we do have both sales ops and enablement teams yes. apparently our ops team is "looking into it" but we have been doing it this way for 2+ years already

ZVRK

Politicker

2

Enterprise Account Executive

We’re a pretty small team of AEs, only 4, and have a very clear territorial arrangement. If an opp comes from a particular country, sdr knows where to send it. There was a time when we were not assigned to territories and we handled it “as a team”.

In your case, do you not have territories assigned?

yvrsales

Fire Starter

2

SDR

no territories currently! We separate based on company size, and then just do a round robin through the team for who gets the opps next. We balance it a bit with timezone differences as needed

TennisandSales

Politicker

2

Head Of Sales

you should for sure try chili piper for this. i don think your team size will cause an issue.

Also there should be an SDR manager/leader that passes the leads to an AE not the SDR themself. That is setting them up for failure i think. have ONE person who is responsible so everyone knows who to go to for approval and to yell at when there are mistakes.

yvrsales

Fire Starter

1

SDR

I totally agree - yeah I used chili piper at my last workplace as an SDR and it was awesome. I have no clue why they are so resistant here but I'm going to keep pushing

2

W21

If you are looking for something that is compatible with Salesforce, you could look at power router - it is no-code tool for distribution. (powerrouter.io) it'll help you create routing at multiple levels. you can round robin leads to SDRs by segment and when an opportunity gets created - a separate roundrobin can be initiated based on segment for the AE team. you could also balance opportunities based on how many each AE already has, keeping things fair. just a heads up, I'm part of the team here :)

Justatitle

Big Shot

2

Account Executive

@oldcloser nailed it and it should be Round Robin, throughout 5 rounds of inbounds everything evens out.

pirate

Big Shot

1

🦜☠️ Account Executive

We have 2 BDRs for a team of 30 or something like that... So mostly hunt for our own business

yvrsales

Fire Starter

1

SDR

yeah we have a high inbound volume so we have one SDR team that handles that in order to get only the qualified leads in front of AEs. we have a separate bdr team that does purely outbound alongside AEs

youwon

Personal Narrative

1

GTM Manager

Hey, I'm curious why you don't recommend using Chili Piper or other similar solutions since you used it before. Was there any negative experience with it?

yvrsales

Fire Starter

0

SDR

I did recommend it when I first started but I got push back saying they had "looked into" other solutions and it didn't seem to work so I dropped it for a few months as I was pretty new. I started bringing it up again recently though because our teams are growing and this is getting super hectic and wastes a ridiculous amount of time

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