Calendaring vendor Chili Piper released its Distro app for Salesforce, providing revenue teams with automated lead routing and assignment. Automated lead assignment improves speed to lead and bypasses spreadsheets, APEX code, and manual routing. Marketing Qualified Leads can be distributed to sales reps when leads hit score thresholds or following events such as webinar attendance or downloading gated content.
Lead assignment details are synced with Salesforce, and users are notified via Slack or email. In addition, a broad set of Salesforce record types are supported, including leads, contacts, accounts, cases, and opportunities.
Features include lead-to-account mapping, rule and trigger-based assignments, round-robin distribution, meeting reminders, and automated rescheduling. The Distro Log provides a detailed breakdown of triggers, actions, and routes.
“Now more than ever, it’s crucial that high-growth companies optimize for efficiency in their marketing and sales processes without sacrificing on customer experience,” said Co-CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe. “With Distro, revenue teams can effectively cover all of their routing and assignment needs while accelerating speed to lead.”
Chili Piper claims that it doubles top-of-the-funnel conversion rates.
A March 2011 article in The Harvard Business Review (“The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”) argued that speed to lead is critical for inbound leads. Last year, XANT replicated the study las year and found that 57.1% of first call attempts took place after a week or more, and only 0.1% of inbound leads were responded to within five minutes. However, firms that responded within those first five minutes had an 8X conversion rate versus later returned calls.
A Lead Connect study found that 78% of companies that respond first to a demo request end up winning the deal. Thus, firms that act immediately by returning a call or scheduling a meeting have a clear market advantage over firms with scheduling/call-back friction.
Chili Piper conducted a study earlier this year and found that 28.1% of demo requests submitted via chatbots or webforms to tech firms received no response after a week, and only 45% of requests were responded to within one hour.
“In the past, marketers at leading organizations such as HubSpot and Vendasta have preached five minutes to two hours as the sweet spot for follow-up. We, however, disagree,” blogged Chili Piper Content Marketing Manager Kelli Diffenderfer. “In this day and age, responses should be instant. And there’s absolutely no reason they can’t be. If you’re not responding immediately, you’re losing out on a significant amount of revenue.”
Automated lead distribution and routing allows prospects to go from buyer research to an inbound inquiry to a scheduled meeting with a few clicks on a landing page or the corporate website, bypassing the delays inherent to traditional lead routing.
Yet, eleven years after the HBR first published its research, inbound response rates remain slow, with 26.8% of tech firms taking one to twenty-four hours to respond and 28.1% failing to respond.
“Distro for Salesforce is a welcome addition to AppExchange, as they power digital transformation for customers by simplifying lead management, improving conversion rates, and accelerating speed to lead,” said Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange. “AppExchange is constantly evolving to connect customers with the right apps and experts for their business needs.”
Distro is priced at $20 per user per month. Chili Piper does not offer any discounts.
Additional information about Chili Piper is available on the GZ Consulting blog and the Chili Piper website.