Recently we have been tasked with streamlining and slimming down the relationship that we have with certain external vendors. Specifically, we were looking to move many manual processes from a third party literature fulfillment vendor to a more automated process. The previous processes included elements such as:
- Lead routing for web product information request forms
- Lead routing for all trade show activities
- Lead routing for all distributors/agents/manufacturers reps who fell outside of SFDC
- Digital Literature Fulfillment
The true challenge that we faced with this was that their manual lead routing process delayed the delivery of leads from 8 hours to as much as 6 days from the time of submission. Holiday weekends were painful and selected trade shows took weeks. Additionally, the quality of their routing (not their fault) was poor because it relied on a manual update to an Excel spreadsheet every time we wanted to make a change. This file took 4-8 hours to create and up to two weeks to get implemented in their systems which meant that no one ever updated it.
On top of this, the construction of our current lead routing process between this vendor and SFDC did not allow us to route leads effectively to Inside Sales teams. This is because our sales assignment tables were based on product lines (which generally go to our field sales teams), and these inside teams sold specific sets of product groups within those product lines making this nuance "disappear" and routing all leads to our field sales teams.
By using Eloqua, our team was able to replace all product based online forms with standard Eloqua forms. We then built look up tables and routing logic using Program Builder to handle the correct routing assignments where hard coding was necessary (Inside Sales and Distributors) to override the assignments in our sales commission tables. Lastly, by using blind forms to profile the customer and products, we were able to increase the accuracy of the submissions making the lead quality much higher.
We're still working on developing our plans for establishing a digital literature fulfillment program in Eloqua, but we plan on getting that done in Q4.