Case study | Lead management · Marketing automation · Routing
Lead scoring and routing
Leads were reaching Sales through a patchwork of automations, with no shared way to tell which ones mattered. I built one scoring model and one central routing system in Marketo, designed with Marketing and Sales leadership.
- Tools
- Marketo, Salesforce
- My role
- Design and build in Marketo
- Worked with
- Marketing team, Sales leadership
for most routing updates, once routing lived in one place
score updates run in the first months, synced with Salesforce
regions covered by one geo-based routing logic: NAMER, LATAM, EMEA and APAC
The problem
There was no dedicated tool for routing leads. Over time, a set of workaround automations had grown to do the job, and none of them followed a common standard.
That hurt twice. The data those automations touched was less reliable, and so were the routing results: leads did not always reach the right person. On top of that, there was no agreed way to flag which leads were worth a salesperson's time first.
What I found
Routing was spread across workarounds
The logic lived in many separate automations built at different times. Checking or changing it meant tracing all of them.
Routing depended on data quality
Distributing leads fairly by region only works if every lead carries clean location data. That had to be fixed first, for every new lead.
Scoring needed shared definitions
A score is only useful if the people who use it trust what it measures, so it had to be designed with Marketing, not for them.
Getting everyone on board
I worked on the two halves with different people. The scoring rules were decided with the Marketing team: together we mapped every demographic and behavioral signal that should count, then I set up the automations in Marketo.
The routing rules were discussed with Sales leadership. Agreeing the logic with them first meant the system could match how Sales was actually organized by region.
What I built
- Routing done by many workaround automations, with no shared standard
- Less reliable data and less reliable routing results
- No common way to tell hot, warm and cold leads apart
- One central routing system in Marketo
- Country captured and standardized for every new lead
- Leads distributed by region to the teams responsible for NAMER, LATAM, APAC and EMEA
- Round robin within each regional team
- A scoring model built on demographic and behavioral information
- Scores synced with Salesforce, so Marketing can flag hot, warm and cold leads before handing them to Sales
Everything runs in Marketo, connected to Salesforce through the native integration. Because routing now lives in one place, changing a rule no longer means checking a tangle of automations.
Results
Most routing updates went from slow, careful detective work to about five minutes of changes. The scoring system ran around 700,000 score updates in its first months.
For the SDRs, the difference was a more reliable lead distribution, shared fairly within each regional team, and scores that Marketing could use to flag hot, warm and cold leads before sending them over.