Chili Piper Automating Distribution for SDRs

SDRs do a lot of manual work. Every. Single. Day.

From finding new accounts to researching accounts to updating data in Salesforce… this manual work adds up.

But we just implemented a new system that’s saving each SDR 20 hours per month. Yes, you read that right. 

Now, each SDR has an extra hour every day to spend prospecting new accounts–time they used to have to spend trudging through manual tasks.

Here’s the TL;DR: 

1. We qualify and score our accounts
2. We route 10 new accounts to SDRs using Distro (our lead routing tool). We limit it to 10 accounts using Distro’s Daily Capping feature (it’s clutch). 
3. We add a “talk track” so SDRs have background info on the prospect before reaching out

But, knowing you, you’re not a TL;DR type of person. So let’s dive into the details.

This post was originally published as part of an article series with Chili Piper

Account Qualification and Scoring

We start by scoring every account (groundbreaking, I know, but stay with me). 

What makes our current scoring unique is the amount of data we take into account. We calculate account score using 300+ account-level data points (we use Goodfit to get this firmographic and technographic data).

Here are some of the data points we use that correlate with win rate:

• CRM (Because Chili Piper only works with Salesforce and HubSpot CRM) 
• Industry (B2B + more specific breakdowns) 
• CTAs on their website that indicate investment in demand generation (e.g. Get a Demo, Free Trial, Download Now, Register Now, etc.)
• Geography
• Employee count
• XDR team size and hiring count
• Demand gen size and hiring count
• Presence of paid campaigns
• Whether or not they’re utilizing a competitor
• Tech stack (email server, marketing automation, etc.)

• Have high complexities in their routing (no surprise here), meaning they: some textsome text
  • Have 10+ sales reps 
  • Have a high influx of web traffic
  • Have a complex sales cycle (have AMs, CS) in addition to AEs and ADRs
• They use multiple tools to optimize their funnel:some textsome text
  • Marketing automation (Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot) 
  • Sales Engagement 
  • In-app optimization tools 

We assign different weights to these criteria depending on how strongly they correlate to winning a deal. We then stack-rank the accounts based on the overall score, giving our team insight into the best accounts to target now. 

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How to Route High-Scoring Accounts in Distro

Now, going back to determining which accounts to distribute to our SDR team. We tier our accounts based on criteria including what’s listed above, and prioritize the highest scored accounts. 

The “timely” characteristics you will see below give a short-term boost to account score. This ensures that accounts meeting our scoring thresholds and with short-term buying signals are routed to SDRs at the right time. 

Triggers that give a short-term boost to account score and increase likelihood of routing

• When a prospect purchases relevant tech. 
• When a prospect account sees a significant increase in account traffic
• When a prospect account sees a significant increase in paid account traffic 
• When a prospect account is hiring SDRs and/or AEs

Here’s what that Trigger looks like in Distro:

As you can see, you can set up your Trigger to fire based on any Field of any Standard or Custom Object. In this example, the Trigger will fire with the “Goodfit Account Router” field is updated in Salesforce.

Then, Distro will route to our SDRs via our “Waterfall Tier 1 - Tier 3” Routing Rule.

We configured this Routing Rule so it will route Accounts with a Goodfit Score between Tier 1 and Tier 6:

Then, Distro will distribute the account to the team via Round Robin, updating ownership in Salesforce.

After the accounts are distribution, we give each SDR an SLA of 72 instant hours to follow up. If they don’t follow up, the record is reassigned to another rep. Here’s what that looks like in Distro:

And here’s what that entire flow looks like from a birds-eye view:

Pretty nice, eh? 

In addition to those triggers, we have higher urgency triggers that automatically supercede account score and trigger an account to route instantly. Each of these triggers has their own router, similar to the account score router above. 

• When a champion at a customer account leaves and joins a new company. We use UserGems for champion tracking.
• When a customer churns (click the link for a breakdown of how we do this) 
• When we identify an account that is a customer of one of our top partners. We use Crossbeam to map partner overlap.

These are just a handful of triggers to give you ideas, but when you set this up for your company, you’ll have your own set of criteria for what makes a great customer, and thus, the account you target will be more likely to buy. 

Again, all of this is done automatically through our Distro product. Now, no one has to worry about assigning new accounts for SDR to work. And no hot, in-market companies looking to buy our software slip through the cracks. 

Everyone wins here. For SDRs, it means less time researching accounts (and more time reaching out), For Ops, it means less time updating territory assignments (you update in just one place and that’s it). 

Additionally, Distro lets you build out reusable assets that can be applied in multiple locations. For example, you can create a single “North America Team” and use it in Form Routers, Handoff Queues, Chat Journeys, Event Lead Distributions… you get it. 

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How we Enable our Team

There’s another critically important piece that makes all of this work – enablement. With the number of criteria that go into assigning an account, it is not enough to simply assign reps new accounts every day. 

It’s a wasted effort if you don’t have an easy way to tell them why the account was routed and give them insights so they can reach out with personalized, relevant, and timely messaging.

We use a “Goodfit Talk Tracks” field and the name of the router in Salesforce to communicate to SDRs the reasons this particular account was routed. 

Another important part of the puzzle is SLAs, to ensure the best accounts are being worked. 

If an SDR doesn’t touch an account for three days after receiving it (or mark it as unfit to work), it is automatically routed to a new SDR. 

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CRM Hygiene: Marking Accounts as Unqualified or Unfit to Work

Like most GTM teams, we’re using a few different data vendors to continuously update data in our CRM to ensure it’s fresh, accurate, and complete. We all know that companies are constantly changing – what was a great company to target last week could be the wrong company to target this week (think layoffs, purchased a competitor, etc.). 

While our system automatically listens for this data and makes updates, there are still scenarios that the human eye can catch better than data providers. 

That’s why it’s important to give SDRs a way to provide real-time feedback on an account they were given. 

They can mark an Account as Unqualified or Unfit to Work and Distro automatically routes a replacement account. Talk about an incentive for Salesforce cleanliness 😉

Then, based on the reason an account was marked Unqualified or Unfit to work, we have triggers we look for to put those accounts back into the shuffle. 

For example, if an SDR marks that an account doesn’t have a relevant CTA on their website, we’ll track that account to see if their website CTAs change. If they do, we’ll unmark as Unqualified and give our SDRs another shot at it. 

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The Results

After making the above changes, we saw over an hour per day of saved time per SDR, which they can now use on revenue generating activities instead of digging through accounts. 

I’ll repeat that: this saves one hour per day per SDR! 

That means SDRs get an extra 20 hours per month to spend prospecting accounts (rather than digging through accounts). 

Additionally, our CRM has never been more hygienic. Because SDRs are incentivized to mark accounts as Unfit to Work or Unqualified, around 20-30 unify accounts are  removed from the pool every day. 

Previously, multiple SDRs would review the same account and separately determine they sholdn’t work with them.

After a month of routing accounts, the % of “good fit accounts” routed to each SDR each day has improved with many of those worse-fit accounts removed from distribution by the SDRs themselves.

Ready to spice up your workflows and head up your pipeline? Get a demo of Distro today.

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