Automating Account Distribution for SDRs with Distro

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:

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

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

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 scores 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 the 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:
- 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:
  - 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.

How to Route High-Scoring Accounts in Distro (Setup)

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 the 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.

Let's dive into the setup to make this happen:

1 - Create your Team

The first thing we will create is a Team so the records are distributed among the reps you want. If your Team has already been created, you can move to step #2.

In the left-hand menu, click "Teams" under the Assets section.

Then, click the "Create Team" button at the top right. First, give your Team a name in the header.

After that, you can add Team members by clicking the "Add Team Member" button. Once you are done, publish to make your Team active.

We recommend checking this article to familiarize yourself more with Teams.

2 - Create your Distribution

To summarize, the Distribution feature is mainly used to set the behavior during meetings or record distribution among Team Members. If you already have a Distribution to be used, please go ahead and proceed to step #3.

In the left-hand menu, click "Distributions" under the Assets section.

Then, click the "Create Distribution" button at the top right and select the "Prospect/Record Distribution" option, as we will use it in Distro.

Give your Distribution a name, and then use the "Add a Team" button to include the Team you created in step #1 or that you already created.

After that, you can adjust some settings, such as Credit/Skip, Weight, and Capping. Once done, publish it.

Please take a look at this article to learn more details about Distributions and the above-mentioned settings.

3 - Create Your Rules

We will now create your routing rules, which are crucial to ensuring your prospects are correctly routed among your Teams within your Chili Piper products. If you already have your rules in place, you can skip to the next step.

In the left-hand menu, click "Rules" under the Assets section.

Then, click the "Create Rule" button at the top right. We will create three rules, two Without Ownership and one CRM Ownership, to be used in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Click "Add Condition" to start building your rules using Salesforce fields.

This is how we built our Entry Rule (Without Ownership):

This is how we configured our Routing Rule to route Accounts with a Goodfit Score between Tier 1 and Tier 6 (Without Ownership):

4 - Create your Distro Router

Now, we will combine all the assets we created above and build the flow in a Distro Router.

Click the "Routers" option under the Distro section in the left-hand menu and then the "Create Router" button at the top right.

4.1 - Trigger

Once the Router's flow builder opens, the Trigger will be displayed. A Trigger is a mechanism that initiates an action when a specific event occurs. For example, if the prospect matches certain criteria, the trigger mechanism will start the flow for this prospect.

Click on the Trigger to start the creation:

Next, select the desired Object. Here, you can use any Salesforce object (Standard or Custom) after activating them. Click here to learn how!

Select the record type as "Record is Updated" after clicking Add Trigger:

This is what ours looks like:

4.2 - Entry Rule

The entry rule optionally sets which conditions must be true on the record to trigger the Router's flow.

Click on the "+" sign to expand the options and add a new entry rule:

Select and add the Entry Rule that will be used. This is where we will use one of the Rules created in step #3.

4.3 - Routing Rule

Now, we will add a Routing Rule to route these prospects to the Teams we created.

Click on the "+" sign to expand the options and add a new Routing Rule:

Select and add the Routing Rule that will be used. We will also use the Rules created in step #3 here.

4.4 - Assign & Update Ownership

We will now click again on the "+" button next to the Matched path and create an Assign & Update Ownership node to assign prospects to your teams via Round-Robin, as the name suggests.

Once the node configuration opens, add the Distribution you created in step #2:

Then, select the Salesforce field to be updated during this process. For this use case, we selected the SDR Owner field from the Account object to be updated with the Assignee's ID, but you can use different fields if you wish.

Next, set your Fallback and Capping options - click here to learn more about them.

4.4 - Field Update

Click the "+" button again, and select the Field Update option.

For this use case, we selected two fields to be updated:

The Distro Router Name field from the Account object is to be updated to Accounts Goodfit Score Router v1, which is our Router name, but you can use different fields and a different router name if you wish.
The Distro Routing Rule field from the Account object is to be updated to Goodfit Account Score Router Waterfall Tier 1 - Tier 3, but you can use different names and fields if you wish.

4.6 - Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Last but not least, we will add an SLA. A "Service Level Agreement" or SLA is a commitment within your Team to establish how quickly your sales team will engage with a prospect based on pre-defined actions.

Click the "+" button and select the Service Level Agreement option.

After a pre-defined timeframe, the SLA will check if a condition is met and, if so, take action.

After the accounts are distributed, we give each SDR and SLA 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:

5 - Publish your Router

Once done with the Router's setup, publish it in the top-right so it becomes active and ready to roll!

This is what ours looks like:

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 will 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.

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, which ensure the best accounts are being worked on.

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.

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.

The Results

After making the above changes, we saw over an hour per day of saved time per SDR, which they can now use for 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 if they shouldn’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