Author: Hillary Lamb

System Overview & My Experience:

LeanData is the strongest enterprise lead matching and routing platform that continues to rank as a favorite of users after many years of market leadership. Founders Evan Liang & Kelvin Cheung are largely credited with creating a category for Lead to Account Matching and Routing. Over time they have progressed toward “Revenue Orchestration” as the platform adds functionality. The competition in Revenue Orchestration has been heating up, and LeanData does not yet check some of the boxes on orchestration features such as conversation intelligence and email engagement. Most users still focus on the bread and butter of matching and routing. I have primarily used the tool to support go-to-market lead lifecycle processes, bridging the gap between marketing and sales execution. 

LeanData’s platform is so open and powerful that it allows users to have a sense of being scrappy and creative with their problem solving skills. That’s not easy to find in enterprise revenue technology. Before we all get too excited, let’s keep in mind that this review applies to Salesforce CRM only. As of right now, LeanData is a Salesforce native tool and doesn’t integrate with Hubspot CRM. 

As an advanced Salesforce admin, I first became a customer in 2016 when Salesforce default routing rules alone were not cutting it (let’s face it, the Salesforce default still doesn't cut it). Their ability to overcome my pain point of manual lead routing resulted in a one-call close. The company was about 4 years old at the time. Since then, I have implemented LeanData three times, and been appointed the main admin for four different companies. During this time I have used other tools for routing, but nothing compares to the LeanData platform. 

Their drag and drop canvas interface allows admins to build out complex routing maps with clicks, not code. It can read any Salesforce field so you can get as specific as you need with each routing scenario. Each object has its own routing graphs (Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunities) and you can save different versions with each change. This is great if you need to revert for any reason (IYKYK). 

To explain what we mean about an enterprise-level platform, let’s explore lead to account matching. LeanData’s matching algorithm is customizable and admins can adjust as needed. Users are not limited to matching on email and website domain. This is particularly valuable for companies with multiple product lines who may need to match to child accounts based on product interest. 

LeanData routing and user management is also very flexible. A few areas where LeanData is great at managing these users are:

• Routing records beyond the out-of-the-box owner field. For example maybe an SDR Owner, CSM Owner, Partner Owner, or even a specific delegate 
• Vacation and working hours are easily set within round robin pools. Admins can give managers rights to manage their own teams within the pools if needed
• Admins can easily change owners of territories around in the territory management page
• One of my more complex use cases involved a change to matching and routing so that leads could be sent to a custom partner account owner for event purposes

One favorite feature my GTM teams always love is the LeanData visual force pages for accounts. (conversations with other LeanData users confirmed this) When you add it on to your layout it pulls in ALL matched leads for that account regardless of status. Teams don't have to search for leads in the system, pull reports, or wait until they are “qualified” – they can identify related leads and view everything from the account. For orgs that have messy data, this is a very fast way to enable sales to find the right person.  

User Favorites: 

• Drag and drop interface - allows you to build complex routing graphs with decision and action nodes
• Routes not only leads but contacts, accounts, and opportunities
• One time routing and scheduled routing
  • Think of this as running a job in a data loader, except all of your assignment logic can be triggered on demand at the same time
• Integrations - Slack, Outreach, Salesloft, etc. allows for a more strategic GTM process
  • Example: Being able to automatically add leads to the proper sequence after routing along with the right notifications.
• Routing insights and debugging - Easily search a record’s email or ID and see a map of how and why things were routed; helps to diagnose issues faster and make corrections where needed. 
• Best implementation & CSM team helping every step of the way during relationship
• Ability to scale complex territories/regions routing assignments with multiple logic scenarios (quickly make updates as teams grow or territories evolve) 
• Allow sales leaders the ability to manage distribution weighting for assignments based on new owner ramp or other business criteria 
• A new feature called Book It - where prospects can schedule a demo directly from the website and routed to the proper AE/SDR. Reduces the back-and-forth of coordination at the point of inquiry. 

Areas to Improve:

• Often requires a dedicated administrator to manage 
• While audits are available, users have been asking for testing features
• Initial set-up can be complex, and while the integrations are generally easy to configure the more custom your routing logic the more challenging set-up and configuration can become 
• While the drag-and-drop canvas is easy to configure, visualizing and managing complex workflows becomes cumbersome if users fall into the trap of over-complicating their system and incorporating many nested steps 
• LeanData’s pricing is at the premium level, so pending business needs and the complexity/volume, etc. the ROI might be harder to recognize against the cost. 
  • Additional costs might be incurred if you need professional services support for more complex use cases
• While there are robust out-of-the-box reporting, users often desire for more customization for specific use cases 
• For high-volume, high complexity routing rules, some users report delays in routing (usually can be correct with optimization, but something to monitor)
• LeanData matching is only as good as the information brought into the CRM. They do not offer enrichment but they do integrate with popular data providers like Clearbit 
• Challenges with order of operations when leveraging data enrichment providers - if there is data latency, routing can be incorrect because of incomplete information
  • This can be adjusted with pausing or hold timers, but decreases the speed of follow up
  • Users should be aware that the minimum wait step is 5 minutes (some would say that’s a big sacrifice on time) 

Maintaining the Gold Standard: 

What sets LeanData apart is not only their technology but also the team. LeanData is consistently praised for top notch implementation and customer success teams. It's a true partnership from end to end. The team helps problem solve, jump on video conferencing, and get creative. I've implemented a lot of software and have high standards when I am “sold the dream” during a sales cycle. When I say these teams are dialed in, and best in class, I mean it. 

The Revenue Orchestration space will continue to heat up and the Team and The RevTech Review believes this space will continue to overlap with, and evolve around, data waterfall/enrichment tools. LeanData remains the default choice for many enterprise operations teams that have complex GTM models and want all of the power that LeanData offers. They continue to reinforce their brand equity with a certification, their annual event Ops Stars, and top-rated customer support staff. We look forward to seeing if a Hubspot CRM integration will become a requirement for “gold standard” status.

Disclosures: 

• Hillary has been a LeanData customer and admin since 2016
• Hillary also supported the LeanData team with a customer testimonial video in the past