Spectrum Enterprise and RingLead: Post-Acquisition Territory Management and Lead Routing

About Spectrum

As the 3rd-largest Ethernet provider in America, Spectrum provides scalable fiber technology solutions to many of the United State’s largest businesses and communications service providers.

Industry: Telecommunications
Company Size: 10000+ employees
Headquarters: Stamford, Connecticut

In 2021, Spectrum's focus is on enabling their acquisition by integrating siloed CRM and MAP instances and streamlining lead routing workflows.

Spectrum’s Acquisition and Land-and-Expand Strategy

Five years ago Spectrum acquired Charter, Time Warner, and Bright House Networks. Post-merger, equipped with new product offerings, Spectrum wanted to hit the ground running fast with a land-and-expand strategy, increasing revenue and customer lifetime value by expanding their product footprint across their customer base.

However, new product lines, sales groups, territories, databases, and data structures created operational complexities and challenges that hindered immediate growth. Fortunately, CRM Marketing Manager Matt Kromer was able to quickly overcome these challenges with RingLead’s data orchestration platform, accelerating the time-to-value of Spectrum’s M&A strategy.

Go-To-Market Challenge

Spectrum’s land-and-expand strategy required multiple sales teams representing different regions and products to sell into the same account. As Matt describes, the territory and lead management process required to enable this strategy presented a complex roadblock in terms of Spectrum’s post-merger go-to-market.

Examples of routing workflow complexities include (but aren’t limited to):

• Enable several different sales groups representing different products to nurture the same account.
• Maintain purposeful duplicates so multiple sales groups could sell into one account.
• Frequent strategy and territory changes required the ability to make quick changes to territory assignments & routing rules.

Challenge 1: Manual Lead assignment took at least 2 days

Challenge 2: Unable to quickly make changes to territory and assignment rules

Slow and Inaccurate Lead Routing Wasted Time and Hurt Conversion Rates

Prior to implementing RingLead, Spectrum's routing workflows were managed manually by a third-party team that took at least two days to assign leads. Not only was lead assignment slow, but it was also often inaccurate due to unintentional duplicates.

Additionally, when territories changed or business strategies were revised, it would take Spectrum "months to make changes to routing workflows," preventing Spectrum from being able to scale when business changes were made.

The negative consequences of inefficient routing:

Solution: "Data-based" Lead Routing and Territory Management

Matt was able to easily manage territories with RingLead’s segment builder and routing workflow engine. Additionally, Matt was able to orchestrate pre-requisite data cleansing and account matching as part of Spectrum’s routing workflow to prevent duplicates and ensure the right lead was routed to the right rep every time.

As Matt describes, reliable lead routing not only impacted conversion rates, but also increased the trust that sales had in the company’s processes, thus enabling enforceable sales SLAs.

Additionally, Matt was able to significantly cut down the time it took to make changes to territory assignment rules when business strategies changed; that time went "from months to minutes."

As a result:

Spectrum also enjoys the following RingLead Route features:

• Round Robin assignment
• CDP, Eloqua, and Salesforce Integrations
• Batch deduplication and Lead-to-Account matching
• Segmentation

Conclusion

Mergers and acquisitions are powerful growth engines, but present complex operational process challenges that can stall expected growth objectives. In Spectrum’s case, using a data orchestration platform to automate and streamline said processes in a data-driven manner was critical. Matt was able to use RingLead’s routing and real-time data optimization workflows to streamline Spectrum’s territory and lead lifecycle management, as well as routing workflows—all crucial pieces of the mergers and acquisitions puzzle.

As stated above, routing and territory management were not the only operational challenges to Spectrum’s go-to-market following their acquisition.

Post merger, Spectrum was equipped with siloed CRM and MAP instances for each acquired company, which not only prevented Spectrum from having a single customer view, but led to many other challenges that stalled growth before being fixed with RingLead. In part 2 of this case study, we’ll cover how Spectrum used RingLead to create a single customer view by integrating all three datasets from their acquired companies and the impact it had on their bottom line. Stay tuned!