In most sales organisations you have to manage incoming leads some way. These leads needs to be divided among the salespersons in a fair way.
At Tessin, all leads were previously routed through our sales manager, Erik. This added a lag in response time but also to Erik’s already heavy workload, forcing him to keep track of who’s next in line for every new lead. I decided to automate this process with the goal to make the process fair, fun and fast.
This resulted in the Tessin Slack Leads Bidder (yes, I need to work on that name). It works like this:
Everything is managed through a Slack channel named #leads. In this setup every salesperson is called an agent and has an account with credits. I’ve configured so that at midnight, every agent receives 100 additional credits.
A new lead from somewhere in the organisation is sent to an internal email account. This will initiate a new 5 minute auction for that lead. The agents can see in Slack who sent the lead and what subject the email had.
Using the /bid X command in Slack, the agents can set their bids. When the time is up the agent with the highest bid is forwarded the original email. If two agents has the same bid it’s assigned by random among them.
Using the /balance command everyone can see the status of all agents current credits.
And using the /bids command you can see the current bids.
There also an /autobid command allowing agents to set a starting bid for every auction.
This might not work in all organisations but so far it has been received positively by our sales team. As an added bonus it makes it more fun for the rest of the company to contribute with leads as everybody can follow the #leads channel in Slack.
The code for the Tessin Slack Leads Bidder system has been open sourced on Github if you want to setup a similar system for your team. To build this I’ve used Mandrill for automating processing of incoming emails and a MSSQL database in the back end. Installation instructions can be found on Github. If you want to contribute, I’m happy to take pull requests.