Best Practice: Sales Assignment Time-Outs

One mechanism we employ at Full Circle Insights is the concept of Assignment Time-Outs, which facilitate a forced time-out after a rep has engaged with a prospect and disqualified them for the time being. Time-outs prevent a name from returning to sales the next day or next week if it happens to engage in another qualified activity right away. These are easily built using workflows and setting date fields based on the disqualified reason then applying those to the logic that re-opens existing leads.

For example, if the individual isn’t ready to be converted to an opportunity because they are a student – you might want to put them in time out for a year, however if they are not ready because they don’t have budget this month you might want to put them in timeout for 20 or 30 days. To get started with timeouts take the following steps:

Determine how long the time-outs should be and if there should be different criteria depending on the disqualification reason.
Insure that certain behaviors will bypass time-outs – for example, a contact form should always drive engagement even if the person is in a Nurture time-out.

It is also critical to think through the entire progression of the time-out and make sure that you have a clear process defined for how a record opens back up – this is a lifecycle and an existing record engaging with you can be just as valuable as a new name.