The CFO doesn't care about routing rules
Revenue operations leaders know that better routing drives better outcomes. But when you need budget approval for a new tool, "better routing" isn't a line item a CFO signs off on.
You need to connect routing to revenue. Specifically, you need to show how much money the current state is costing the company and how much a routing tool will recover. This guide walks through the framework.
Step 1: Quantify the current cost of bad routing
Before you can show ROI, you need to establish the baseline. How much is the status quo actually costing? There are four areas to measure.
Unworked leads
Pull a report on leads that were created in the last quarter and never received a meaningful engagement. Not "viewed in CRM," but actual outreach. A phone call, an email, a meeting booked.
Every unworked lead represents wasted marketing spend. If your average cost per lead is $150 and you had 200 unworked leads last quarter, that's $30,000 in marketing spend that produced zero pipeline.
Slow response time
Measure the time between lead creation and first rep engagement. The MIT/InsideSales.com study shows that leads contacted within 5 minutes are 21x more likely to qualify versus 30 minutes. If your average response time is 4 hours, calculate how many leads were engaged after the optimal window.
You don't need perfect data here. Even a rough calculation makes the point: if 60% of your leads are contacted after the first hour, and the research says conversion rates drop significantly after 5 minutes, you're leaving pipeline on the table. For a deep dive on the response time data, see our speed to lead analysis.
Misrouted leads
Track how many leads needed to be manually reassigned last quarter. Each reassignment represents:
- Wasted time for the ops person doing the rerouting
- Delayed response time for the lead
- Potential confusion for the prospect (getting contacted by the wrong person first)
If your team reassigns 50 leads per week and each reassignment takes 5 minutes of ops time plus adds 30 minutes to the response, you can calculate both the direct labor cost and the indirect conversion impact.
Rep productivity loss
When reps spend time on manual routing tasks (checking territory sheets, figuring out who should own a lead, chasing down the right person to hand off to), they're not selling.
Survey your reps: how much time per week do they spend on lead assignment and routing issues? Even 30 minutes per rep per week, across a 50-person sales team, is 25 hours of selling time lost weekly. At average fully-loaded sales rep compensation, that's a quantifiable cost.
Step 2: Model the improvement
Now project what changes with automated routing. Be conservative. CFOs respond better to realistic projections than optimistic ones.
Speed to lead improvement
If your current average response time is 4 hours and automated routing brings it to under 5 minutes, model the conversion impact:
- Current: X leads per quarter, Y% conversion, Z average deal size
- Improved: same leads, improved conversion rate from faster response
Even a modest improvement, moving conversion from 12% to 15%, can represent significant revenue when multiplied across your lead volume.
Unworked lead recovery
If automated routing eliminates 80% of unworked leads (a reasonable assumption with proper fallback rules and notifications), calculate the pipeline value recovered.
Rep productivity gains
If routing automation saves each rep 30 minutes per week, that's 26 hours per year per rep. Across a team, the aggregate selling time recovered is meaningful.
Ops efficiency
How much time does your ops team currently spend on manual routing, reassignment, and routing-related troubleshooting? Automated routing won't eliminate all of this, but it typically reduces it by 60-80%.
Step 3: Calculate total cost of ownership
This is where most business cases fall short. They compare the tool's license fee against the projected benefit without accounting for the full cost.
Direct costs
- License fees: per user per month, platform fees, tier requirements
- Implementation: vendor professional services, if applicable
- Internal implementation time: your team's hours to configure, test, and roll out
Ongoing costs
- Administration: time spent maintaining routing rules, adding reps, adjusting logic
- Training: onboarding new ops team members and reps on the tool
- Integration maintenance: keeping CRM and tool integrations healthy
Hidden costs to account for
- Switching cost: if you later outgrow the tool, what's the migration effort?
- Scope creep: will you need higher-tier plans as your needs grow?
- Dependency risk: what happens if the vendor raises prices or sunsets features?
For a breakdown of specific tools and their pricing, see our lead routing tools guide.
Step 4: Build the one-page summary
CFOs and executives don't read 10-page business cases. They read one-page summaries. Here's the structure that works:
The problem (2-3 sentences)
State the current cost in dollars. "We have X unworked leads per quarter representing $Y in wasted marketing spend. Our average response time is Z hours, and research shows this reduces our conversion rate by an estimated A%."
The solution (2-3 sentences)
Describe what you're proposing, not the tool's feature list. "Automated lead routing will reduce response time from hours to minutes, eliminate unworked leads through fallback rules and real-time notifications, and recover X hours of rep selling time per week."
The numbers
Present a simple table:
- Annual cost of current state: $X (unworked leads + slow response + ops time)
- Annual cost of routing tool: $Y (license + implementation + maintenance)
- Net annual benefit: $X - $Y
- Payback period: Z months
The ask
Be specific. "We're requesting approval for [tool name] at $X per year. Implementation will take 6-8 weeks. We expect to see measurable improvement in speed to lead within 30 days of go-live."
Step 5: Address the objections
Every business case faces objections. Prepare for these:
"Can't we just fix our CRM routing rules?"
Maybe. If your needs are simple and you have strong CRM admin capacity, native routing might be sufficient. But if you've already tried this and you're reading this guide, native routing probably isn't solving the problem. The question is whether incremental CRM improvements will close the gap or whether you need purpose-built tooling.
"This is a nice-to-have, not a must-have"
Reframe with the cost data. "We're currently losing $X per quarter in unworked leads and slow response times. This isn't a feature request. It's a revenue recovery initiative."
"The ROI projections seem optimistic"
This is why conservative modeling matters. If you projected a 25% conversion improvement and the CFO pushes back, you can show that even a 10% improvement justifies the investment. Build your case so it works at the pessimistic end of the range.
"Can we start with a pilot?"
Yes, and you should proactively suggest this. A pilot with one team or one lead source lets you validate the ROI with real data before committing to a full rollout. Most routing vendors support pilot deployments.
The metrics that prove it worked
Once you've secured the investment, you need to show results. Track these metrics monthly:
- Speed to lead: before vs. after, by channel and segment
- Unworked lead rate: should drop significantly
- Lead-to-meeting conversion: the most direct revenue indicator
- Routing accuracy: percentage of leads correctly assigned first try
- Rep satisfaction: qualitative but important for adoption
- Ops time on routing: hours spent on manual routing tasks
Report these to the same stakeholders who approved the investment. Nothing secures future budget like proving past investments delivered.
Start with the data
The business case for lead routing software is straightforward once you have the baseline data. Start measuring unworked leads, response times, and reassignment volumes this week. The numbers usually make the case themselves.
If you want routing tools built with these operational realities in mind, designed by people who've built this exact business case at multiple companies, that's what we're shipping on March 10th.