How Albacross Saved Hours Per Week with Distro Lead Distribution

Imagine putting gravel into the cogs of a machine… you can practically hear the screeching sound it makes as it grinds to a halt.

That’s what Albacross’ routing process was like before Distro.

Everything was manual. And a massive waste of time. 

We chatted with Victor Naess, revenue operations at Albacross, and learned how Distro helped fix their lead routing process. 

“It could be a few hours per week just assigning leads manually,” Victor said, “And we were like, why can’t we just automate this?”

And so they did. 

Streamlining leads 

“We wanted a way to streamline the leads we sell to others,” Victor said. “Together with our signals machine that we built internally, we combine the routing of these two different intent data sources to make sure that once we get a ping, we send it to the right rep.”

If it’s an existing account or someone is already working it, they’ll send the lead to them. If it doesn’t exist, they create it, enrich it, and send it off to the right rep.

They’re even able to route leads that may not have explicitly raised their hand for a demo. 

“For the leads that aren’t explicit hand raisers — we’re also routing them to the appropriate segment.” 

Before Distro

“Before Distro, we weren’t actually doing anything,” Victor said. “It was a manual process.” 

At first, Victor was in charge of lead routing. But it was eating up hours of his time. 

So he handed it over to their SDR manager, who (shockingly) also didn’t want to do it. 

“Some weeks it could be a few hours per week just assigning them manually,” Victor said. “It was a perfect blend of being pissed off enough and, happily enough, Distro landed in my inbox. And we were like, why can’t we just automate this?”

Right when Victor was at his breaking point, he got an email announcing the launch of Distro. 

“I saw the email that went out to the current customers, and I wrote to our customer success guy and said, ‘Hey, how do I get some of this secret sauce?’”

Why Chili Piper?

“I was aware of a few of the incumbent lead routing providers,” Victor said. “You pay an exorbitant amount of money — and you can make beautiful flow charts for every scenario — but then you also have a huge monster to deal with.” 

That might be okay if you’re also a monster of an organization in terms of size and complexity — but most organizations aren’t that complex.

The implementation process

Up and running in less than an hour? You bet. 

“The implementation process was pretty easy,” Victor said. ”Initially, we were just running it with our intent leads, and it took a grand total of an hour.” 

During the early stages, they noticed a few edge cases where leads were being misfired or misrouted, but it was a quick fix. 

“We fine-tuned it a little bit along the way,” He continued. “We noticed that “hey, this one edge case over here sometimes happens, and then it gets a bit wonky.”

Unexpected wins

One of the best surprises for Victor was Chili Bot.

He assumed he would have to make a separate Zapier notification to alert people in Slack when they got a new lead.

“No. To the rescue comes Chili Bot,” Victor said. “It pings people in Slack with a new record, and they just get the button to go straight there.”

“That was my biggest unexpected win,” Victor said. “One hundred percent.” 

It also benefited their entire go-to-market strategy.

“Launching new channels and new inbound funnels — we’ve been able to cut that down by 80%,” Victor said. “And by now, it’s so battle-tested by us that we know exactly how it works.”

Working at a fast-growing startup means things can change rapidly. 

“Directives change, and the market changes, and you’ve got to follow it,” Victor said. “And we need to be able to send those to reps and then also re-route them if they’re not being acted upon.”

Albacross has a long list of leads that can sometimes go unworked. 

But with Distro, they can make sure all leads get worked in a timely manner.

“In this case, we’re able to give it to someone else who will work it,” Victor said. “And that’s something I think every organization should aim for.” 

Want to learn more? Schedule a demo to see Distro in action