What Is Lead Routing and How Should It Work?

Q: What is lead routing, and how should it work?

Lead routing is the set of rules that decides which person receives each new lead, and how quickly. It should assign every lead to a named owner automatically, within seconds, using rules anyone on the team can read, with a fallback for every case the rules do not cover.

The common methods

Round robin shares leads in turn. Territory routing assigns by region, segment or named account. Account-based routing sends a lead to whoever already owns that company. Most teams need a mix: check for an existing owner first, then territory, then round robin among whoever is left.

Where routing breaks

Rarely in the main rule. It breaks at the edges: a lead that matches two territories, a rep on leave who stays in the rotation, a form fill at six on a Friday, a company entered twice under two names. Each of those leaves a lead with no owner, and an unowned lead is the slowest kind.

What good routing needs first

Clean inputs. Routing reads fields such as country, company size and account owner, so it is only as good as the data in them. Enrich the record before the rule runs, match the lead to an existing account, and catch duplicates on entry. Otherwise the rule fires correctly on wrong information.

How to test yours

Take last month's leads and measure the time from creation to a named owner, not to first reply. Look at the slowest tenth and find what they have in common. That pattern is the missing rule. Then write the rules down in plain words, so the next change does not depend on one person's memory.

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What is lead routing, and how should it work?

The common methods

Where routing breaks

What good routing needs first

How to test yours

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