Effective lead routing aligns potential customers with the best-suited sales reps to maximize sales opportunities and conversions.
But lead routing isn’t a perfect science, and what works best for one organization might not be effective for another. Finding the right strategy requires understanding your unique business needs and having the flexibility to adapt as they evolve.
What is Lead Routing?
Lead routing, also known as lead assignment, is the process of assigning incoming leads (and prospects) to the most suitable sales representative.
A lead routing process can be as simple as listing all sales reps alphabetically and assigning each new lead to the next rep in line. If you have reps named Anna, Ben, and Carl, the first lead goes to Anna, the second to Ben, the third to Carl, and then the cycle repeats.
But it’s usually not that simple.
Modern sales environments and customer relationship management (CRMs) platforms like Salesforce enable businesses to streamline lead routing through automation tools. While Salesforce offers native solutions such as Salesforce Flows, these can be complex and limited in functionality.
To overcome these challenges, businesses often use custom APEX code or dedicated automated lead routing software that leverages predefined criteria, data enrichment, and custom rules to streamline lead assignment. Automation reduces human error, improves your speed to lead, and lets you make real-time adjustments based on sales team performance and lead behavior.
For example, when a sales-qualified lead (SQL) enters your system, automated lead routing software might immediately assign it to the next available top-performing sales rep with a proven track record with similar leads. This connects each lead with a sales rep whose skills and experience align best with the lead’s needs, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
10 Lead Routing Examples
Different types of lead routing cater to various business needs, such as balancing workloads, leveraging specialized knowledge, and prioritizing high-value prospects. Here are 10 popular lead routing strategies, their benefits, and examples of how to implement them.
1. Round-robin Routing
What is round-robin lead routing? It’s a lead-routing strategy that sequentially assigns incoming leads to sales reps in a rotating order, distributing leads evenly among all sales team members.
If there are five sales reps, for example, the first lead goes to Rep A, the second to Rep B, and so on until the cycle repeats.
A round-robin-based routing system helps maintain a balanced workflow and ensures all reps have equal opportunities to engage with new leads. But since this assignment happens sequentially and doesn’t consider factors like the individual strengths or expertise of each team member, a round robin won’t always match leads with the most suitable rep. High lead influxes can also overwhelm the sequential order and cause delayed follow-ups and missed opportunities.
2. Territory-based routing
This strategy assigns incoming leads to sales reps based on specific geographic regions. Here, each rep is responsible for leads within their designated area or territory.
If an American company has three sales reps covering the East Coast, another the West Coast, and a third the Midwest, leads from New York would go directly to the East Coast rep, Arizona to the Midwest Rep, and leads from California to the West Coast rep.
A territory-based routing system builds strong customer relationships by letting reps provide more personalized service and understand local market conditions better. However, it can also distribute leads unfairly if certain territories generate more leads than others, overwhelming some reps while leaving others with fewer opportunities. Its rigid boundaries could also limit flexibility in reassigning leads and adapting to market changes.
Pro Tip
Using a hierarchy feature like a Complete Company ID lets you take territory-based routing to the next level. Bucket related accounts within a territory so you can automate account and lead assignments within dynamic territory alignments.
3. Account-based routing
Account-based lead routing assigns incoming leads to sales reps based on specific accounts, usually focusing on key and strategic clients.
For example, you might assign dedicated account managers to your largest clients. When a new lead from a major customer — like Zoom— comes in, it’ll go directly to the assigned rep or team.
Under this strategy, each rep handles all leads and opportunities within their designated territory of accounts, which helps them cultivate deeper customer relationships and better understand their customer needs. But similar to territory-based routing, account-based routing can create imbalances such as uneven workloads if certain accounts generate more leads than others.
4. Hierarchy-based lead routing
Hierarchy-based lead routing matches and routes inbound leads to the owner of an account hierarchy, or family tree consisting of related child accounts or subsidiaries within a parent account.
Consider a large multinational corporation like Disney, with several account divisions, branches, and legal entities. With hierarchy-based routing, the routing system automatically matches a lead from any Disney subsidiary, like Hulu, to the parent account and routes it accordingly.
You can use native account hierarchies in Salesforce, however this is a very manual process. When data changes constantly, it can be impossible to keep up with and can create duplicates if accounts are not properly connected to the Parent Account field.
Other limitations include:
- Single hierarchy view. Out-of-the-box Salesforce limits you to one hierarchy per Account and doesn’t accommodate other organizational relationships such as different legal, operational, and sales structures.
- Dependence on existing accounts. All parent accounts must already be part of Salesforce to build a hierarchy. If a parent account is missing, it can lead to incomplete or fragmented hierarchies.
- Chain linking limitations. In Salesforce, you must manually link a child account directly to a parent account, and that account to a parent. This “chain linking” can create inaccurate hierarchies and misrepresented relationships if improperly managed.
Move beyond Salesforce’s limitations and automatically build account hierarchies by automating hierarchy-based routing with Complete Hierarchies. Compatible with any third-party data provider and 100% native to Salesforce, Complete Hierarchies helps you build, maintain, and customize multiple hierarchies using a no-code, drag-and-drop interface.
5. Contact-based routing
Contact routing is a unique strategy that forgoes the lead object and routes contacts instead. It’s particularly useful for maintaining a cleaner and more efficient database. By routing contacts directly, you avoid cluttering your CRM with unnecessary lead records.
Let’s say you manage Sales Operations at a large SaaS company. One of your key accounts is a corporation with multiple divisions, each using different products your company offers. When a lead comes in from a contact at the corporation’s IT department who previously engaged with your sales team about cloud solutions, you can route this new lead to the same sales rep who handled the earlier interaction.
By doing so, you ensure the rep who’s already familiar with the contact’s unique challenges and past conversations can seamlessly continue the dialogue. The rep understands the contact’s pain points and can tailor the discussion to address them directly, increasing the chances of closing a deal.
Contact routing is also useful for cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers and tapping into whitespace opportunities. When a contact interacts with a marketing campaign, for example, you can set their engagement to trigger a routing process that matches them to an existing account and alerts the account manager for timely follow-up.
6. Product-based routing
This lead routing strategy assigns incoming leads to reps based on the specific product or service they’re interested in. Like availability-based routing, this example should function as an additional feature that complements your existing routing strategy. For instance, you could first route leads based on account and then factor in the specific product or service associated with that lead.
Imagine you’re working operations at Amazon. When a new lead expresses interest in Amazon Web Services (AWS), you’ll route the lead to a sales rep who owns the AWS account and specializes in the expressed product or solution. You can also do this by delineating whether the account has an open opportunity associated with the product.
Taking a product-based approach to lead assignments lets you connect leads with reps who have the most relevant knowledge and expertise, which can increase conversion chances and customer satisfaction.
Be sure to consider the risk of creating capacity imbalances if certain products are more popular than others. This is where you’ll need a fall-back strategy, such as having a sales leader or operations manager manually assign leads to other reps when the intended rep is overwhelmed.
7. Availability-based routing
Under availability-based lead routing, you assign incoming leads to sales reps based on their current availability.
Consider a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider like Asana. When a new lead enters the system, you or your lead routing software checks which sales rep is available to take on the lead. If Rep A is on a sales call and Rep B just finished theirs, Rep B will get the lead.
While this routing approach ensures reps respond to leads quickly, it won’t always match leads with the most qualified reps since it prioritizes availability over expertise. To maximize the effectiveness of this strategy, ensure you have clear rep availability parameters to balance workloads and maintain high response times.
Use a routing tool that integrates with Google Calendar and Salesforce Business Hours to determine whether reps are in a meeting, out of the office, or working in a different time zone. This lets you accurately assess availability and ensure you route leads to reps who can quickly respond.
Choosing a tool that lets you update automation rules in real-time, like Complete Leads, also helps keep you agile to quickly accommodate changes in your GTM strategy, like when a rep joins or leaves your team, or when someone goes on vacation.
8. Source-based routing
Source-based routing assigns incoming leads to reps based on the lead’s origin, such as marketing campaigns, referrals, and social media. The idea here is that if reps are familiar with the context and nuances of the lead’s source, they’re better equipped to provide more targeted and effective follow-up.
Let’s say you’re running multiple social media campaigns, partner referral programs, and webinars. When a new lead arrives from a partner referral, you assign it to the reps who manage partnerships. When a lead originates from a webinar and those leads are passed over, it’ll go to a rep experienced in engaging webinar attendees.
But similar to the other strategies discussed above, this approach can also create workload imbalances if certain campaigns see more engagement than others. It can also limit lead reassignment flexibility if a rep suddenly becomes unavailable or if lead sources shift significantly.
9. Trigger-based lead routing
Trigger-based routing assigns leads to sales reps based on specific actions and behaviors a lead takes, such as visiting a product landing page, downloading a whitepaper, or attending a webinar.
Unlike other routing strategies which rely on static criteria like geography and company size, trigger-based routing dynamically adjusts assignments in real-time based on a lead’s immediate actions. This approach adds responsiveness and agility to your lead management process, syncing your sales team with the prospect’s current interest and intent.
Imagine you’re leading a Sales Operations team. When a lead visits your pricing page multiple times within a short period or engages with high-value content pieces like case studies and product demos, these behaviors signal high-buying intent. These actions also contribute to the lead’s score — a value representing the lead’s conversion likelihood calculated based on their interactions with your organization.
Marketing Operations teams often track these intent scores and monitor when prospects engage with specific campaigns. Trigger-based routing allows you to automate critical actions, like assigning leads to sales reps once they hit a certain threshold. This ensures that high-scoring leads immediately go to an available rep ready to close deals with high-intent prospects.
If certain triggers are more common, however, they can create uneven workload distribution among reps. To maintain balanced workloads and fair lead distribution, implement load-balancing rules and regularly audit your routing system to ensure alignment with your sales objectives.
10. Industry-based routing
This strategy routes incoming leads to sales reps based on the industry the lead belongs to.
At a company like IBM, for example, industry-based routing would route retail industry leads to reps who understand retail technology like point of sale (POS) systems and consumer behavior, while leads from the manufacturing sector would go to reps knowledgeable about supply chain management and manufacturing processes.
An industry-based routing system optimizes lead management by allowing reps to provide tailored solutions specific to that lead’s industry, increasing conversion chances and customer satisfaction.
Without complementary routing features, workload imbalances remain an issue here and you risk creating silos within the sales team as reps specialize in some industries and not others.
You also risk complicating onboarding for new sales reps as they need to gain deep industry-specific knowledge before they can start selling effectively. If certain industries experience downturns, reps specializing in that industry may face difficulty pivoting to other sectors, too.
Lead Routing Best Practices: 5 Tips
These routing strategies are not exclusive of one another, and we recommend using whatever strategies work best with your go-to-market motions. Whether you’re using a round-robin system, a territory-based approach, or a combination of lead routing strategies, following best practices maximizes their effectiveness. Here are five tips to ensure your lead routing is as efficient and productive as possible.
1. Regularly update lead assignment rules with a visual flow builder
Assignment rules dictate how your lead routing system distributes leads among sales reps based on predefined criteria. You can establish your criteria based on factors such as business size, maturity, and geographic location.
In Salesforce, you can create lead routing flows through the Flow Builder. But there are limitations and it’s usually owned by an administrator which gates the ability to update routing rules yourself. This problem becomes even more cumbersome and slow as your business scales.
For instance, if you’re targeting both small businesses and large enterprises, you might create rules that assign leads from smaller businesses to a sales team specializing in small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and leads from large organizations to a team that handles complex and high-value deals.
As your business evolves and expands into new industries, you’ll need to revisit and adjust these rules to route leads to the most appropriate sales reps.
Here’s how lead routing software like Complete Leads can simplify your lead routing process in Salesforce with a more intuitive, flexible visual flow builder:
- Quickly create, modify, and visualize routing flows. Complete Leads lets you build and adjust routing flows in seconds with a drag-and-drop interface. This helps you see the entire routing process at a glance, empowering you to identify and address any gaps and inefficiencies.
- Organize and manage routing logic with nested flows. Nested flows, or flows within flows, organize complex routing logic into manageable segments. For example, you can have a main flow for routing leads by company size with nested flows underneath for different geographic regions. This structure lets you update specific routing logic segments — such as adding a new territory — without affecting other parts of your flow.
- Trigger complex, real-time routing decisions. As a low to no-code solution, Complete Leads lets you build sophisticated routing flows without any coding. It also lets you reference data from any object in Salesforce. This flexibility means you can quickly and accurately route leads to the right reps based on up-to-the-second data, helping your team quickly respond to new opportunities.
- Add context with sticky notes. You can add notes beside your flows in Complete Leads for additional context and reminders. These notes let your team understand the reasoning behind your routing decisions and keep track of important changes, making future adjustments smoother and more transparent.
- View and manage changes with a visual history log. Complete Leads includes a visual history log that tracks all changes made to your routing flows. This lets you quickly review past adjustments, understand the routing logic’s evolution, and revert to previous changes if necessary.
2. Implement a lead-scoring system
Lead scoring assigns a value to each lead based on predefined criteria such as demographic information, engagement level, and behavioral data. This information helps sales teams to quickly identify and act on high-quality leads.
In Salesforce, you can set up a lead-scoring system by defining criteria that indicate a lead’s readiness to buy. These might include behavioral actions like downloading a guide, attending a webinar, and scrolling through your pricing page but can also include factors such as company size, a lead’s job title, and their geographic location.
Each action and criterion has a point value, and the total score indicates the lead’s overall quality and likelihood of conversion. Leads with a higher score have higher priority and get more quickly routed to a sales rep, ensuring they receive immediate attention.
Here’s how a SaaS company might define key actions in its lead-scoring system:
If a lead downloads a whitepaper (+10 points), attends a webinar (+15 points), and fills out a contact form (+30 points), they’ll have a total score of 55, indicating high engagement with your product and purchase intent. The lead routing system will recognize their high score and route it to a top-performing rep specializing in handling high-quality leads.
3. Monitor lead response times with a lead response timer
Lead response times, or how fast you engage with new leads after they enter your system, directly correlate with conversion rates. One study even suggests that engaging with leads within the first five minutes makes your conversion rates 8 times higher.
That doesn’t come as a surprise — fast responses show leads that you’re reliable, attentive, and eager to solve their pain points — all characteristics of great customer service. Immediate responses also prevent hot leads from cooling off and exploring your competition, keeping your business at the forefront of their decision-making process.
You can track response times directly on the lead record itself in Salesforce, letting you and your sales reps know how quickly the team engages leads. Here’s how:
1. Set custom fields. Create custom fields on the lead object to store the timestamps. You can add fields such as “Lead Creation Time” and “First Engagement Time” to log precisely when a lead enters your system and when a rep contacts a lead for the first time.
2. Create formula fields. Add a formula field to calculate the response time. This field subtracts the “Lead Creation Time” from the “First Contact Time” on your lead object to give you the response time directly on the record.
3. Capture timestamps. Use Salesforce workflows or the Process Builder to automatically populate the above custom fields. When the system creates a lead record or when a sales rep logs the first contact activity, your workflow can automatically set the “Lead Creation Time” to the current timestamp and capture when the first rep engagement happened, respectively.
Some tools, like Traction Complete’s Response Timer, even let you track the time between different sales cycle stages and segment response times by sales rep, lead source, accounts, and other key criteria. It’s a great analytical aid to help you identify bottlenecks in your sales process and ensure adherence to service-level agreements (SLA).
4. Enrich your lead data with multiple third-party data sources
Integrating third-party data providers like Zoominfo or Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) into Salesforce ensures you’re working with the most updated and accurate information about your leads and accounts.
These data providers offer extensive databases that include firmographic details, contact information, financial data, and other important details that can help you improve your lead qualification and assignment.
But it’s important to recognize that third-party data providers aren’t always perfect. They can sometimes deliver conflicting information, especially if you’re using multiple providers. This creates inconsistent data, such as different values for the same field (like the number of employees or industry classification), potentially causing your reps to target companies outside your ideal customer profile and waste time on unqualified leads.
To enrich your Salesforce data effectively and avoid these data quality pitfalls:
1. Integrate third-party data providers. Set up API connections that allow data to flow from third-party data providers to Salesforce. You can do this using native Salesforce connections or through third-party integration tools available on the Salesforce AppExchange.
2. Map data fields carefully. After integration, map the data fields from each third-party provider to the corresponding fields in Salesforce. Pay extra attention to fields like company size, industry, location, and contact details to ensure you correctly import the enriched data into your CRM. Be mindful of potential conflicts between data sources and establish rules for which provider’s data should take precedence in case of conflict.
3. Automate data updates with caution. After integrating your third-party data source, set up automation rules to keep your data updated. Use Salesforce’s automation tools like Flow and Process Builder to schedule regular updates from the data provider. But remember that automation isn’t a “set-and-forget” tool. Regularly review the accuracy of the data you’re importing and consider building automation that periodically validates your data sources.
4. Refine your lead routing rules. With enriched data, you can refine your lead routing rules to leverage the new, more accurate information. Instead of routing all SMB leads from New York to the East Coast SMB team, for example, you can further segment these leads based on specific needs identified through the enriched data.
5. Optimize data provider usage. If you’re managing multiple data providers, consider using one at the lead level, another at the account level, and a third for specific data subsets. Doing so helps you avoid conflicting information and ensures clarity on which provider is responsible for any changes made to your data.
6. Maintain data integrity with Picklists and Integration Users. Minimize your intake of dirty data by having users populate fields using predefined picklist values. You can also use dedicated integration users to track which vendor or provider made specific data changes, helping you maintain data accuracy and traceability across your system.
5. Use advanced automation
As your business scales, manually routing leads becomes impractical and nearly impossible due to sheer volume. Manual routing also often has gated permissions, which means automations can’t be made by the teams that need to make them, like sales and marketing teams.
All the lead routing examples and best practices discussed above depend on automation for efficiency and accuracy. To keep up with growth, advanced automated routing is critical to ensure you quickly and accurately assign leads to the right sales reps.
With advanced lead routing software like Complete Leads, you can fully automate your lead routing process:
- Automate complex routing flows. Complete Leads empowers you to create sophisticated flows that automate lead assignments based on specific criteria such as lead scores, changes in intent data, and account activity. These automated flows route flows to the appropriate rep instantly, minimizing delays and improving your speed-to-lead.
- Reference and route any Salesforce Object. With Complete Leads, you can reference data from any object in Salesforce. This lets you create highly customized and precise routing rules, like referencing data from the Opportunities object to check whether a lead’s associated account has any open deals. If an open opportunity exists, you can automatically route the lead to the best available rep.
- Automatically send notifications and follow-ups. Automated notifications let your reps know when they get new leads. This ensures your team is always on top of new opportunities, minimizing the risk of missed leads.
- Handle high processing volumes. Too much complex automation can make deployment feel like a traffic jam, causing slowdowns and APEX CPU Time Limit Exceeded errors. With Complete Leads, you can efficiently manage high volumes by detecting and performing operations in batches, which keeps your automations running smoothly and without interruption, even at scale.
The Challenges of Lead Routing at Scale
As your GTM operations scale up, establishing and updating routing rules get more difficult.
No matter what routing strategy you use, you’ll likely have conditional routing logic that considers multiple criteria such as lead source, geographic location, and behavior — especially when you’re expanding into new territories and industries.
If you’re in a situation where you need to assign leads based on real-time data or changing business rules, you’ll also need custom APEX code to handle the extra logic.
Maybe your company launches a new marketing campaign that drastically increases lead volume, requiring more sophisticated routing to manage the influx. Perhaps you want to segment your customer base more granularly and you need custom coding to handle the more detailed routing criteria. Or new regulatory requirements introduce stricter data handling and compliance rules.
Remember that statistic on how engaging with leads within the first five minutes makes your conversion rates 8 times higher?
It’s difficult to reach that milestone when you need to revamp your routing logic whenever there are big business changes.
The key takeaway is that you need an automated routing system that adapts quickly without custom code, extensive manual configuration, or involving Salesforce Admins.
How Traction Complete Can Help
Complete Leads by Traction Complete is a lead routing and automation solution that’s 100% native to Salesforce. Unlike Salesforce Flows, which requires configuration at the metadata level, Complete Leads lets you configure flows at the data level within Salesforce. Combined with the drag-and-drop user interface, this feature lets you quickly make changes without new deployments.
To give you an example, here’s what a typical round-robin flow looks like in Salesforce Flow Builder:
This flow has seven steps, and expanding it by even one more step introduces multiple new decision points, data manipulations, and potential action branches. If you want to verify the lead’s validity before assigning it, you’ll need a new decision element, additional record retrievals, and conditional updates.
Here’s what a similar round-robin flow looks like in Complete Leads:
There are only three steps in this example — filtering records by criteria, distributing leads via round robin, and emailing relevant users of their assignment. If you want to add another step in this flow, like logging the assignment in a custom object for reporting purposes, you can just drag and drop the appropriate element or action into it.
You can make these changes without custom APEX coding, Salesforce Admins, or developers — and without waiting weeks to make an update when your rules have already changed again. Complete Leads also includes a hierarchy matching feature that lets you match and route leads to specific company hierarchy levels, making otherwise complex routing a breeze.
Empowering Marketing, Sales Operations, and Revenue Operations Teams
Responding quickly to leads and adjusting your team’s lead routing rules and GTM strategy on the fly is crucial to maximize your conversion rates. If you spend hours assigning leads or wait months for an IT team or Salesforce admin to update assignment rules in Salesforce, it’s time to consider a purpose-built lead routing tool.
Take your lead routing to the next level
When it comes to lead-to-account matching, lead routing, and deduplication or data cleanup, Complete Leads has everything you need to take your revenue to the next level.
Ready for the no-code solution to your lead routing and duplicate management?
Book a demo and learn more about what Complete Leads can do for you.
