sales-lead-routing

What this skill does

# Design Lead Routing Rules

Help the user design and implement lead routing — from choosing a routing model and defining assignment rules through platform implementation, speed-to-lead optimization, and capacity management. This skill is tool-agnostic and covers Salesforce, HubSpot, Salesloft, Apollo, and standalone routing tools.

## Step 1 — Gather context


If `references/learnings.md` exists, read it first for accumulated knowledge.

Ask the user:

1. **What's your team structure?**
   - How many reps (SDRs, AEs, or both)?
   - Are reps specialized (by segment, territory, vertical) or generalist?
   - Any tiered seniority (senior reps vs junior)?

2. **Where do leads come from?**
   - A) Inbound (website forms, content, events)
   - B) Outbound (SDR-sourced, cold outbound)
   - C) Product-led (signups, trials, PQLs)
   - D) Partner/channel
   - E) Mix — describe

3. **How are leads routed today?**
   - A) Manual assignment (manager assigns)
   - B) Round-robin
   - C) Territory-based
   - D) CRM automation rules
   - E) No system — first come first served
   - F) Starting from scratch

4. **What tools do you use?**
   - CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, other
   - Sales engagement: Salesloft, Apollo, Mailshake, other
   - Routing tools: LeanData, Chili Piper, Distributely, none

5. **What's your lead volume?** (weekly or monthly inbound leads, rough estimate)

**If the user's request already provides most of this context, skip directly to the relevant step.** Lead with your best-effort answer using reasonable assumptions (stated explicitly), then ask only the most critical 1-2 clarifying questions at the end — don't gate your response behind gathering complete context.

## Step 2 — Routing model framework

Choose the right routing model based on team structure and lead characteristics.

### Decision matrix

| Model | Best for | Team size | Complexity | Speed-to-lead |
|-------|----------|-----------|------------|----------------|
| **Round-robin** | Equal distribution, generalist teams | Any | Low | Fast |
| **Territory-based** | Geographic or named-account specialization | 4+ reps | Medium | Fast |
| **Score-based** | Matching lead quality to rep skill | 6+ reps | High | Medium |
| **Account-based** | Named accounts with assigned owners | Any with ABM | Medium | Fast (if owner exists) |
| **Hybrid** | Complex orgs with multiple segments | 10+ reps | High | Varies |

### Round-robin
- **How it works**: Leads assigned in rotation to each rep equally
- **Variants**: Simple (A→B→C→A), weighted (A gets 40%, B gets 30%, C gets 30%), availability-aware (skip reps who are OOO)
- **Best for**: Small teams, equal lead quality, no specialization needed
- **Limitation**: Doesn't account for rep skill, lead quality, or territory

### Territory-based
- **How it works**: Leads assigned based on geographic region, industry vertical, or company size segment
- **Territory types**: Geographic (NA West, NA East, EMEA, APAC), vertical (Healthcare, FinTech, SaaS), segment (SMB, Mid-market, Enterprise)
- **Best for**: Teams with regional/vertical expertise, large enough to specialize
- **Limitation**: Uneven lead distribution if territories have different volumes

### Score-based
- **How it works**: High-score leads go to senior/experienced reps, lower-score leads go to SDRs for qualification
- **Tiers**: Hot (80+ score → senior AE), warm (50-79 → standard AE), cold (30-49 → SDR), below 30 → nurture/discard
- **Fallback rules**: Route unscored leads (missing data = no score) to SDRs for manual qualification. When a tier's rep pool is at capacity, overflow to the next tier down (e.g., hot leads overflow to standard AE pool if all senior AEs are maxed). Set per-rep capacity caps (e.g., max 30 leads/week) and auto-redistribute when a rep hits their cap.
- **Best for**: Teams with lead scoring in place (see `/sales-lead-score`), tiered rep experience
- **Limitation**: Requires a working scoring model; bad scores = bad routing

### Account-based
- **How it works**: Leads matched to existing account owners. Net-new accounts routed via other model.
- **Logic**: Check if lead's company matches an existing account → assign to account owner. If no match → fallback to round-robin or territory.
- **Best for**: ABM teams, named account strategies, preventing rep conflicts
- **Limitation**: Requires clean account data and dedup

## Step 3 — Design routing rules

### Priority waterfall

Build routing rules as a priority waterfall — the first matching rule wins:

| Priority | Rule | Example |
|----------|------|---------|
| 1 | **Existing account match** | Lead's company matches an owned account → route to account owner |
| 2 | **Named account list** | Company on target account list → route to assigned AE |
| 3 | **Score threshold** | Score ≥ 80 → route to senior AE pool |
| 4 | **Territory match** | Geography/segment matches territory → route to territory owner |
| 5 | **Round-robin fallback** | No other rule matched → round-robin across available reps |

### Speed-to-lead SLAs

Speed-to-lead is the most important metric in routing. Response time directly impacts conversion:

| Response time | Conversion impact |
|---------------|-------------------|
| < 5 minutes | 8x more likely to qualify vs 30 min |
| 5-30 minutes | Baseline |
| 30-60 minutes | 50% drop in qualification rate |
| > 1 hour | 80%+ drop |
| > 24 hours | Essentially dead — better to re-nurture |

**SLA recommendations by lead type**:
- Inbound demo request: < 5 minutes
- Inbound content download: < 1 hour
- PQL (product-led): < 15 minutes
- Outbound response/reply: < 1 hour
- Partner referral: < 30 minutes

### Overflow and fallback rules

What happens when the assigned rep can't respond in time:

| Scenario | Fallback |
|----------|----------|
| Rep doesn't respond within SLA | Escalate to manager + reassign to next available |
| Rep is OOO | Skip in rotation, assign to backup |
| Territory owner at capacity | Overflow to adjacent territory or SDR pool |
| No account owner exists | Fall through to round-robin |

### Conflict resolution

- **Multiple reps claim same lead**: Account owner wins. If no account owner, first-touch attribution.
- **Lead matches multiple territories**: Primary territory wins (define primary in territory rules).
- **Existing customer, new contact**: Route to account owner, not round-robin.
- **Recycled/re-engaged lead**: Route back to original owner if still on team, otherwise round-robin.

## Step 4 — Platform implementation

### Salesforce
1. **Assignment Rules**: Setup > Lead Assignment Rules — define criteria and assign to users or queues
2. **Queues**: Create lead queues for pools (SDR pool, AE pool, territory queues)
3. **Flow Builder**: For complex logic — score-based routing, account matching, SLA escalation
4. **Matching rules**: Setup > Duplicate Management > Matching Rules — match leads to existing accounts
5. **Escalation rules**: Setup > Escalation Rules — auto-escalate if not contacted within SLA
6. **Third-party**: LeanData or Distributely for advanced routing with visual rule builders

### HubSpot
1. **Lead rotation**: Settings > Users & Teams > Lead Rotation — built-in round-robin
2. **Workflows**: Automation > Workflows — build if/then routing logic based on properties
3. **Contact owner assignment**: Use workflow actions to set owner based on territory, score, or account
4. **SLA monitoring**: Create workflow to reassign if owner doesn't log activity within X hours
5. **Third-party**: Chili Piper for real-time scheduling + routing from forms

### Salesloft
- **Rhythm routing**: Rhythm prioritizes actions for reps — configure routing via CRM sync
- **Cadence assignment**: Auto-import leads into cadences based on CRM assignment
- **Round-robin**: Not native — handle in CRM, sync assignment to Salesloft

### Apollo
- **Sequence assignment**: Assign contacts to sequences owned by specific reps
- **CRM sync**: Apollo respects CRM ownership — route in CRM, sync to Apollo
-