Manual routing works right up to the point it doesn't: a rep on holiday, a lead that arrives at 7pm, an enquiry nobody recognises as high value. Every one of those is a deal that cools while it waits. Routing logic that lives in the CRM rather than in someone's head fixes it permanently.
Score before you route
Routing without scoring sends your best enquiry to whoever is next in the rotation. We score on the attributes that actually predict revenue in your data — company size, stated budget, service requested, source, and whether the contact has engaged before — then route the top band to your strongest closers.
Keep the model simple enough to explain in a sentence. A scoring system your sales team cannot describe is one they will quietly ignore.
Territory and specialism come before availability
The rule order matters. We resolve territory and language first, then specialism, then round-robin within whoever is left. Reversing that order produces the classic failure where a technical enquiry lands with a generalist because they happened to be next in line.
Round-robin should also be weighted. New starters take a smaller share while they ramp; part-time reps get a proportional load. A flat rotation looks fair and produces uneven pipelines.
- Territory and language
- Service specialism or product line
- Current open-deal load per rep
- Weighted round-robin as the tiebreaker
Plan for the rep who isn't there
Availability rules are what turn routing from a demo into a system. Working hours, holiday calendars and out-of-office states all need to feed the assignment logic, with a named fallback owner per team so no record is ever assigned to nobody.
Out of hours, the enquiry still gets an immediate acknowledgement and a booking link. It queues to a real owner for the next working morning rather than sitting unassigned until someone spots it.
Escalate when nothing happens
Assignment is not contact. We add a timer: if there is no logged activity within the SLA — typically fifteen minutes in hours — the lead reassigns and the manager is notified. Two breaches in a week and the rep drops out of the rotation until the queue is cleared.
Publishing that SLA breach report weekly changes behaviour faster than any amount of coaching, because it makes response time visible rather than anecdotal.
What to expect
On the accounts where we have rebuilt routing, first-response time typically falls from hours to single-digit minutes, and the spread between the fastest and slowest rep narrows dramatically. The second effect matters more than the first: consistency is what makes the forecast trustworthy.