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Salesforce lead assignment rules best practices and tricks.

By Stacy O’Leary

I confess: I love Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules almost as much as I love the Approval Process . A good set of Lead Assignment Rules will buy you endless friends in both sales and marketing, and will make your incoming data sparkle and look perfect (even if it is not!) In this guide, I’ll be talking about the initial Lead sort, upon creation.

Salesforce Lead Assignment Rule Example

• Criteria #1: If State = California, assign to Stacy
• Criteria #2: If Country = United Kingdom, assign to Ben
• Criteria #3: If Country = France, assign to Lucy
• Criteria #4: If Annual Revenue is greater than $500,000,000 USD, assign to “High Roller Queue”

Planning Lead Assignment Rules

Discovery: questions to ask.

• Where are the new Leads coming from? Marketo? HubSpot? Other integrated systems? Web forms? Are there any examples you look at? Make friends with the people who run these systems, you need to have a good relationship because you’re going to need their help.
• What fields are populated on these newly created Leads? What fields are required? If it’s minimal, can you get more information? Generally, the more information you have, the easier it is to sort.
• What if a Lead comes in from one of your Partners? What if a Lead comes in from one of your competitors? From one of your employees? Are there any kinds of Leads that should never be distributed out to your team, like students or media inquiries? (Remember – ANYONE with access to the internet can fill out your form! They do not have to be a legitimate prospect!)
• Who is covering what territories? Do you have any territories that don’t have a sales rep yet? Do all new Leads have enough data to determine territories?
• What about the Leads that don’t meet any criteria at all? Where will they go? Who will work them?

Refining the requirements

• Our new Leads, almost always, come from Marketo . They could come from a Marketo form, or a list imported from a trade show, but Marketo is the system that pushes them to Salesforce. If a person creates their own Lead, we do not want to take it away from them.
• We always have: first name, last name, lead source, email, company, state and country. We sometimes have # of Employees, but that’s pretty much all we know about them at the moment of creation.
• Any Lead that comes in from a Partner should be directed to our channel team. We don’t want to market to competitors, employees, or students.
• We have a territory plan defined by Sales, and we’d also like to separate prospects for the UK and France, though we do not have a sales rep for those areas yet.
• If something comes in that we cannot otherwise sort, let’s put it in a holding place and let marketing send out generic nurture emails. If a person in this holding place takes interest, we can always give it to the sales team later.

• Partners (any Lead that comes in from a Partner company)
• Disqualified (any Lead that comes in from a competitor, is an employee, or is a student)
• UK + France (any Lead where Country = United Kingdom, or France)
• Unsorted (any Lead that does not meet any criteria)

Creating Lead Assignment Criteria

Leads that shouldn’t be distributed, next criteria.

The Final Empty Criteria

Activate the Lead Assignment Rules

• Leads can only be sorted by a field value at the moment it was sorted.
• The Lead Router does not auto-convert Leads to Contacts
• You cannot deactivate a User license if that person is part of the Lead Assignment Rules (even if the Lead Assignment Rules have been deactivated.)
• Create a report for yourself, for that last criteria – Leads that are unsorted. This way you can review them periodically and see if there’s enough volume to justify sorting them in a certain way.

Stacy O'Leary

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How to Re-run Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules: Flows & Apex

Salesforce Lead assignment rules ensure Leads are assigned to the appropriate user or queue for follow up. They also liberate marketers from trying to maintain sales territory logic within their Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).

>> Related: How to Build a SLA Alert in Salesforce <<

When a new Lead is created, Salesforce will use logic you’ve configured to assign the record to the appropriate user or queue. But what if you need to re-run that logic on existing records ?

In this post:

Re-running Lead Assignments for just a few Leads

If you only need to do this for a single Lead record, the solution is simple.  Edit the record and select the optional “ Assign using active assignment rule “ checkbox.

If you need to do a one-time batch reassignment of a number of records, export the relevant Lead Ids.  Then use the Apex Data Loader to trigger assignment rules to fire. You can grab the ID of the appropriate Lead Assignment Rule from the URL bar when viewing the rule in Setup. It will always start with the prefix “01Q” .

But you may want to automatically re-run Salesforce Lead Assignments

But you may want to re-run assignment rules automatically under certain conditions. For example:  you may assign Leads under a certain Lead Score to a Queue.  When the Lead Score increases over the threshold, you then want to re-run assignment rules to assign to an inside sales rep for follow up.

To do this, we combine Flow and an Apex Invocable method. We take advantage of the power of Apex with the flexibility to declaratively (clicks, not code!) control the logic of when to re-run the assignment rules, without having to edit any code.

Using Apex for Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

Let’s start with the code.

Since we’re writing code here, we’ll need to start in a sandbox org first before deploying to production. You’re smart and already knew that you’d NEVER make changes in production without first testing in a sandbox ( right?! ), but in this case, Salesforce doesn’t trust you either way and forces you to write your code in a sandbox org before moving to production.

We’ll be creating an Apex class with a single method with the @InvocableMethod annotation, which allows us to call our Apex from within a Flow. The method accepts a single parameter (a list of the Lead Ids to be assigned) that you’ll pass into the method from your Flow.

That’s it. Just those four lines are all you need in your code. The logic for firing the assignment rules will be configured in one or more Flows.

Now, in order to actually deploy this to your production org, you’ll also need to create a test class to cover your code and ensure that it functions as expected in your environment. A sample test class might look like this (but this is extremely basic):

Work with a developer to ensure you’re accounting for any requirements specific to your Salesforce instance.

Using Salesforce Flows for Lead Assignment Rules

Now we’ll create our declarative logic of when to fire the code, using a Flow.

1) Create a new Flow by searching for Flows under Setup and clicking the New Flow button in the top right. This example is for a Record-Triggered Flow , but you can design it a number of ways.

2) Select the Lead object for your Flow and configure the trigger for when a record is created or edited .

3) Then set the Entry Conditions.  In this use case, we want to re-assign Leads after they meet a certain Lead Score. Select “custom condition logic is met. ” Set the condition that the Lead Score is greater than or equal to 100.

Under the “When to Run the Flow for Updated Records” section, select the option to only execute when a record is updated to meet the condition requirements . This means we’ll only execute the actions if the record previously did not meet the criteria, but now does after being updated.

4) Without getting into too much detail, because of Triggers and Order of Execution , we can’t call our code in an immediate action. Instead, we’ll create a scheduled path to call our Apex method.

In this case, we want the logic to execute ASAP, so we’ll set the schedule for 0 minutes from now.

5) Once saved, we can create a new action. Click to Add a New Element , and select an Action type. Give your action a name, and select the Apex class you created earlier. Set the Apex Variables leadIds using the Field Reference of the Lead Id that started the process.

6) After saving, your Flow looks like this:

Activate your flow, test in your sandbox, and deploy to your production org. Since the code is fired under a scheduled action, there is a slight delay before the reassignment happens. In my experience, it’s usually <2 minutes, but you can monitor this under Setup > Flows and viewing the Paused and Waiting Interviews section.

The nice part about this approach is that if your requirements change – for example if your Lead Score threshold changes to 150 instead of 100 – you can change the logic in your Flow (Step 3) without having to touch any code.

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How to set up lead assignment rules for lead routing in Salesforce?

Unsure how to set up lead assignment rules and lead routing in Salesforce? This article covers it step-by-step

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No matter how much I dread Salesforce, I’ve got to admit Salesforce’s assignment rules are incredible.

Assignment rules in Salesforce help your team determine who gets what leads and cases based on specific criteria you set up. It's all about streamlining your GTM process and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.  

Picture this: your organization is rocking different GTM motions, right? Inbound leads, website-generated leads, event imports, you name it. Well, guess what? You can create assignment rules for each of these motions. 

For example, you can have a kickass rule for inbound leads and another one for event follow-ups. Oh, and don't forget about cases. You can set up rules for weekdays, weekends, and holidays. It's all about keeping things organized and making sure the right people are on the case.  

But here's the kicker. As your organization grows, things get messy. You're stuck with just one rule in Salesforce. One! 

Seriously, even your carbonated sugar water has more variety.

So, what do some organizations do? They create this massive assignment ruleset and cram every rule entry in there. It doesn't matter if it's for inbound, event follow-up, segmentation, or territories—they just shove it all in one place. Talk about a recipe for chaos!

In this post, I'm gonna share some best practices for Salesforce lead routing and assignment rules. We'll show you how to keep your team engaged with those precious leads and speed up your time-to-revenue. 

Ready? Let's do this!

How to define lead assignment rules for lead routing in Salesforce?

When it comes to assignment rules in Salesforce, your Salesforce administrator can only have one active rule at a time for your go-to-market motions. This assignment rule serves a dual purpose: automating lead routing when new leads enter your CRM and managing customer-facing processes within your CRM.  

Let's start with the lead assignment rules. 

Lead assignment rules define how leads are assigned to your sales reps. Whether they're manually created, captured from your website, or imported through SFDC's Data Import Wizard, these rules ensure proper allocation. Additionally, case assignment rules come into play when you want to assign support questions. Think of this as a use case for customer support and customer success functions.

Getting the basic flow for your lead assignment and routing in Salesforce right

Every organization is different with unique GTM motions. With that in mind, here are a few questions to ask yourself (and your entire GTM team) before you begin setting up your lead routing.  ‍

Psst… I’ve been burned by not getting this right.  

• How are leads entering your CRM? 
• When leads enter the CRM, what happens? 
• How and when should leads be passed off to your team members? (think lead qualification, interests, activity, contact properties, and behavior) 
• Which of your salespeople and account executives touch leads and when? 
• When are leads considered sales or marketing qualified? 

When you have answers to the above questions, you’ll have a good picture of how your leads flow through your CRM.

How to set up a lead assignment in Salesforce for lead routing?

To get started with assignment rules in Salesforce, follow these steps:  

• Login to Salesforce and click on Setup in the upper right corner of the horizontal navigation bar.

• In the Setup search box, type "assignment rules" and select either Lead Assignment Rules. ‍

• Click on New to create a new assignment rule. 
• In the Rule Name box, provide a name for your rule.
• Once done, click Save. ‍

• Open your newly created rule and select New in the Rule Entries section to define your rule criteria. a. In Step 1 of the "Enter the rule entry" window, enter an Order for your new rule. The Order determines the processing sequence, similar to a queue. ‍

          b. In Step 2, decide whether your rule should be based on meeting specific criteria or a formula. In the "Run this rule if" dropdown box, choose either "criteria are met" or "formula evaluates to true".            

      c. Once you’ve selected how you want to trigger the rules, use the drop down to set the criteria for the rule entry ‍

     d. Finally, in Step 3, select the user or queue to whom your rule will assign the new lead or case. You can use the lookup feature to find specific users or a queue

    e. Once you've completed Step 3, click Save. ‍ That’s it! You’ve now set up a lead assignment rule in Salesforce. ‍ If you’d like some inspiration for your next lead assignment rule, consider this example:

In the above example, you can see that we are: 

• Disqualifying leads that come from competitors
• Routing leads that come from our partnerships to partnerships expert
• Routing leads that have less than 5000 employees to Joe Cavill
• Sending leads who have more than 5000 employees to Jessica

Two reasons why your lead assignment might not work as expected

If you're facing issues with your lead or case assignment rules not functioning properly, here are a few tips to troubleshoot and identify the root cause quickly.  

• First and foremost, check if the assignment rule is active. Remember, you can have only one active case or lead assignment rule at a time. 
• Next, ensure that the record is assigned to the correct user or queue and verify that the checkbox "Assign using active assignment rule" has been selected. To support this step, consider enabling field History tracking on the case or lead owner and adding object History (case or lead) to your page layout. 

These measures can help track any changes made to ownership.  

One common issue to watch out for is overlapping rule entries or entries in the wrong order. When you have multiple rule entries, it's possible for them to overlap, leading to unpredictable record assignments. 

For example, if entry #1 assigns New York leads to Henry and entry #2 assigns Demo Request leads to Terry, Henry might end up receiving Demo Request leads intended for Terry. To avoid such confusion, review the order and arrangement of your rule entries carefully. 

Disadvantages of lead assignment and lead routing with Salesforce

When it comes to implementing lead assignment and routing on Salesforce, there are a few downsides you need to be aware of. Here's a list of potential hiccups you might encounter along the way. 

• Round-robin or custom distribution: First up, let's talk about the nuances of round-robin or custom logic lead distribution. When you have a team of AEs, you naturally want to set up fair distribution or implement your own custom logic. However, doing this in Salesforce can be quite challenging, especially when you need to consider all those pesky edge cases. What if the lead is assigned to an AE and she falls sick on the day of the demo call? Naturally, a teammate takes the demo. Now, how do you add the original AE back to the queue and give her another lead since this got reassigned to someone else?
• Lead-to-account matching: Picture this scenario: a lead is already in your Salesforce CRM and has been assigned to an AE. Now, when they come back and book a demo with you, you definitely don't want them to go through a round-robin distribution and get assigned to someone else on the team, right? You want them to stick with their designated rep. Unfortunately, achieving this in Salesforce is impossible.
• Complex lead qualification: Lead qualification shouldn’t require you to write complex code. Unfortunately, that’s what it’ll take when you try to do lead qualification with Salesforce.
• Routing log: Imagine your sales rep reaches out to you, wondering why a lead didn't get assigned to them. Well, in Salesforce you can track an object’s history to see when properties change, but you won't have a clear way to track all the steps that led to the assignment (or lack thereof). It becomes a guessing game, and nobody wants to play that.
• Instant scheduling: And finally, we have the big one. When you have a qualified lead that's been routed to the right sales rep, wouldn't it be amazing to book a call with them right away? No need to make them wait for an email or phone call from your sales rep. Unfortunately, no matter how many workflows you create or stitch together, this is simply not possible with Salesforce. 

These are the challenges you might face when implementing lead routing on Salesforce. But hey, awareness is the first step toward finding solutions, right? Keep these in mind as you navigate the world of Salesforce.

How RevenueHero simplifies lead assignment for you in Salesforce?

At first, it seems pretty straightforward, but here's the catch: you're limited to having just one rule. Now, imagine as your GTM motions get more complex and your organization grows. 

That one rule starts to feel like a ticking time bomb, ready to explode with multiple defining rule entries. With each entry you add, the rule becomes more unwieldy and harder to manage. 

With RevenueHero integrated to your Salesforce CRM, here’s what you’ll get:

• Show the right sales rep’s calendar after a form is submitted.
• Auto-qualify leads after form-submit using custom logic.

• Automatically log all meeting activity to your Salesforce CRM to create custom reports.
• Use custom Round-robin logic and weighted assignments to ensure smoother account handovers.

• Eliminate tedious CRM cleanups and matching errors by automating lead to account matching. 

Of course, I’m a bit biased. But based on what existing customers say, Salesforce works. But Salesforce + RevenueHero makes you win.

Related articles

No SDR qualification or BANT interrogation. Just a live demo of the product, tailor-made to your business.

Guide to lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Use SFDC lead assignment rules to get more done, create a better experience, and close deals faster.

Rachel Burns Jul 24, 2023

15 min read

Table of contents

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What are Salesforce lead assignment rules?

What if your sales team could spend their valuable time connecting with prospects and closing deals — instead of losing time doing admin work like assigning and organizing leads?

When you automate lead assignment and routing, your sales team can:

Boost sales team productivity and efficiency

Prevent high-quality leads from slipping through the cracks

Create a better experience for potential customers

Speed up your entire sales pipeline to close more deals, faster

In this blog post, we'll discuss the ins and outs of Salesforce lead assignment. We'll cover the benefits, how to plan your lead assignment strategy, and a step-by-step walkthrough of adding lead assignment rules in Salesforce. We'll also explore the power of scheduling automation to simplify and speed up lead assignment, routing, and qualification.

Key takeaways:

Lead assignment rules help sales teams boost productivity, respond to leads faster, and make better data-driven decisions. 

Matching leads with the right sales reps and teams creates a better customer experience by responding to leads faster and giving them personalized attention.

Before you set up your lead assignment rules, work with your sales, marketing, and RevOps teams to understand your lead generation processes and sales team structure.

Within Salesforce lead management settings, rule entries are the individual criteria and actions. A “lead assignment rule” refers to a set of rule entries. 

Automating lead routing , qualification, and booking with Calendly helps your team be more efficient and organized while creating a better experience for prospective customers.

6 benefits of creating lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Why should your team take the time to set up lead assignment rules in Salesforce? Here are six great reasons:

Ensure leads are assigned to the right reps and teams: Lead assignment rules mean each incoming lead is directed to the salesperson or team who has the relevant expertise and skills to engage and convert that lead. Automated lead assignment also prevents leads from falling through the cracks by making sure each lead is assigned to a rep or team, rather than relying on manual assignment.

Respond to leads faster: With lead assignment rules, leads are automatically assigned to the right salesperson, reducing response time and increasing the chances of converting leads into customers .

Boost sales team productivity: Automating lead assignment reduces manual work for RevOps teams and sales managers. Lead assignment rules also help identify and prioritize leads more likely to convert, saving time and resources that would otherwise be wasted on pursuing poor-fit leads. These time savings let sales teams focus on nurturing leads and closing deals.

Create a better customer experience: Leads can be assigned to sales reps who have relevant industry or product expertise, understand their unique needs, and can provide personalized solutions. This tailored approach creates a better experience for leads, which results in more conversions and higher customer satisfaction.

Improve sales forecasting: With well-defined lead assignment rules, you can gather more accurate data on lead distribution and conversion rates. This data can be used for sales forecasting, data driven decision-making, and resource allocation.

How to create lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Step 1: build your lead assignment strategy.

Before you go into your Salesforce instance and set up lead assignment rules, you need to figure out what exactly those rules will be. The options are limitless — where should you start?

It’s time to bring RevOps, sales, and marketing together to answer some questions:

Lead sources: Where do leads come from? Do we use marketing forms through Salesforce web-to-lead forms or a third-party integration? Are we importing leads via the data import wizard?

Sales team structure: How is the sales team structured? Are different teams or individuals specialized in specific products, industries, use cases, or regions?  

Lead data: What info do we request from new leads? Which standard and custom fields do we require?

Sales territories: How are sales territories defined? Are there specific regions, countries, or territories we should take into account for lead assignment?

Integrations : Do we have any third-party integrations with lead assignment or distribution features? Are we using those features?

Special circumstances: Are there any priority levels or tiers for leads that require special attention? For example, do we have a designated rep or queue for leads with complex needs and use cases?

Poor fits: What should we do with leads who don’t meet any of our criteria?

It’s a lot of information to gather and organize, but it’s important to learn as much as possible up front to cover every scenario and equip your sales team with accurate data. Putting this time and effort in now will pay off tenfold in productivity once your lead rules are in place!

Step 2: Set up lead assignment rules in Salesforce

You’re almost ready to enter your lead assignment rules in SFDC . First, let’s go over some terminology. We’ve been talking about lead assignment rules as individual directives: “If the lead matches X, then do Y.” Within Salesforce lead management settings, a “lead assignment rule” refers to a set of rule entries. Rule entries are the individual criteria and actions (“If X, then do Y”). An assignment rule can consist of up to 3,000 rule entries, and you can only have one active assignment rule at a time.

For example, a rule entry can assign all leads interested in a particular product to a queue of reps who are experts on that product. In Salesforce, a lead queue is essentially a bucket for unassigned leads, and you can choose which sales reps can pull leads from each queue.

Another rule entry can assign all leads from companies with over 5,000 employees to your top enterprise sales rep.

To create a lead assignment rule in Salesforce: 

From Setup, enter “Assignment Rules” in the Quick Find box, then select Lead Assignment Rules.

Enter the rule name. (Example: 2023 Standard Lead Rules)

Select “Set this as the active lead assignment rule” to activate the rule immediately.

Click Save.

Click the name of the rule you just created.

Click New in the Rule Entries section.

Enter an order number that tells Salesforce when to run this rule entry in relation to other rule entries. For example, if you want this to be the first criteria Salesforce looks at when assigning a lead, enter number one.

Select the rule criteria. What attributes must the lead have before Salesforce applies the rule entry? You can use any standard or custom field in the lead record for your criteria. For example, you want to assign leads to your U.S.-based enterprise sales team, so the company size field must be equal to or greater than 5,000 and the country field must equal the United States. You can include up to 25 filter criteria.

Choose the user or queue to be the assignee if the lead meets the criteria. For example, assign to the U.S.-based enterprise sales team queue.

Optional: Choose an email template to use when notifying the new lead owner. After you set up your lead rules, you can also use Salesforce Flow automations to notify lead owners via other channels. For example, at Calendly, we integrate Salesforce with Slack, and a workflow automatically notifies sales reps via Slack when a lead is assigned to them.

Salesforce goes through the rule entries in order until it finds one that matches the lead's info, then routes the lead accordingly. 

Let's say you have small business, mid-market, and enterprise sales team queues. Your first three rule entries would match company size to each of those three queues. If they don't have a company size listed, or the company size doesn't match any of the values in your rule entries, Salesforce will move on to the industry rule entries.

To make sure no leads fall through the cracks, you also need to set a default lead owner. If the assignment rules fail to locate an owner, or you don’t set up assignment rules, web-generated leads are assigned to the default lead owner.

To select a default lead owner:

From Setup, enter “Lead Settings” in the Quick Find box, then select Lead Settings and click Edit.

Define the Default Lead Owner. The Default Lead Owner can be a specific user or a queue.

Save your settings.

Salesforce lead assignment rule examples

As we mentioned earlier, your rule entries can include up to 25 filter criteria.

Simple rules include just one filter criteria:

By country or state/province: Route leads from specific states or countries to sales representatives who understand the regional market. You need this rule if your team uses sales territories to divide leads. For example, if the state/province equals Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, or Washington, assign the lead to the West Coast queue.

By language: Assign leads to sales reps who speak the same language.

By industry: Assign leads from different industries to salespeople who have experience working with those industries.

By company size: Assign leads based on the size of the company, assigning larger companies to a dedicated enterprise sales team.

Complex rules use two or more filter criteria. For example, you could route leads from specific states or provinces to salespeople based on their sales territory and the company size. If you have a particular rep (Bob) working enterprise leads on the West Coast, your filter criteria could say: If the state/province equals Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, or Washington, and the company size equals greater than 5,000, assign the lead to Bob.

These are just a few examples. Lead assignment rules can be customized to fit your team’s and customers’ needs. Review your strategy to choose the right combination of criteria for your sales processes, products, and customers.

What does the built-in Salesforce lead process look like in action?

A website visitor named Nora fills out a contact form to learn more about your product. She shares her name, email address, company name (Acme Inc.), and company size. You use Salesforce’s built-in web-to-lead forms , so Nora’s form submission automatically creates a lead record.

Your team has set up lead assignment rules that assign leads to sales queues based on their company size. Acme Inc. has 5,000 employees, so Nora is automatically assigned to the enterprise sales team queue.

Enterprise sales team queue members receive an email notification that a new lead has been added to the queue. Taylor, an enterprise sales rep in Acme Inc.’s territory, assigns Nora’s lead record to themself.

Taylor emails Nora to set up a qualification call.

Nora, who has been waiting to hear back from your team, agrees to meet with Taylor. After some email back-and-forth, they find a time that works.

What are the limitations of Salesforce’s built-in lead assignment rules?

Salesforce’s built-in lead assignment rules are a great place to start, but there are a few critical limitations, especially for enterprise sales teams:

Single level of evaluation: Salesforce assignment rules operate based on a single level of evaluation, meaning that once a rule matches the criteria and assigns a lead, the evaluation process stops. Your team might miss out on important info, like a complex use case or unique industry, when matching the lead with a rep.

No built-in round robin distribution: Round robin lead distribution is the process of assigning leads to reps based on factors like team member availability or equal distribution for a balanced workload. Salesforce lead assignment rules don't include an easy way to set up round robin distribution — you need an additional tool like Pardot, one of the round robin apps on AppExchange , complex Apex code , or a third-party lead routing platform .

No lead escalation settings: Lead escalation is the process of flagging a lead to higher levels of management or specialized teams for further assistance or action. This process comes into play when a lead requires additional attention or intervention beyond the assigned salesperson or team's capabilities. Unfortunately, Salesforce doesn’t have built-in settings for lead escalation rules. If your customer success team uses Service Cloud, you can set up escalation rules for customer support case escalations, but this feature isn’t included in Sales Cloud.

High maintenance for large organizations: Managing and maintaining a comprehensive set of assignment rules can become challenging and time-consuming in large organizations with complex sales structures and multiple teams or regions. Sure, you can include up to 3,000 rule entries in a single lead assignment rule, but that’s a lot to set up and keep up to date — especially if you’re trying to save your team time, not add to their workload.

Built-in Salesforce lead assignment rules and automations are a solid starting point, but what about automating lead qualification and booking? If you use Salesforce on its own, your reps might still spend a ton of time on lead reassignment to balance their workload, manual lead qualification, and email back-and-forths to schedule sales calls.

That’s where Calendly comes in.

How to automate lead assignment, qualification, and booking with Calendly

Your scheduling automation platform can be an excellent lead generation, qualification, and routing tool — especially when it integrates with Salesforce. Calendly’s Salesforce integration helps your team be more efficient and organized while creating a better experience for prospective customers.

When a lead books a meeting via a sales rep or team’s Calendly booking page, Salesforce automatically creates a new lead, contact, or opportunity. If the lead already exists in your Salesforce instance, the event is added to the lead’s existing record, so you don’t end up with duplicate lead records or time-consuming manual reassignment.

What if you don’t want to let just anyone book a meeting with your team? When you add Calendly Routing to your marketing forms, you can show scheduling pages only to leads who meet your qualifications, like prospects from specific industries or companies of a certain size. That way, your busy team can spend time on the most valuable deals.

Calendly Routing works with HubSpot , Marketo , Pardot , and Calendly forms and is built for your Salesforce CRM. You can use any form field (email, domain, company name) in any Salesforce standard object to match visitors with their account owner. Account lookups let you send known leads or customers from your website form directly to their account owner’s booking page, without needing to manually reassign leads to the right rep.

Remember the lead assignment example we walked through earlier featuring Nora from Acme Inc.? Here's what that process looks like when you add Calendly:

Nora fills out your “contact sales” form, which is already built in HubSpot, connected to Calendly Routing , and enriched with Clearbit .

She enters her email address in the form, and Clearbit fills in the company name, size, and industry. This shortens the form, so Nora only has to input her name and job title.

Calendly checks to see if Acme Inc. has an account in your Salesforce instance. They don’t, so the next step is lead qualification .

Based on Nora’s information — company size, industry, job title — she’s a highly qualified lead, so she’s automatically routed to the booking page for your enterprise sales team.

Nora is happy about that, and immediately books a meeting time that works for her, with the exact team she needs to talk to.

On the backend, Calendly’s Round Robin meeting distribution is set to optimize for availability, so it assigns the meeting to the first available sales rep — in this case, Taylor. This automation helps your team respond to meeting requests faster, hold initial sales calls sooner, and balance the workload across reps.

Calendly creates a lead record in Salesforce with the info Nora entered into your website form (including the data from Clearbit) and an activity log of any meetings she books with your team via Calendly. Salesforce automatically makes Taylor the lead owner.

If you were relying on Salesforce’s built-in lead assignment rules, Nora’s lead record would have gone to an enterprise sales queue, and she would have had to wait for a rep to pick up the lead and reach out to her to book a meeting.

“ A good tool is one that’s so simple, sales reps can basically forget about it and let the meetings roll in. That’s essentially what happened when we implemented Calendly. ”

Sales Enablement Manager at SignPost

What happens if a lead doesn’t qualify for a meeting? Instead of sending them to a booking page, you can display a custom message with next steps, ask them for more information, or redirect them to a specific URL, like a piece of gated content or a webinar signup page.

Automating lead assignment with Calendly Routing has been a game changer for RCReports , a compensation analysis solution for accountants and business valuators. Before connecting Calendly Routing with their Salesforce instance, RCReports’ AEs spent at least five hours a month reassigning leads booked on the wrong calendar. This created a disjointed customer experience and frustration for the sales and marketing teams.

“ Now that we’ve implemented Calendly’s routing feature with Salesforce integration, demos are always booked with the correct AE, reducing friction for both our team and the customer. ”

Abbie Deaver

Director of Marketing at RCReports

Users on Calendly’s Teams plan and above can connect Calendly to Salesforce. The full suite of Salesforce routing features , including routing by Salesforce ownership, is available on Calendly’s Enterprise plan.

To learn more about Calendly Routing, get in touch with our sales team .

Spend less time on manual lead assignment and more time closing deals

When you automate Salesforce lead assignment and routing, high-value leads stop slipping through the cracks, the workload is balanced across the team, leads are matched with the sales reps best equipped to help them, and team members have more time to focus on connecting with prospects and closing deals. 

The results? A more productive team, faster sales cycle, higher conversion rates, and better customer experience.

Webinar: How Calendly Uses Calendly to Close More Deals

Rachel Burns

Rachel is a Content Marketing Manager at Calendly. When she’s not writing, you can find her rescuing dogs, baking something, or extolling the virtue of the Oxford comma.

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Leandata showcases power of modern revenue orchestration at opsstars 2022, leandata announces winners of the 2022 opsstars awards, what are lead assignment rules in salesforce.

Lead assignment rules are a powerful feature within Salesforce to assist your team’s automation of its lead generation and customer support processes. Assignment rules in Salesforce are used to define to whom your Leads and Cases (customer questions, issues or feedback) are assigned based on any one of a number of specified criteria you determine. 

Organizations typically develop lead assignment rules for their GTM processes or flows:

• Rules for inbound Leads
• Rules for website-generated Leads
• Rules for importing Leads from an event

For case assignments, a company might establish one case assignment rule for weekdays and another assignment rule for weekends and holidays. 

A lead or case assignment rule often consists of multiple rule entries to specify exactly how leads and cases are assigned throughout your go-to-market teams. For example, related to customer service inquiries, a standard case assignment rule might have multiple entries. Cases with “Type equals Gold” are assigned to the Gold Level service queue, cases with “Type equals Silver” are assigned to the Silver Level service” queue, and so on. 

As organizations grow and scale, they operationalize multiple GTM motions: inbound, outbound, account-based, upsell/cross-sell, and hybrid. However, many are limited to having just one rule in Salesforce.

As a work-around, many organizations create one massive lead assignment ruleset. They then wedge all of their rule entries into that one big ruleset, regardless of how many different motions that represents. Over time, Salesforce lead assignment rules can quickly become unmanageable .

This post covers the best practices for Salesforce lead and case assignment rules. The ultimate goal is to fully engaging your hard-won leads and speed up your organization’s time-to-revenue.

How to Define Assignment Rules

Your Salesforce administrator can only have one rule in effect at any particular moment in your go-to-market motions, and that assignment rule is intended to both automate lead generation processes and other customer-facing processes routed through your CRM. 

Lead assignment rules specify how leads are assigned to users or queues as they are created manually, captured from your website, or imported via SFDC’s Data Import Wizard.

Case assignment rules determine how cases are assigned to users or put into queues as they are created, either manually or through the use of Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, On-Demand Email-to-Case, the Self-Service portal, the Customer Portal, Outlook, or other data generation applications.

Criteria for Lead Assignment Rules

Okay, so you’ve decided that lead assignment rules in Salesforce make sense for your revenue operations team – now what?

Well, first, you’ll need to determine the edition of your Salesforce instance. Lead assignment rules are available in the Group, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions of SFDC. Case assignment rules, conversely, are available only in the Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions.

With regard to User Permissions, to view assignment rules, you’ll need View Setup and Configuration permissions. However, to create or change assignment rules, you’ll need Customize Application. If you are not your organization’s Salesforce administrator, you should check with them before attempting to head off on your own.

How to Create Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

Creating lead and case assignment rules in Salesforce is a relatively straightforward process. 

• Login to Salesforce and select Setup in the upper right corner of the horizontal navigation bar.
• In the Setup search box , type “assignment rules” and then select either Lead Assignment Rules or Case Assignment Rules.
• Select New to create a new assignment rule.
• In the Rule Name box, type a name and specify whether it should be active for leads or cases created manually and by those created automatically by web and email. When done, click Save .
• Click open your newly created rule and select New in the Rule Entries to specify your rule criteria.
• Step 1 in the “Enter the rule entry” window requires you to enter an Order for your new rule (the Order is the order in which the entry is processed, like a queue).
• In Step 2, you determine whether your new rule is based on meeting a set of criteria or a formula. In the Run this rule if the dropdown box, select either “criteria are met” or “formula evaluates to true.”
• Lastly, in Step 3, select the user or queue to whom your rule will assign your new lead or case (use the lookup feature to find specific users or a queue). After completing Step 3, select Save .

Why Are Your Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules Not Working?

If you discover your lead or case assignment rules are not working, here are a few tips to quickly troubleshoot the root cause.

First, check to ensure the assignment rule is active. Remember, only one case or lead assignment rule can be active at one time. Secondly, ensure the record is assigned to the correct user or queue.

Make certain to select the checkbox Assign using active assignment rule . In support of this step, enable field History tracking on case or lead owner, as well as add object History (case or lead) in your page layout. 

One common problem is overlapping rule entries, or rule entries in the wrong order. With dozens of rule entries, many will overlap, causing records to get assigned unpredictably. For example, if entry #1 assigns California leads to John, and entry #2 assigns Demo Request leads to Jane, then John might wonder why he’s receiving Demo Requests leads who are supposed to go to Jane. 

Assignment Rule Examples

The image, below, shows sample rule entries being entered into Salesforce for a variety of “what if” situations:

• Junk leads containing “test” are sent to an unassigned queue
• Demo requests are routed directly to SDR 3
• Leads at accounts with over $100 million in annual revenue are routed to AE 1
• Leads in certain states are sent to their respective representatives

How LeanData Simplifies Salesforce Lead Assignment

Creating lead and assignment rules in Salesforce is relatively straightforward. However, as your GTM motions become more and more complex, it becomes necessary to populate that one rule with multiple defining rule entries. As you grow and scale, your rule threatens to become unwieldy. Then these problems arise:

• Difficulty in both comprehending and managing
• Poor visibility, making it difficult to troubleshoot and validate
• Restrictions allowing only the criteria on the routed record

LeanData’s lead routing flow and assignment solution is a native Salesforce application that allows users to create flows in an easy-to-understand visual graph. Its visible representation of an organization’s desired lead flow affords many benefits to users, including:

• Easier ability to visualize and understand complex flows
• Real-time visibility of the routing of leads and the ability to quickly troubleshoot and make adjustments
• At-a-glance ability to use information on matched records for routing decisions and actions

Assignment rules in Salesforce are a relatively easy-to-learn feature that can be very quickly implemented, delivering a flexible and powerful logic to your CRM processes. Automating your lead and customer processes will accelerate your GTM motions and deliver your organization a sustainable competitive advantage.

For more best practices, read the eBook, “ Best Practices for a Winning B2B Marketing Data Strategy .”

• lead assignment rules
• lead assignment rules salesforce

Ray Hartjen

Ray Hartjen is an experienced writer for the tech industry and published author. You can connect with Ray on both LinkedIn  &  Twitter .

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Automation Champion

Automating Salesforce One Click at a Time

Running Lead Assignment Rules From Salesforce Flow

Last Updated on February 14, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta

To understand how to solve the same business use case using Process Builder . Check out this article Getting Started with Process Builder – Part 49 (Running Lead Assignment Rules From Process Builder) .

Big Idea or Enduring Question:

How do you run the lead assignment rule from the Salesforce flow? Lead assignment rules allow us to automatically assign Leads to the appropriate queue or user. A Lead assignment rule consists of multiple rule entries that define the conditions and order for assigning cases. From a Salesforce User interface, a user can trigger assignment rules by simply checking the Assign using the active assignment rules checkbox under the optional section.

The problem arises when you need to insert or update the Leads from Salesforce Flow and wants to trigger assignment rules. Using the Salesforce Flow a Lead will be inserted or updated but the assignment rule will not be triggered as there is no check box to use the organization’s assignment rule or a prompt to assign using the active assignment rule.

Let’s start with a business use case.

Objectives:

After reading this blog post, the reader will be able to:

• Running the lead assignment rules from Salesforce Flow
• Understand @InvocableMethod Annotation
• How to call an Apex method using Salesforce Flow

Business Use Case

Pamela Kline is working as a System administrator at Universal Containers (UC) . She has received a requirement from the management to update the following Lead fields when Lead Source changed to Partner Referra l .

• Status = Working – Contacted
• Rating = Hot

As data changed by the process, she wants to fire the assignment rule as soon as the process updates the lead record.

Automation Champion Approach (I-do):

Guided Practice (We-do):

There are 4 steps to solve Pamela’s business requirement using Salesforce Flow and Apex. We must:

• Setup a lead assignment rule
• Create Apex class & Test class
• Define flow properties for record-triggered flow
• Add a decision element to check the lead source
• Add an assignment element to update status & rating
• Add a scheduled path
• Add a decision element to check if lead source changed
• Add action – call an Apex class to invoke lead assignment rule

Step 1: Setting Up Lead assignment Rule

• Click Setup .
• In the Quick Find box, type Lead Assignment Rules .
• Click on the Lead Assignment Rules | New button .
• Now create an assignment rule, as shown in the following screenshot:

Step 2: Create an Apex class and Test class

Now, we have to understand a new Apex annotation i.e . @InvocableMethod . This annotation lets us use an Apex method as being something that can be called from somewhere other than Apex . The AssignLeadsUsingAssignmentRules class contains a single method that is passing the ids of the Leads whose Lead Source changed to Partner Referral . Create the following class in your organization.

• In the Quick Find box, type Apex Classes .
• Click on the New button .
• Copy code from GitHub and paste it into your Apex Class.
• Click Save.

Step 3.1: Salesforce Flow – Define Flow Properties for Before-Save Flow

• In the Quick Find box, type Flows .
• Select Flows then click on the New Flow .
• How do you want to start building : Freeform
• Object : Lead
• Trigger the Flow When : A record is created or updated
• Condition Requirements: None
• Optimize the Flow For : Fast Field Updates
• Click Done .

Step 3.2: Salesforce Flow – Using Decision Element to Check the Lead Source

Now we will use the Decision element to check the lead source to ensure that it is equal to Partner Referral.

• Under Toolbox , select Element .
• Drag-and-drop Decision element onto the Flow designer.
• Enter a name in the Label field; the API Name will auto-populate.
• Under Outcome Details , enter the Label the API Name will auto-populate.
• Resource: {!$Record.LeadSource}
• Operator: Equals
• Value: Partner Referral
• When to Execute Outcome : Only if the record that triggered the flow to run is updated to meet the condition requirements

Step 3.3: Salesforce Flow – Adding an Assignment Element to Update Rating and Status

• Drag-and-drop the Assignment Element element onto the Flow designer.
• Enter a name in the Label field- the API Name will auto-populate.
• Field: {!$Record.Rating}
• Add Condition
• Field: {!$Record.Status}
• Value: Working – Contacted

• Click Save .
• Enter Flow Label the API Name will auto-populate.
• Click Show Advanced .
• API Version for Running the Flow : 53
• Interview Label : Record-Trigger: Lead Before Save {!$Flow.CurrentDateTime}

Step 4.1: Salesforce Flow – Define Flow Properties for After-Save Flow

• Field : Lead Source
• Operator: Euqals
• Optimize the Flow For : Action and Related Records

Step 4.2: Salesforce Flow – Add Scheduled Paths

• Under SCHEDULED PATHS , click on the New Scheduled Path .
• Under Scheduled Path Details , enter the Label the API Name will auto-populate.
• Time Source : Lead: Last Modified Date
• Offset Number : 1
• Offset Options : Minutes After

Step 4.3: Salesforce Flow – Adding an Action to Call Apex class to Trigger Lead Assignment Rule

• Drag-and-drop the Actions element onto the Flow designer.
• Select the AssignLeadsUsingAssignmentRules Apex class.
• Field: LeadIds
• Value: {!$Record.Id}

• Interview Label : Record-Trigger: Lead After Save {!$Flow.CurrentDateTime}

Proof of Concept

Now onward, if a business user updates the Lead Source to Partner Referral , Process Builder will automatically update Status , Type , and Assign it to the right user or queue based on the lead assignment rule.

Monitor Your Schedule Flow

To monitor Flows that are scheduled, navigate to the following path:

• Navigate to Setup (Gear Icon) | Environments | Monitoring | Time-Based Workflow .

• Use the Delete button to delete the time-based Flow job from the queue.

Formative Assessment:

I want to hear from you! What is one thing you learned from this post?  How do you envision applying this new knowledge in the real world? Let me know by Tweeting me at @automationchamp , or find me on LinkedIn.

Submit Query!

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9 thoughts on “ running lead assignment rules from salesforce flow ”.

It ran repeatedly, every minute, over and over again. I was getting notification email every minute when testing. I did the same steps as you mentionned, with a record triggered flow containing the apex action.

I found that this ran repeatedly, every minute, over and over again. Was easy to spot because I modified the Apex to include sending the user notification email as well – so I was getting notification email every minute when testing.

When I updated the ‘Time Source’ in the flow scheduled path from ‘Time Source: Lead: Last Modified Date’ to ‘Time Source: When Lead is Created or Updated’ that seems to have solved the problem.

Was curious if you had the same experience or if there was some other nuance happening.

It also looks like you had originally intended to use a decision element in step 4.3 but changed that to flow entry requirements, likely because the scheduled path can’t assess the prior and current values the same way the starting node can.

Thank you for sharing your valuable feedback. I have a quick question for you: When executing the Apex class, do you utilize a Record-triggered Flow or a Scheduled-triggered Flow?

after the apex class fires, noticed the lead owner is assigned to default lead owner, instead of using lead assignment rule. Any clue?

Thank you for an excellent tutorial 🙂 you solved my problem! Very much appreciated

Anyone getting issues with an error on mass updates “Apex error occurred: System.QueryException: List has more than 1 row for assignment to SObject “? if each one is called individually, I don’t understand how there is more than 1 row for assignment. Sometimes I get an email with this error only to see that the trigger actually worked for the specified record so a bit odd. Thanks!

Thank you for the great tutorial. Why add the 1 minute wait? Is that just to take avoid too much synchronous automation? Or is it required for another reason?

You’re right Kevin (to make the process asynchronous).

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• May 12, 2020

How I Manage Lead Assignment in Salesforce For a Global Sales Development Team

Part of my role as a Marketing Operations Manager is to manage the lead assignment process within Salesforce for our 25+ Sales Development Representatives from around the world. A crucial piece to our success is getting the leads to the right person without any delay and ensure a smooth handoff from marketing to sales. In this post, I will walk you through exactly how I manage the lead assignment and lead reassignment process within Salesforce and share some lessons learned along the way.

High-level overview of the lead assignment process

• Manage lead assignment for 25+ Sales Developement Representives around the world
• Manage lead assignment for 10+ channel partners around the world
• Leads are only assigned to SDRs or partners (no AEs or ADMs, for example)
• Leads in target countries are scored and given a rating (A-D).
• Leads that meet our MQL rating are assigned to an SDR for follow up
• Leads that do not meet our MQL rating are assigned to a lead queue in Salesforce

Using standard Salesforce lead assignment rules

When the Sales Development team was smaller and the business rules were not as complex, we used the standard Salesforce lead assignment rules . Now, we only use the standard assignment rules to assign leads to channel partners. These assignment rules are only based on Country and are rarely updated.

Using advanced lead assignment rules in Salesforce

The lead assignment for the Sales Development team is more complex. Leads are assigned based on a number of different criteria including industry and company size. With 25+ Sales Development Reps, territories constantly shifting and the team growing, using the standard Salesforce lead assignment rules were difficult to manage. We purchased Traction Complete an app available on the Salesforce AppExchange to manage the lead assignment for our SDR team. Not only does Traction Complete give us an easier, more visual way of managing our lead assignment rules, it also gives us the ability to:

• Assign leads via round robin
• Automatically match leads to accounts
• Filter records by advanced criteria (using fields from the leads or matched account)
• Account based lead assignment
• Update fields
• Automatically convert leads from a matched account into a contact
• Auto-merge duplicate leads

The lead assignment process

Here’s a basic overview of what the lead assignment process looks like.

Leads are created in our Marketing Automation platform and are scored. The leads are then synced with Salesforce where the Complete assignment rules run to determine:

• Is the lead in one of our target countries? If the lead is not in one of the target countries, the lead is assigned via the standard Salesforce assignment rules.
• Is the lead an MQL? Leads are only assigned to an SDR once they reach them MQL threshold. If they are not an MQL, they will be assigned to the “Unqualified Leads” queue until they reach the MQL threshold.

Assigning leads via round robin

We also have the ability to assign leads via round robin. We occasionally use this feature if an SDR is going on vacation for an extended period of time.

Triggering lead assignment rules when a lead is an MQL

Leads are only assigned once they are marketing qualified. To trigger the lead assignment process in Complete, the checkbox field called “Re-run Traction Complete” must be set to TRUE. To update this field, we have MQL flows set up in our Marketing Automation system to do this automatically.

Here’s what the smart campaign looks like in Marketo to trigger lead assignment when a lead becomes an MQL

Leads can only run through the smart campaign every 60 days because we do not want leads to continuosly become an MQL if the SDR has had a conversation with them recently.

Here’s what the automation rule looks like in Pardot to trigger lead assignment when a lead becomes an MQL

Tips for managing lead assignments

• Limit the number of times a lead can become an MQL . If a lead is considered an MQL more than once, it can impact your conversion rates and skew your reporting. Limiting the number of times a lead can become an MQL can help with this, and it can prevent SDRs from constantly updating the lead to “recycle” or something similar.
• Make sure you have all countries, states and provinces assigned . This might seem obvious, but when you are territory planning, make sure that all states, provinces, and countries you do business in are accounted for. Otherwise, some leads might slip through the cracks and not be assigned to anyone or assigned to the wrong person.
• Determine the criteria for lead reassignment . When should the lead be reassigned? Do you have an SLA the SDR needs to meet before the lead is reassigned to someone else? If you shift territories, does the current SDR get to keep anything they are currently working on? Are there certain leads that should be excluded from reassignment? All these questions are something you should work with your Sales Manager to determine before making any changes in Salesforce.
• Allow SDRs to update lead ownership . Sometimes the lead is assigned to the wrong person, usually due to incorrect demographic data. Allow SDRs to be able to update the lead ownership to the correct person instead of pinging an admin to do it.
• Determine if lead alerts need to be set up . Do SDRs need to be alerted when a lead is assigned to them? If not, then you need to create views where they can easily see leads assigned to them. We use Outreach.io as our Sales Engagement Platform, which allows our SDRs to easily see what leads are assigned to them and need to be actioned on immediately. For that reason, we do not have lead alerts set up for MQLs, but we do have alerts sent out if a high-value form (pricing, contact, etc) is filled out.
• Enable field history tracking for lead owner . Enabling field history tracking for lead owner will allow you to see when lead owner updates occur. This is important for troubleshooting to see if your automated lead assignment process assigned the lead to the incorrect owner, or if someone updated the lead owner manually. It will also allow you to easily reverse owner updates if leads are assigned to someone by mistake.

Lead reassignment due to territory changes

Step 1: update the lead assignment rules in traction complete.

The first step to do a territory change is to update the flow in Traction Complete. This update will only apply to new leads and new MQLs.

Step 2: Pull Salesforce report of the leads that need to be updated

Next, pull a Salesforce report of all the leads that need to be reassigned. The report should at minimum include the fields Lead ID or 18-Digit Lead ID and Re-Run Traction Complete. I also add the following filters to the report:

• Converted = False (to remove any leads that are already converted into contacts)
• Lead Owner contains _______ (to pull leads owned by a specific person)
• Lead Status not equal to Working (to exclude leads that the SDR is already working)

Run the report and export it as a CSV.

Step 3: Update the field “Re-run Traction Complete” to TRUE

Open the file in Excel and set the “Re-run Traction Complete field to TRUE. Save the file.

Step 4: Upload the file to trigger the re-assignment

I use Salesforce Data Loader to upload the CSV into Salesforce.

Lessons learned from completing many territory reassignments

• Updating via my Marketing Automation platform is MUCH slower . I used to run data updates to trigger reassignment or lead ownership in Marketo. However, it takes a lot longer to complete then exporting a report in Salesforce and importing it via Data Loader.
• If you use a Sales Automation tool, make sure ownership is updated there as well . We use Outreach.io for our Sales Automation tool. I find that 90% of the time lead ownership is synced from Salesforce to Outreach immediately, but sometimes you need to force the sync.
• Create a “Lead Territory Change Template” report in Salesforce . I have a report saved that I reuse each time I do a territory reassignment. The template includes all the filters that I would typically use as well as all the columns I need.
• Always double check that the lead assignment is correct . Run a report in Salesforce and group by the lead owner to ensure that everything is assigned to the new owner.
• Ensure you don’t have any lead alerts setup . Check your Marketing Automation platform and processes in Salesforce to make sure nothing will trigger an email alert or something similar when the lead owner is updated. You don’t want to trigger hundreds, or maybe even thousands of alerts when a lead is reassigned.

How do you currently manage lead assignment in Salesforce?

• I use the standard lead assignment rules
• I use an app from the AppExchange
• I have my own custom process set up in Salesforce
• I have my own custom process set up in my Marketing Automation System
• Other (specify in comments below)

View Results

Send me a tweet @jennamolby , leave a comment below, or book a Peer Chat .

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You are a truly rock star! Thank you for sharing a helpful work and tools on lead assignment!

@brandy_chi

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• Salesforce Admin

Salesforce Lead Assignment rules

• Dec 28, 2023

Salesforce Lead Assignment rules automate your org lead generation and support processes. Lead Assignment Rules are a powerful tool that enables the automatic assignment of leads to the right sales representatives based on specific criteria.

What is Salesforce Lead Assignment rules?

Lead assignment rules are used to specify how leads are assigned to users or queues. This is used to assign the owner of leads based on lead generation, like leads created from the web or imported from a data loader.

Type of Assignment Rule 

There are two types of assignment rules we have in Salesforce.

• Lead Assignment Rules
• Case Assignment Rule

How to create lead Assignment Rules

Let’s see the step-by-step guide to set up the lead assignment rules.

• Creating Lead Assignment Rule
• Creating Lead Assignment Criteria
• Specify the lead assignment method
• Activate the lead assignment rules
• Test the lead assignment rules

Consideration for Lead Assignment Rules

• We can create as many assignment rules as possible, but only one can be active.

Lead Assignment Rules can help streamline your lead management process, improve lead conversion rates, and increase sales productivity by ensuring that the right leads are assigned to the right representatives.

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Yes, There Is a Better Way to Assign Leads in Salesforce

How quickly do your sales reps respond to new web leads?

In 2007, the  Lead Response Management Study  by Dr. James Oldroyd reported that the recommended time for following up on a lead is five minutes. Nine years later, InsideSales.com published  Best Practices for Lead Response Management  based on Oldroyd’s study. The five-minute rule still holds true. However, the average sales rep takes much longer than the recommended time to respond to leads.

Clearly, it is critical to respond quickly to web inquiries. According to a study from InsideSales.com, 78% of sales go to the company that responds to an inquiry first. And yet, the average time a company takes to respond to a lead is 40 hours. This gap offers a chance to get ahead of the competition by ensuring your lead assignment process is automated, fast, and accurate.

There is no one right way to assign leads. The best approach depends on a company’s product and customer types. To complicate the process, speed is not the only criterion for lead assignment. It’s also important to consider factors like territory alignment, existing relationships with a customer account, skills and availability of the assigned rep, and fairness in lead distribution.

Sending Leads to the Right Rep in Salesforce

Salesforce includes built-in Lead Assignment rules that are useful for small sales teams to get started. But the rules have limitations. They are not enough to support your organization as it grows and the rules become more complex. This image shows an example of basic Salesforce lead assignment rules.

Mid- to large-sized companies need many more rules, and entering those rules becomes a time-consuming process. In fact, just managing a few dozen rules is painful.

For example, you might use criteria like these to funnel leads to your sales reps:

• Company size or revenue
• Product interest
• Lead quality

Anne, an awesome rep, handles leads from companies in the healthcare industry that have revenues of $100 million or more and are located in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

Implementing that rule would involve entering multiple criteria, including a list of ZIP codes or county names. The image below shows an example of more complex lead assignment rules using revenue, industry, and location as the criteria. It’s quite typical for a mid-size company to create hundreds, sometimes thousands of rules. This is especially true with fine-grained territory assignments based on ZIP or area codes, or for companies doing business internationally.

Entering complex rules with point-and-click is cumbersome and prone to errors. To make matters worse, there is no easy way to test the rules to see if they work correctly before activating them. The people who define the rules — typically, someone in sales operations or the VP of sales — may not have the tech skills and access to validate them. This results in miscommunication and more overhead.

If reps receive the wrong leads or leads remain unassigned, there’s no way to figure out what happened. The system doesn’t keep logs for assignments or an audit trail for rule changes. It would be valuable to have a monitoring and reporting tool to stay on top of what’s happening, identify any stray leads, and take action so leads aren’t stranded.

Balancing the Load

Remember the five-minute rule? Anne may be the best rep for XYZ criteria, but it doesn’t help the company if she’s bombarded with too many leads and can’t quickly follow up on them. Even if she has a balanced number of leads, what happens if she is at a meeting or out of the office when a lead comes in? The clock is ticking, and the lead is sitting in Anne’s queue.

That’s where Round Robin and Load Balancing can help. Instead of assigning leads to individual reps, they can be distributed to members of a group. Distribution strategies can vary from a basic Round Robin to Weighted Load Balancing. They can be combined with assignment caps, checks for absent users, or skills-matching.

Complexity Increases as the Number of Sales Reps Grows

A company with dozens of reps has people coming and going often enough that the lead assignment rules will need frequent updates. On top of that, territories periodically change or get re-aligned.

Assigning the right person to a lead also depends on the current products and business lines that are offered. New ones get added, and old ones are removed. These changes occur on a regular basis in large companies. Acquisitions happen less often — but when they do, they will affect the lead assignment process.

Another factor to consider is a team-selling setup in an internal sales organization. You may also have partners, such as resellers and solution providers, added to the mix. In this case, you may assign to both an internal rep and a partner, or you can choose just one of them.

How to Turn Complex Lead Assignment Rules into an Easy-to-Manage Process

In summary, you want a lead assignment program that achieves the following goals:

• Qualify the lead to determine which sales rep or team is the right one.
• Verify the sales rep is available.
• Ensure that each rep has a fair number of assignments.
• Confirm that someone follows up with the leads quickly.
• Make changes to the rules easy, fast, and reliable.
• Monitor lead assignments with reporting and logs.

The assignment rules in Salesforce are not designed to manage this process, and Salesforce does not offer Round Robin or Load Balancing capabilities. Fortunately, the AppExchange has an app like  Decisions on Demand  to give you powerful tools to address these challenges. You can define your lead assignment rules in a simple table inside Salesforce as shown in this image.

After setting up the rules, you can test them with a built-in Test Console. The unique Excel import/export capability makes it easy to update large rulesets containing thousands of rules. It includes useful distribution options like Round Robin and Load Balancing with weights, caps, and skills-matching.

Decisions on Demand for Salesforce boosts close rates, cuts overhead, and reduces errors. With this AppExchange app, your team can turn lead assignment into a completely automated process.

Learn more about flexible lead assignment rules , or  schedule a personalized demo  at a time that works for you.

September 30, 2021

Speed Up and Sell More: Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules Best Practices

Get the latest RevOps insights

When a lead comes in, an opportunity should come knocking.

But there’s a lot more under the hood. You need solid lead assignment rules in place, and one key variable to keep in mind.

Time. According to LeadSimple, responding to a lead in the first 5 minutes is 21x more effective.

No surprises here. If you’re a scaling business, you know that responding first to a lead is mission-critical.

If you’re manually triaging leads or waiting for IT to make business-critical changes to your lead assignment rules, it’s not scalable. Nor fast.

As an operations leader, you feel this pain across your entire organization. 

Demand teams work hard to generate incoming leads, so it doesn’t make sense to abandon them just because they’re not getting to the right rep in real-time. Your leads, after all, are directly tied to sales revenue.

Automating the process doesn’t solve the problem alone, either. It’s an important piece to speeding up, but not the only piece to the lead assignment puzzle.

You’re inundated with the notion often – speed is everything!

Well, we’re here to tell you:

Respond right is the new respond first.

Shotgun responses don’t help if your lead happens to work for a target enterprise account of yours. You definitely want your Enterprise sales rep, Rachael putting her best foot forward.

Setting the right lead assignment rules also helps with what ‘future you’ couldn’t know ahead of time.  Say a lead comes in from a territory that doesn’t have a rep assigned – It’s going to sit in a queue. A potential quality lead slipped through the cracks of time because there’s no accountability or rule in place.

Complex business processes and go-to-market efforts add additional layers of friction. How can you get it right if you’re constantly evolving at scale?

Your lead assignment process could be stunting your growth potential.

It’s time to speed up, starting with smarter lead assignment rules. 

Give your operations teams their sanity back, and set your sales reps up for speed-to-lead success.

Go ahead and skip the next section if you’re already aware of the challenges to overcome as a scaling business, and want to get right to Salesforce lead assignment rules for success.

Businesses Quickly Outgrow Native Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

Asana, a project management platform, was scaling fast.

They were grappling with increasing volumes of leads, lagging response times, and complex assignment rules that became impossible to keep up within Salesforce.

As more leads came in from a variety of sources, and with complex territory assignments and hundreds of sales reps that change frequently, lead assignment became a nightmare to manage in native Salesforce.

That’s because creating and changing lead assignment rules can quickly become very complex:

Only a dozen or so lead assignment rules are implemented here, primarily basic rule sets like location, company size, industry, or lead quality. You can imagine how cluttered your rules would get as you continued to add more criteria.

Asana knew that not having a more sophisticated Salesforce workflow automation process meant they didn’t have the flexibility to adapt at scale.

There were two problems Asana needed to overcome:

1. Complex, evolving go-to-market rules

You wouldn’t want sales reps responding to a lead that’s not in their sales territory. You also wouldn’t want junior reps following up with your largest target accounts.

But it happens.

Typical go-to-market (GTM) models are unique by company and can vary by:

• Named account
• Role or product focus
• Partner channels and more

How a company sets up their go-to-market strategy informs how they need to route or assign leads to reps. SaaS sales teams are regularly selling into different territories, market segments (SMB, mid-market, enterprise), verticals, and industries.

What’s more, lead assignment rules often require changing daily with large enterprise businesses. 

Asana, for example, consistently had leads assigned to reps that no longer worked with them.

Imagine juggling complex territory assignment rules and hundreds of sales reps that change frequently?

It can take weeks or months for IT to get involved whenever a Salesforce lead assignment rule needs to be changed:

• IT has to define the required changes, scope them, slot those into a sprint, which may occur weeks or months later
• During the sprint, the team will make the changes, validate them, test them
• Push them from the development environment to the QA environment, and perhaps a staging environment, and then finally into production

Doing things manually, or not at all, is not a scalable alternative.

You can automate to help you move faster, but speed is sidelined when you don’t have the flexibility to adapt to your changing assignment or routing environment.

And it only gets worse as your lead volume climbs.

2. Massive volumes of incoming leads and lagging response times

When too many cars are trying to get to various destinations, traffic jams occur, with some drivers giving up and going somewhere else altogether.

If companies are slow to respond, the chances of those leads sticking around drops with every. passing. minute. Someone else will hop on a plane instead and get facetime sooner.

You need to move faster.

On average, it took companies 42 hours, or almost two days, to respond to a lead .

That’s basically a lifetime:

Dramatics aside, it means most B2B companies are still falling behind and not responding to leads within the five-minute-or-less sweet spot. But it’s there for the taking.

In the past, we had people manage catchall queues, trying to figure out who should own each lead. – Jim Maddison, Veracode

In Xant’s Lead Response Study 2021 of 5.7 million inbound leads at 400 plus companies, they found that 57.1% of first call attempts occurred after more than a week of receiving a lead.

So why are most companies lagging behind? They need to automate and create more adaptable lead assignment rules that actually reflect their go-to-market.

Speed might be serving up the silver platter, but you’re only going to get the deal if you implement effective salesforce lead assignment rules.

Here are some best practices to help set yourself up for success.

Lead Assignment Rules Best Practices For High-Growth Companies

You’ve got massive volumes of incoming leads and ultra-complex go-to-market rules. You’re in the right place.

First things first.

Automate, automate, automate. 

Let’s get to that golden window of 5-minutes. Picture Tesla’s “Come to Me” app (it comes to you and eliminates a long trek to your parking spot).

It requires one tap.

Once a lead enters Salesforce, they follow the defined rule roadmap according to lead assignment rules that you set and ultimately land with the correct salesperson in record time.

You’re giving back those precious minutes to your revenue and sales operations teams.

Now about those rules.

Define Your Go-To-Market Rule Baseline

Carving out territories based on geography, segments, verticals, industries, named accounts, or whatever your go-to-market strategy is, is the first step. This is your baseline.

Any lead that falls into a sales rep’s territory should be assigned to them based on these defined rules, but that’s easier said than done. They’re constantly changing based on several factors.

You need to define your criteria  

In other words, the set of criteria that you will be implementing – you know the drill. To do so, you ask all the necessary questions:

• Which rep will take on what territories?
• What happens if new reps are hired and old ones leave?
• What happens if someone goes on vacation? Or doesn’t work on Fridays?
• A lead comes in from a partner, where do you want this to go?

The beauty is that the sky is the limit.

But how do you get there with native Salesforce constraints lacking the required sophistication?

We had about 800 or 900 rule criteria. We needed something flexible and something that could change, or help us change as we change our business a year to year. – Jim Maddison, Veracode

The next step:

Create customer rule criteria 

Veracode, a security company, had incredibly complex criteria. They had to hire a developer to manually code changes to lead assignment rules. Things changed daily for them, and they grappled with how to adapt.

Ditching the code for the intuitive drag and drop Complete Lead’s interface gave Veracode more flexibility to create assignment rules on the go.

Remember when we said the sky’s the limit?

Implement Nested Flows to Tackle Ultra-Complex Rule Sets

If there were a way to make it easier, you do it right?

Nested flows keep your rules organized. 

At a high level, think of it like nesting dolls: each “nested” or child assignment flow sits within a bigger, or parent assignment flow.

These parent-child relationships can span far beyond just one or two levels, giving you the freedom to allow each business unit to oversee their own GTM processes and territories.  This is a huge win for Rev Ops organizations looking to simplify and speed up ultra-complex lead management.

Department Managers can even set and keep track of rules for their own set of assignment flows, for different GTM teams and within different nested flows. That means lines are drawn in the sand but teams still have visibility and control of how a lead is tracked for their particular team.

Your business depends on data getting where it needs to go, fast. That’s why no matter how complex, your assignment rules should never feel out of hand.

Leverage Powerful Account-Based Assignment

Account-based strategies should be a cornerstone to your go-to-market strategy, and you want to know that your strategic investments are being implemented successfully.

• In a survey conducted by ITSMA , 87% of B2B marketers said that ABM initiatives outperform their other marketing investments.
• COVID-19 caused companies t o rush to create ABM strategies to respond to an increased need for a strong digital presence.
• 56% of the 800 B2B marketers that LinkedIn surveyed said that they are using ABM. Over 80% said that they plan to increase their ABM budget over the next year.

Use account-based assignment.

Account-based marketing targets specific companies, so setting up account-based rules in your lead flow process allows you to route leads from these target accounts to your most experienced reps quickly and easily.

The rule of thumb is that leads from target accounts need to go to the account rep that owns the account. The account owner has the deepest knowledge of the account and the highest chance to convert. Simply put, account based routing  has a positive impact on your bottom line.

With a more robust lead assignment solution to align with their account-based selling and marketing strategies, Alfresco was able to increase their close/won rate by 10%!

Enterprise hierarchy assignment is a no-brainer for account selling.

Imagine if you could automatically visualize all the related customer accounts including subsidiaries, and assign one strategic rep to the parent enterprise account?

You can and you should. Complete Hierarchies gives you the ability to automatically build and visualize complex account hierarchies, so that you’re able to route leads to the right rep no matter how complex the account structure.

Let’s say a new lead comes in from Hulu, but you’ve no idea that it’s a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Chances are the same rep won’t be assigned the account if other go-to-market rules are in place.

Also, you’ve already given a discount to The Walt Disney Company, and this information is not available to the rep who gets the new lead. Account Hierarchies can be a trick up the sleeve when it comes to account-based assignment.

But what happens if a lead comes in and it’s not associated with any account or go-to-market territory?

Set Up A Sophisticated Round Robin

You’re leaving revenue on the table when you let leads sit and die without a timely response.

Native Salesforce just isn’t sophisticated enough to handle more complex round-robin criteria that’s required to keep your leads flowing when they hit a snag.  It’s limited and cumbersome to manage – major setbacks when it comes to your speed-to-lead.

For certain territories or situations, you may have multiple reps covering the territory or a catch-all queue for leads that don’t have enough information to assign properly.

In those cases, businesses often have someone dedicated to manually triaging and assigning leads. This is an incredibly time-consuming operational nightmare and a good way to tank your response times.

And with a lack of accountability, reps often cherry-pick the ideal leads and leave others to the crows.

To avoid these assignment pitfalls you need to push leads to a chosen pool of sales reps and evenly distributed to your sales team, giving everyone an equal opportunity to generate a sale. But you also need more flexible options.

Use sophisticated dynamic round-robin assignment to:

• Set sophisticated criteria like rep speciality or languages
• Use availability settings to ensure leads can be responded to immediately (e.g. office hours)
• Automatically notify reps when new leads are pushed through
• Enforce SLAs on response times to make sure leads are responded to as quickly as possible
• Pair with a rep response dashboard that gives you a complete view to help you monitor how fast a rep is following up with their round-robin leads

Weighted round-robin:

Give your best-performing reps more leads, and improve your overall chance at generating more pipeline. Based on:

• Performance
• On their speciality
• Any desired field

If you’ve found that reps have hit their max capacity for being able to manage any more leads, you can cap the number of records assigned to your team members in the round-robin.

Hit a snag? Re-route your leads:

If reps aren’t responding within their SLA, you can reroute the lead and assign it to someone who will respond. This helps prevent further roadblocks and keeps data flowing, even when there’s a bottleneck.

It’s typical for our team to get four to five requests a week to change territories for a user. Onboarding and offboarding now takes just a few minutes to run all our leads back through the system and automatically get reassigned. – Jim Maddison, Veracode

The ultimate speed-to-lead tactic to keep in your back pocket.

Go Beyond Leads, Assign Any Object

Just imagine that feeling you get if you could create assignment flow, beyond leads. It’s a whole new world.

Assign any object

Go beyond leads and create any assignment flow across any object. You can assign any record, update any field, and trigger any action.

It works similarly to the assignment flow you create for leads, so define your goals and determine your set of criteria for each particular object.

No more manual effort!

This presents endless opportunities to customize your assignment flows, resulting in streamlined processes and less manual administrative time spent manually sifting through information.

What Are You Waiting For?

It’s time to speed up and sell more. 

Speed is crucial, but there’s so much more than that underpinning your speed-to-lead. You need the flexibility to handle your go-to-market complexity and to keep your leads flowing to the right reps in real time.

When you’re scaling fast, you can’t afford to let good leads slip through the cracks.

Interested in hearing more?

We’re happy to talk you through how you can elevate your lead assignment rules in Salesforce, and dramatically improve your speed-to-lead game.

Book a personalized demo with one of our experienced team members today.

Don’t let data hold you back. Build a better way with Complete Leads.

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No we can assign the lead with dataloader as well for that we have to goto setting in dataloader application and we have to provide the assignment rule Id of leads

Hi @Lokesh thanks for sharing the information. I was not aware about it. I hope your comment will help many learners :) I will edit the post accordingly. Thank you

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Export-import segments and assignment rules between environments

• 3 contributors

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Welcome to Dynamics 365 Sales . For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans .

Business value

As an administrator or sales manager, you need to set up assignment rules in multiple environments like sandbox, dev, test, or production. This increases the time taken to transfer rules from one environment to another and is prone to errors. With this feature, you can export your segments and assignment rules from one environment and import them into another environment easily.

Feature details

As an administrator or sales manager, you can:

• Export segments and assignment rules from a source environment.
• Import segments and assignment rules to any target environment.
• Update any environment-specific data—for example, User ID.

Migrate assignment rules and segments (docs)

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Lead assignment rule in a trigger

The objective is to have assignment rules fired on a Lead record creation. It seems the rule can be assigned only when using "update" DML in an "after insert" trigger. Why does another DML must be executed after insert to have lead assignment rule assigned?

Moreover, testing of the rule assignment fails even though the rule has been assigned to the Lead. We cannot test assignment rule outcome (ownerId=defaultQueueId for example) since the rule will change on PROD eventually.

• assignment-rules

• I am trying to understand your code. I also want to run the Lead Assignment rule via triggers. Could you please let me know that why you have used the line: ls.add(new Lead(id = l.id));? Thanks in advance for your help. Kind regards, –  user7797 Commented Apr 9, 2014 at 14:36
• Leads, being inserted, are added to the list so they can be updated in order to get the assignment rule assigned (see Database.update(ls, dmo)). A lead record in the update list only needs "id" field and no other field should be updated. –  RadDeveloper Commented Apr 14, 2014 at 22:45

2 Answers 2

Lead reassignment within a trigger can be done with future methods such as the following. Your after insert / after update trigger will need to collect up a set of lead ids that qualify for reassignment and then once all other afterinsert/afterupdate operations are complete, call the future method below:

Note use of DmlOptions:

• Works! The assignment to dmo can be made outside the loop, by the way. –  Sander de Jong Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 14:29
• @SanderdeJong - optimized code per your suggestion –  cropredy Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 16:31

DMLOptions are additional settings you can specify when you are performing DML in Apex. They don't apply to data input by any other means (unless, like you've discovered, you issue an explicit update)

DMLOptions settings take effect only for record operations performed using Apex DML and not through the Salesforce user interface.

If you are loading in this data via Data Loader, you can specify the assignment rule to use in the Data Loader Settings.

As for the assertion, have you tried enclosing the test within Test.startTest() and Test.stopTest(). (It might also be an idea to assert in the trigger context, as I'm not sure the DMLOptions would survive / be available after the completion of the DML Operation.)

• Thanks for the response. I will be using update DML in order to assign default lead assignment rule to records (I think there should be consistency in how records are processed regardless of how they are created). Test method fails regardless of Test.start/stopTest. –  RadDeveloper Commented Jul 4, 2013 at 21:23
• 4 DMLOptions apply to DML initiated from Apex Code (such as in Visualforce). Once you're in a trigger, the DML has already started, and so the DMLOptions have no effect (because they were already given by the initial DML function). –  sfdcfox ♦ Commented Jul 6, 2013 at 2:35

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‎Dec 20, 2017 6:29 PM

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‎Dec 21, 2017 12:52 PM

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