salesforce trigger lead assignment rules

• AppAssessor

Articles by role:

• Consultants
• Business Analysts

By Lucy Mazalon

By Ben McCarthy

• Dreamforce Events
• Courses Login

What’s trending

The Future of Salesforce: Is the Cloud Giant Really Losing Its Momentum?

Salesforce Winter ‘25 Release: What to Expect and How to Prepare

Agentforce: The Next Evolution in Salesforce’s AI Story

Breaking News: Elton John Pulls Out of Dreamfest

Salesforce List Views: 7 Best Practices You Should Implement Right Away

Upcoming events, how to build a successful salesforce devops process, streamline lead assignment in salesforce, salesforce revops trends & insights (ask me anything), charity hackathon – third edition.

Wrocław, Poland

Unlocking Einstein Copilot: What You Need to Know

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

More like this:

Ultimate guide to case swarming in salesforce service cloud.

By Mariel Domingo

Free eBook: A Comprehensive Backup Guide for AI, Data, and Salesforce

By Lauren Metcalf

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment.

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!

Similar Posts

Elevate Your Screen Flows with a Customizable Counter Component

Dynamic Progress Bar for Form Completion in Salesforce Flow

Launch a Flow from CRM Analytics Dashboard Text Widget

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).

• Pingback: Getting Started with Process Builder – Part 49 (Running Lead Assignment Rules From Process Builder) - Automation Champion

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Discover more from Automation Champion

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Salesforce is closed for new business in your area.

Interested in scheduling a demo or free trial? Contact us today.

Salesforce Assignment Rules Deep Dive

• July 7, 2022

What Are Salesforce Assignment Rules

Assignment rules are a standard feature in Salesforce used to automate the assignment of leads and cases. They can be a great alternative to manually assigning records. However, there are more than a few limitations you’ll want to be aware of. In this article we’ll discuss the benefits and limitations of Salesforce assignment rules so you can decide if they make sense for your organization. We’ll also share advice and guidance on how to effectively configure assignment rules.

The Benefits of Assignment Rules

Salesforce assignment rules are a powerful tool designed to streamline the distribution and management of leads and cases within an organization. By automating the assignment process, these rules ensure that leads and cases are instantly assigned to the most appropriate team members based on specific criteria such as product interest, priority, and geographic location. This target approach helps to accelerate response times, balance workload, improve team performance, and increase customer satisfaction. The use of assignment rules in Salesforce, therefore, represents a strategic advantage for businesses looking to optimize their sales and support workflows, ultimately driving growth and customer loyalty.

Limitations of Assignment Rules

While Salesforce assignment rules offer significant advantages, they also have limitations that organizations should be aware of:

• Limited to leads and cases : One of the most significant limitations of Salesforce assignment rules is the inability to assign standard or custom objects beyond leads and cases. This restriction often prompts organizations to look for an alternative solution that can assign any object .
• Lack of round robin assignment : They do not support round robin assignment, which is essential for most modern sales and support teams. Instead, each rule assigns records to a specific user or queue you designate.
• Lack of workload-based assignment : They don’t consider the existing workload of team members, potentially leading to an uneven distribution of leads and cases. This can result in slow response times and employee burnout.
• Lack of availability-based assignment : They don’t consider the availability of team members, resulting in leads and cases being assigned to team members that are away from work or otherwise unavailable.
• Difficult to maintain : Assignment rules can quickly become difficult to manage—even for small teams with simple assignment logic. Here’s an example of what a small portion of a typical assignment rule looks like:

Assignment rules can still be very useful despite these limitations. Continue reading to learn how assignment rules can be used to optimize your lead and case routing process.

How Assignment Rules Work

An assignment rule is a collection of conditional statements known as assignment rule entries. Each assignment rule entry contains one or more conditions and a user or queue to whom matching records will be assigned.

The Sort Order field can be used to change the order in which assignment rules are executed. Leads and cases will be evaluated against assignment rule entries in order and assigned by the first assignment rule entry that matches.

In the example above, we’ve prioritized our rules for Canada provinces (e.g. Ontario) higher than our country-wide Canada rule entry to ensure that leads from specific provinces don’t get assigned to the wrong person.

Next we’ll step you through how to actually create an assignment rule. 

How to Create Assignment Rules

You’ll need the “Customize Application” permission in order to manage assignment rules. If you don’t have this permission, contact your Salesforce administrator.

Ready to create your first assignment rule? Follow these steps:

• Login to Salesforce.
• Navigate to Setup .
• Search for “assignment rules” in Quick Find and click either Lead Assignment Rules or Case Assignment Rules .
• Click New to create a new rule.
• Name your rule and then click Save . We recommend leaving the Active box unchecked for now. 

Now you’re ready to specify how leads or cases will be assigned.

• Click on the rule you created.
• Click New to create a rule entry.
• Sort Order : this controls the order in which rules are executed.
• Criteria : you can enter one or more filters to define which records should be assigned by this rule.
• Owner : choose a user or queue to which records should be assigned. Alternatively you can check the Do Not Reassign Owner checkbox if this rule should not assign records.
• (Optional) Select an email template for notifying users of assignments.
• Click “ Save. ”
• Repeat the above steps for any additional rule entries.

Activate Your Assignment Rule

You can follow these steps to activate your assignment rule:

• Navigate to your assignment rule.
• Click the Edit
• Check the Active
• Click Save .

Keep in mind that only one assignment rule can be active at a time. We’ll discuss how your active assignment rule can be used to assign records in the next section.

What Triggers Assignment Rules in Salesforce

There is often some confusion about how and when assignment rules run. There are a few different ways these rules can be triggered:

• Creating a New Record : When a new lead or case is created, either manually or through an automated process, assignment rules can be triggered to assign the record to the appropriate user or queue.
• Updating a Record : If a record is updated and meets certain criteria set in the assignment rules, this can also trigger the reassignment of the lead or case.
• Web-to-Lead or Web-to-Case Submission : When leads or cases are generated through Salesforce’s web-to-lead or web-to-case features, assignment rules can automatically assign these incoming records.
• Data Import : When importing data into Salesforce, you can opt to apply assignment rules to the imported records, ensuring they are assigned according to the established criteria.
• API Creation or Update : Records created or updated via Salesforce’s API can also trigger assignment rules, depending on the configuration.
• Manual Triggering : Users with the appropriate permissions can manually apply assignment rules to leads or cases, either individually or in bulk.

Understanding these triggers is essential to effectively utilizing assignment rules in Salesforce, ensuring that leads and cases are assigned to the right team members promptly and efficiently.

Tips and Tricks

• It’s always a good idea to include a final rule entry with no conditions. This will be used to catch anything that didn’t match your rule criteria and assign it to a user or queue for review.
• It’s also a good idea to include a rule entry that assigns junk (e.g. spam, test records, etc.) to a queue for review and deletion.
• We recommend you test assignment rules in a sandbox before you add to your production org. However, keep in mind that assignment rules cannot be deployed from a sandbox to a production org.
• Custom formula fields can help to simplify complex assignment rules. For example, rather than entering lengthy criteria (e.g. lists of states by region) you could create a formula field instead. This would reduce your criteria from “STATE/PROVINCE EQUALS IL,IN,IA,KS,MI,MN,MO,NE,ND,OH,SD,WI” to “REGION EQUALS Midwest”.
• You can enable field history tracking on the owner field to track assignments made by your assignment rules.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens to records that don’t meet salesforce assignment rule criteria.

These records will be assigned to whomever is designated as the default lead owner or case owner.

What are the different types of assignment rules in Salesforce?

Salesforce currently support lead and case assignment rules. Additionally, account assignment rules can be created as part of enterprise territory management.

What is the order of execution for assignment rules?

It’s important to understand exactly when assignment rules are run in relation to other events. For example, assignment rules are run after apex triggers and before workflow rules. See Salesforce’s Triggers and Order of Execution article for a comprehensive list of events and the order in which they’re executed.

How do you run assignment rules when creating or editing records using the REST API?

You can use the Sforce-Auto-Assign header when making REST API calls to control whether or not assignment rules run.

Salesforce assignment rules can be a valuables tool for many organizations. However, it’s important to understand the limitations. If you’re struggling with assignment rules it may be time to look at alternative solutions. Kubaru is a powerful automated assignment application for Salesforce. Check us out on the Salesforce AppExchange or contact us to schedule a demo.  

How to Calculate (and Reduce) Your Customer Acquisition Cost

Have you ever considered how much your company spends to obtain a single customer? If you’re not calculating customer acquisition cost (CAC) you may be reading the signals all wrong. Even when business seems to be booming, if it’s costing

Net Revenue Retention Explained: Increase Your Revenue Growth in 2024

Imagine you’re sailing the vast ocean of subscription-based business, where the winds of customer churn and revenue expansion constantly shift. In this unpredictable sea, there’s one compass that guides you: Net Revenue Retention (NRR). It’s not just a metric–it’s your

A Comprehensive Guide to Data Enrichment for B2B Sales Success

Imagine you’re at a party, and you spot someone you’d like to get to know. You have their name and a vague idea of what they do, but that’s about it. Now, what if you had a magic lens that

Contact us to schedule a demo today!

Schedule Demo

Fill out the form below and we’ll respond in a few minutes

* We take privacy seriously. We will never sell or share your personal information with anyone.

We surveyed hundreds of B2B companies about their top go-to-market challenges...

• Intelligent Lead Delivery
• Convert Signals to Revenue
• Enterprise Salesforce Orchestration
• Products Overview Discover modern Revenue Orchestration
• Integrations Connect signals to plays
• Pricing Plans for every company
• Why LeanData

Snowflake Scales Account Based Plays with LeanData Revenue Orchestration

Clockwise Supports PLG Motion with LeanData Revenue Orchestration

• Become a Partner Team up with LeanData
• Technology Partner Directory Discover ISV solutions to fit your needs
• Solutions Partner Directory Connect with our network of authorized Service Integrators

LeanData’s integration with Salesloft allows a user to route prospects to the right reps.

Slack has transformed business communication– it’s the platform where work can happen.

Expertly target and engage high-value accounts when they’re ready to buy.

LeanData’s integration with Outreach allows a user to route prospects to the right reps.

• Learning Center
• Certification
• Tips & Tricks
• Help Center
• About Us Learn more about us and our mission
• Newsroom Keep up with what’s new at LeanData
• Events Stay up to date and network with industry professionals at our upcoming events
• Careers Join the LeanData team
• Contact Us Get your questions answered - contact us now

G2 Recognizes Lead-to-Account Matching and Routing as Newest Tech Category, with LeanData the #1 Vendor

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 .

More Related Content

How to Automate Lead Routing in Salesforce

How assignment rules work in Salesforce When leads come into your Salesforce instance, a rep needs to reach out to...

Salesforce Lead-to-Account Matching, the Easy Way

Salesforce lead-to-account matching is an important consideration in better aligning Sales with Marketing and increasing the efficiency and productivity of...

10 Best Lead Assignment Tools for Revenue Teams (2024)

Lead assignment tools optimize sales processes by building efficiency into lead distribution. Here are the top 10 lead assignment tools worth investigating.

• Manage Email Subscriptions
• How to Post to DZone
• Article Submission Guidelines
• Manage My Drafts

Enterprise Security: Now is the time to ensure your systems are secure. Expand your org's tactics and put future attackers in their place.

Secrets Management: Learn key strategies for secrets management to enhance visibility. Identify and mitigate potential security risks.

2024 DZone Community Survey: Tell us what's in your tech stack. Help us build a better DZone. Enter for a chance to win swag!

• How To Plan a (Successful) MuleSoft VPN Migration (Part I)
• On-Demand-Schedulers With MuleSoft CloudHub APIs
• Understanding Mule Events in Mule 4
• Create Proxy Application for Mule APIs
• Large Language Models: Changing the Game in Software Development With Code Generation, Debugging, and CI/CD Integration
• How To Achieve High GC Throughput
• The Ultimate Guide To Evaluate RAG System Components: What You Need To Know
• How Data Encryption Can Simplify Infrastructure Architecture
• Software Design and Architecture
• Integration

Trigger Salesforce Assignment Rules and Send Notifications From MuleSoft

This blog describes the process of triggering salesforce lead or case assignment rules and sending email notifications to owners when creating records from mulesoft..

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

In many MuleSoft integration projects, there is a requirement to create lead or case records in Salesforce. Organizations typically use the lead assignment rule and case assignment rule to automatically assign new leads or cases to the users or queue.

When we create leads or cases from MuleSoft using the Salesforce connector, by default it does not trigger the assignment rules and does not send email notifications to owners.

This blog describes the process of triggering Salesforce lead or case assignment rules and sending email notifications to owners when creating records from MuleSoft. We will assume that the salesforce assignment rules are already set up and which get triggered when creating leads or cases from the salesforce UI. We will be focusing on triggering assignment rules in Salesforce when creating a new lead or case from Mulesoft. This blog will not cover how to create assignment rules in Salesforce.

Salesforce Assignment Rules

Assignment rules in Salesforce are used to automatically assign a lead or case to the owner (user or queue).

Salesforce provides two types of assignment rules:

• Lead assignment rule:  This is used to specify how leads are assigned to users or queues.
• Case assignment rule: This is used to determine how cases are assigned to users or put into queues.

When a new lead or case is created it triggers the assignment rule as well as sends the notification email to the assignee if the send email checkbox is enabled. For example: In the below screenshot, you can see two lead assignment rules. One is default and the other is a custom rule (Mule Assignment Rule) created for this blog. Please note that at a time only one assignment rule can be active.

Mule Assignment Rule

In this rule, leads are assigned to the owners based on the condition for lead: country, and after that email notifications are sent to those owners as the send email checkbox is true.

To know more about the salesforce assignment rules you can refer here .

AssignmentRuleHeader

To trigger the assignment rule from MuleSoft, AssignmentRuleHeader must be specified in the salesforce connector for the specified assignment rule to be triggered. We can specify two types of AssignmentRuleHeader .

• useDefaultRule : This is a boolean type and it should be set to true. This triggers the default (active) assignment rule. If this is specified, do not specify an assignmentRuleId .
• assignmentRuleId : In this type, we can pass the ID of a specific assignment rule to run for the case or lead. The lead or case assignment rule can be active or inactive. The Assignment rule ID can be fetched by querying the AssignmentRule object. If this is specified, do not specify useDefaultRule .

EmailHeader :  To send an email notification to the lead or case owner as a part of the assignment rule, EmailHeader   with " triggerUserEmail ''  type set to 'true'   should be passed in the Salesforce connector.

Walkthrough

For the demo, we will be considering a use case where leads are created in Salesforce using MuleSoft. We will be using the previously mentioned ‘Mule Assignment Rule’ which assigns leads to owners based on the lead country value and sends email notifications.

Add a mule flow with the below connectors to create leads in Salesforce.

In the salesforceHeaders   variable set the AssignmentRuleHeader   and EmailHeader   with the below syntax:

Here, we are using the useDefaultRule   option which will trigger the default active lead assignment rule.

If your requirement is to trigger a specific assignment rule, we can specify the assignmentRuleId :

You can get the assignmentRuleId by running SOQL: SELECT id FROM AssignmentRule WHERE Name = 'Mule Assignment Rule'

Please note that we need to pass both the headers to trigger the assignment rule and send notifications. If the requirement is to only trigger the assignment and not send an email, you can skip the EmailHeader . But if email notification is needed you need to mandatorily add the EmailHeader else it will not send an email even if the send email checkbox is true in the assignment rule.

Add the Salesforce transformation in the Transform Message.

Please note that we are creating this lead with country = ‘US’ which will satisfy the first assignment rule condition and should assign this lead to ‘Mule Max’ .

Pass the salesforceHeaders variable in the headers section of the Salesforce connector.

Run the application and trigger the request.

• Lead Assigned: A lead is created in Salesforce and it is assigned to ‘Mule Max’ as per the lead assignment rule.

• Email Sent: Email is triggered to the lead owner as per the lead assignment rule.

Email format can be different based on the email template used in the salesforce assignment rule.

Note:  If you are using the Salesforce Sandbox environment, it may not trigger the email notification because by default the send email access is disabled in Sandbox. To enable the send email access go to the email deliverability setting in the Salesforce setup and change the access level to All Email.

We have covered how to trigger the salesforce lead assignment rule and send email notifications to the lead owners when creating new leads from MuleSoft. The same process can be used for the case assignment rules.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Partner Resources

• About DZone
• Send feedback
• Community research
• Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

• Become a Contributor
• Core Program
• Visit the Writers' Zone
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• 3343 Perimeter Hill Drive
• Nashville, TN 37211
• [email protected]

Let's be friends:

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.

You might also like

Sales Funnel ROI Calculator

8 Lead Management Process Samples

How to Measure Lead Follow-Up Beyond First Touch

Get our newsletter.

Get tips, tutorials, best practices, and other cool stuff delivered to your inbox every quarter.

• Name * First Last

Get a System Audit

Whether you inherited a new instance or just want a second opinion, we'll dive in and benchmark your tech stack.

• Full Name *
• Job Title *
• What systems and challenges do you have?* *
• Hidden utm_medium
• Hidden utm_source
• Hidden utm_campaign
• Hidden utm_content
• Hidden utm_term

Download Resource

Use this form to recieve your free resource in your inbox today!

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.

Related Posts

Data in motion: Complete RevOps data management for Salesforce

Data management for RevOps has never been more important. Today, we set in motion a recommitment to you, your data, and your business.

3 lead routing plays to boost pipeline for marketing operations

Why we built this: Multi-SLA timers

Traction Complete Launches "The RevOps Data Management Suite for Salesforce"

Reforming Data Management for Revenue Operations Professionals

• Stack Overflow for Teams Where developers & technologists share private knowledge with coworkers
• Advertising & Talent Reach devs & technologists worldwide about your product, service or employer brand
• OverflowAI GenAI features for Teams
• OverflowAPI Train & fine-tune LLMs
• Labs The future of collective knowledge sharing
• About the company Visit the blog

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most.

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

Get early access and see previews of new features.

Turn off lead assignment rules in salesforce lead trigger

I'm having trouble with a Salesforce lead trigger, fired after insert. The lead assignment rules need to be on by default , but I need to bypass the rules for leads that match a certain criteria.

I've seen in the salesforce docs you are able to set assignment rules when inserting/updating leads: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_methods_system_database_dmloptions.htm#assignmentRuleHeader_section

However, I'm not able to turn off these lead assignment rules:

I've also tried creating a new lead assignment rule set with no actual rules and set the DML options to use this - but the default assignment rules are still fired! dmo.assignmentRuleHeader.assignmentRuleID = '01Qe00000000HAq';

The order of execution states the record is saved to database (not committed) > after triggers executed > assignment rules executed. So the trigger is run before assignment rules.

I've tried the code on before insert, but get the error 'DML statment cannot operate on trigger.new or trigger.old: Trigger.AssignOwnerToNewLead: line 133, column 1'

Thanks in advance, Sam

2 Answers 2

use this before trigger

• 1 This is the code I've tried, but does not work. Is this in a before insert trigger? I get an error when attempting this on before insert: 'DML statment cannot operate on trigger.new or trigger.old' –  Sam Commented Dec 4, 2013 at 15:09
• Create a new lead assignment rule with no assignments name it AssignmentSkip
• In apex programmatically set that id on the rule header options

Your Answer

Reminder: Answers generated by artificial intelligence tools are not allowed on Stack Overflow. Learn more

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest.

Required, but never shown

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy .

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged triggers salesforce apex-code force.com or ask your own question .

• The Overflow Blog
• Where does Postgres fit in a world of GenAI and vector databases?
• Mobile Observability: monitoring performance through cracked screens, old...
• Featured on Meta
• Announcing a change to the data-dump process
• Bringing clarity to status tag usage on meta sites
• What does a new user need in a homepage experience on Stack Overflow?
• Staging Ground Reviewer Motivation
• Feedback requested: How do you use tag hover descriptions for curating and do...

Hot Network Questions

• Does the order of ingredients while cooking matter to an extent that it changes the overall taste of the food?
• Why does average of Monte Carlo simulations not hold for simple problem?
• How does the summoned monster know who is my enemy?
• If the Hom-space of finite length modules is generated by single elements, must the elements be conjugate?
• Book or novel about an intelligent monolith from space that crashes into a mountain
• Has the US said why electing judges is bad in Mexico but good in the US?
• 3D printed teffilin?
• 2 in 1: Twin Puzzle
• Can Shatter damage Manifest Mind?
• What explanations can be offered for the extreme see-sawing in Montana's senate race polling?
• Why is the movie titled "Sweet Smell of Success"?
• Which version of Netscape, on which OS, appears in the movie “Cut” (2000)?
• "TSA regulations state that travellers are allowed one personal item and one carry on"?
• Is the spectrum of Hawking radiation identical to that of thermal radiation?
• Why was this lighting fixture smoking? What do I do about it?
• How to disable Google Lens in search when using Google Chrome?
• Took a pic of old school friend in the 80s who is now quite famous and written a huge selling memoir. Pic has ben used in book without permission
• How do you end-punctuate quotes when the entire quote is used as a noun phrase?
• If inflation/cost of living is such a complex difficult problem, then why has the price of drugs been absoultly perfectly stable my whole life?
• Journal keeps messing with my proof
• Writing an i with a line over it instead of an i with a dot and a line over it
• bash script to run a python command with arguments in batch
• What is the highest apogee of a satellite in Earth orbit?
• Motion of the COM of 2-body system

SmartSuite Dashboard Training Class |  Sept 3, 8 AM PT - Register here!

Top 12 Leading Salesforce Alternatives Reviewed (Features & Pricing for 2024)

August 31, 2024

SmartSuite Staff

Salesforce has established itself as a titan in the CRM industry, offering robust functionality and scalability.

While Salesforce excels in many areas, it's not without its challenges. 

The platform's complexity can be daunting, often requiring significant time and resources. Additionally, as companies scale, the costs may rise faster than anticipated.

So, we've analyzed different CRM tools, studied hundreds of user reviews, and curated a list of the top 12 Salesforce alternatives, each offering unique strengths to address different business needs.

This article examines the core features, pricing structures, strengths, and drawbacks of various alternatives.

Let's dive into these Salesforce alternatives 👇

Why Do Users Look for Salesforce Alternatives?

Salesforce has long been a leader in the CRM space, offering powerful features like extensive integrations, highly customizable options, and integrated marketing tools for advanced automation.

These strengths have made it a go-to solution for many businesses.

However, enterprise-level pricing plans and complex feature-packs make small and medium-sized businesses sell alternatives.

Reason 1: Limited and slow reporting capabilities

While Salesforce offers reporting functions, many users find them to be limited and sometimes slow, especially when dealing with large datasets. This can be frustrating for businesses that rely heavily on data-driven decision-making.

Reason 2: Unitive interface with limited integrations

Salesforce's broad feature set, while powerful, can be overwhelming for new users. The platform's complexity often results in significant time investment for team members to become proficient and increased training costs.

Users have also complained about the lack of native tools, making them rely on third-party integrations, making Salesforce only a standalone database of leads.

Reason 3: Pricing catches up with you

While Salesforce's pricing may seem competitive initially, many users find the pricing structure confusing. 

Along with that, the costs can escalate quickly as your business needs grow. This is often due to the additional fees for essential features or upgrading to more expensive tiers to access advanced functionalities.

So, users who want a budget-friendly CRM with advanced customization and automation features look for alternatives.

What Are the Best Alternatives to Salesforce?

Based on our research and user reviews, these are the best Salesforce alternatives:

#1. SmartSuite

SmartSuite is a workflow management software that lets you manage your sales processes—lead generation, outreach, qualification, and communication, in a centralized platform with built-in automation, a communication center, and robust task management. 

Full disclosure: Even though SmartSuite is our own product, we aim to provide an honest perspective on why SmartSuite is the top Salesforce alternative available for companies who want to combine their CRM system for task management and automation across the entire organization.

SmartSuite ranked higher in the list due to ease of use and feature-packed pricing, including CRM automation, sales forecasting, and lead management.

The platform is not a traditional CRM per se but offers a modern alternative with hundreds of templates for sales processes. It also allows users to centralize task management and process automation for all functions in one platform.

Here are three key features that make SmartSuite a stronger modern contender against Salesforce.

Feature 1: Project management for sales and marketing

SmartSuite’s dynamic project management feature lets you build a custom campaign tracker or CRM tool to manage and track your workflows.

• Campaign management

Plan, build, and manage multiple campaigns in a dedicated dashboard —social media campaigns, product launches, content planners, and more.

You get access to 7+ task views including Gantt charts and Kanban board and get a deeper look into the campaign's performance.

• Project reporting and testing

Generate a detailed dashboard to review performance across various projects. Run A/B test campaigns to make data-driven decisions to improve project’s and team’s performance.

• Lead tracking

Convert more leads into buyers by tracking every aspect of their journey. By building a lead tracking dashboard, you can add as many properties as you need to get a granular view of the incoming database. To keep your team involved, you can share updates within the dashboard to facilitate quick and real-time communication.

• Pipeline & forecast reports

Convert your sales pipeline into visual graphs and charts to make forecasts and identify potential sales opportunities.

Feature 2: Workflow automation

SmartSuite offers a robust workflow automation suitable for the sales and marketing team to accomplish various tasks ranging from lead generation to deal closing. The no-code builder makes it easier for anyone in the team to build simple to complex workflows for various use cases.

Here are some of the use cases of SmartSuite’s workflow automation:

• Centralized marketing hub: Centralize all your marketing processes in a single platform from ideation to execution.
• Campaign management: Manage outreach campaigns by setting up automation such as updating target leads status based on predefined criteria.
• Managing sales pipelines: Update and maintain sales databases and spreadsheets, export leads to specific product or marketing lists, and organize tasks into actionable steps .
• Lead management: Set up notification triggers to send timely alerts to the right team members when new leads enter the sales funnel. This ensures that no lead is overlooked and that follow-up actions are timely.

Feature 3: CRM template library

SmartSuite offers a library of CRM templates to help you cut down on building one from scratch. Each template is designed by industry experts and contains essential properties such as accounts, lead type, qualification stage, and more.

For example, the Sales CRM template comes with accounts, contacts, opportunities, and sales resources tables, which serve as a central repository for each type of item. Each template also has pre-built views to get a more granular view of your processes.

Some common use cases of these templates include:

• Track estimated value of sales opportunities: Track the estimated and actual contract values of sales opportunities associated with an account.

• Sales asset management: Track all your sales and marketing material in a dedicated space to facilitate smooth collaboration and faster decision-making.

• Rollup fields to calculate the total contract value: With the Sales CRM solution, multiple records of sales opportunities can be paired with a single account to generate a total contract value. Each opportunity's actual contract value is recorded, and the overall contract value is totaled in the Rollup field of the account table.

How Does SmartSuite Compare to Salesforce?

If you’re looking for a pure-bread CRM platform, Salesforce is your best option. 

However, SmartSuite has so much more to offer. It is a great workflow management platform for handling sales and marketing processes. 

More Salesforce customers switch to SmartSuite because of its feature-packed and transparent pricing plans, which include rule-based automated assignments, lead management, and advanced reporting capabilities.

Salesforce is a great pick for small—to medium-sized businesses that need an integrated set of tools for various sales processes. However, the setup is often time-consuming and effort-heavy.

SmartSuite, on the other hand, is much more intuitive and offers a unified work management solution.

Its key advantage is the ability to build custom solutions tailored to specific business needs without extensive coding knowledge. This makes it particularly appealing for small to medium-sized businesses that want to centralize processes across the organization without the complexity and cost associated with Salesforce or the dependency on integrations between solutions.

SmartSuite Pros and Cons

✅ Generous free plan with access to advanced features

✅ 200+ sales CRM templates for different use cases

✅ Flexible and advanced reporting such as pipeline and sales forecast reports

✅ Intuitive no-code automation to streamline sales workflows

❌ Only 25+ integrations

#2. HubSpot

Best for: Easy-to-use, all-in-one CRM solution with strong marketing automation capabilities.

Similar to : Zoho CRM and Pipedrive

HubSpot is a marketing automation software that offers a lot of CRM functionality such as lead management and sales forecasting. 

It wins over Salesforce due to its user-friendly interface and accessible pricing plans along with a free CRM plan.

Who Is It For?

Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), startups, especially marketing and sales teams.

HubSpot’s Top Features

• Prospecting workspace: A dedicated space to empower sales teams to have the relevant context to create more authentic and engaging buyer experiences.
• Email tracking : Monitor your email’s performance and send personalized timely emails based on the insights.
• Sales analytics and reporting: Build custom reporting dashboards and gain insights into your pipeline, team performance, deal status, prospecting touches and conversions, and more.

HubSpot’s Pricing

HubSpot offers a free plan for up to five users. You can also get a 14-day free trial for its three pricing tiers.

• Starter: $20 per user/month, including Stripe integration, 1 email inbox, and up to 3 dashboards, each with 10 reports per dashboard.
• Professional: $100 per user/month, and a one-time required Professional Onboarding for $1,500.
• Enterprise : $150 per user/month, and a one-time required Enterprise Onboarding at a price of $3,500.

As compared to Salesforce, HubSpot has a free plan and a low monthly entry price of $20 for small and medium-sized businesses.

HubSpot’s Pros and Cons

✅ Intuitive user interface

✅ 2-way data sync with other apps available

❌ Expensive pricing due to add-ons

❌ Limited CRM-focused tool and more emphasis on inbound efforts

#3. Microsoft Dynamics 365

Best for: Integrated solution that combines CRM and ERP functionalities.

Similar to: SAP CRM and Oracle NetSuite

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an integrated suite of business applications that combines CRM and ERP capabilities.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 stands out due to its seamless integration with other Microsoft products like Office 365 and Power BI. This makes it a strong choice for organizations already using Microsoft tools over Salesforce.

Who is it For?

Medium to large enterprises who need a scalable CRM or businesses using Microsoft products.

Microsoft Dynamics 365’s Key Features

• Marketing and sales integration: Connect various sales and marketing processes through email marketing, lead scoring, marketing pages, and social posting.
• Pipeline management: Track your pipeline and progress toward key performance indicators (KPIs) using embedded charts and dashboards.
• Unified contact management: Keep track of your accounts and contacts, nurture your sales from lead to order, and create sales collateral.

Microsoft Dynamics 365’s Pricing

There are three pricing plans available:

• Dynamics 365 Sales Professional: Starting at $65 per user/month, includes core sales automation features.
• Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise: Starting at $95 per user/month, offers advanced sales and customer relationship management features.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Starting at $50 per user/month, provides comprehensive customer service capabilities.

You can try out the tool with a 30-day free trial.

Microsoft Dynamics 365’s Pros and Cons

✅ Integrates with Microsoft products such as Teams, Excel, and PowerBI

✅ Combines CRM and ERP capabilities

❌ Can be complex to implement and manage, especially for non-Microsoft users

❌ Cost increases with add-ons and custom solutions

#4. Pipedrive

Best for: End-to-end management of sales processes.

Similar to : Zoho CRM and Salesforce

Pipelive is an easy-to-use CRM tool that helps sales reps organize, manage, and track lead databases with advanced automation, reporting, and native communication tools.

Pipedrive is a great Salesforce alternative for sales teams as all the features are laser-focused on enhancing sales processes, including pipeline management, at budget-friendly pricing.

Small to medium-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups.

Pipedrive’s Top Features

• Insights and reporting: Get actionable insights through visual reports, pipeline metrics, and custom dashboards.
• Automation workflows: Automate administrative and repetitive tasks such as sales call scheduling, lead assignment, and follow-up emails.
• Communication and email tracking: Assign chat requests to sales reps, compose and send outreach emails, and get real-time alerts for prospect’s email engagement.

Pipedrive’s Pricing

Pipedrive offers five pricing plans with a 14-day free trial for each one of them:

• Essential: Starts at $24 per user/month, including customizable pipeline, 15 reports per user, and leads inbox.
• Advanced: Starts at $44 per user/month, including 30 active automation per user, two-way email sync, and email open & click tracking.
• Professional: Starts at $64 per user/month, including contract timeline, advanced automation, and revenue forecast reports.
• Power: Starts at $79 per user/month, including project add-on, 15 teams per company, and custom fields.
• Enterprise: Starts at $129 per user/month including unlimited reports and advanced customizations.

Pipedrive's pricing plans are more scalable than Salesforce, as there isn't much price variation between tiers.

Pipedrive’s Pros and Cons

✅ 400+ integrations

✅ Affordable, feature-packed pricing especially for teams with small budget

✅ Excellent add-ons for marketing & lead generation

❌ Limited workflow customization

❌ Add-ons can be expensive 

Best for: Managing and tracking leads in a dedicated space with highly tailored dashboards and reports.

Similar to : Salesforce and Pipedrive

Zoho CRM is a solid and budget-friendly CRM solution that offers extensive customization and integration capabilities. Compared to Salesforce, it offers a more cost-effective solution for small to medium-sized businesses while still providing a wide range of features.

Small and medium-sized businesses with low budgets and enterprise teams looking to scale their CRM efforts.

Zoho’s Top Features

• Sales automation: Automates routine sales tasks, including sales appointment schedules, follow-up emails, contact tracking and lead scoring.
• Omnichannel communication: Connect with your customer through multiple channels—email, phone, social media, and live chat to have more contextually rich conversations.
• Process management: Build scalable sales process including lead scoring, approvals, lead assignment rules, and reviews.

Zoho’s Pricing

Zoho offers a free plan for up to 34 users access and limited access to features including lead tracking, management, and basic reporting.

To explore what all Zoho has to offer, you can try its 15-day free trial for its four pricing tiers:

• Standard: Starts at $20 per user/month with access to sales forecasting tools, 100 custom reports, and 5 forms/modules.
• Professional: Starts at $20 per user/month with access to SalesSignals and unlimited customer reports and dashboard creation.
• Enterprise: Starts at $20 per user/month with access to Zoho AI and marketing attribution.
• Ultimate: Starts at $20 per user/month with access to 25 cohort analyses and access to advanced integration.

Zoho also wins over Salesforce in terms of pricing with a free plan and low-entry point starting plans.

Zoho’s Pros and Cons

✅ Cost-effective pricing plans

✅ Preset reports and custom reporting capabilities

❌ AI assistance only available on Enterprise and Ultimate tiers

#6. Freshsales

Best for: Sales teams focused on automating workflows and enhancing productivity.

Similar to : Pipedrive and Zoho CRM

Freshsales is the CRM tool offered by Freshworks, focused on growing the sales pipeline with powerful AI assistance.

Freshsales stands out with its built-in phone & email, allowing sales teams to communicate with leads directly from the CRM. Its AI-powered lead scoring also gives it a competitive edge over Salesforce.

Startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that need a cost-effective CRM solution.

Freshsales’s Top Features

• Multi-channel communication: Engage with prospects at the right time in the right contextual setting across email, chat, phone, zoom, and SMSs.
• Workflow automation: Build custom workflows and sales sequences by segmenting and prioritizing prospects based on rules and key identifiers.
• Sales intelligence: Enhance sales processes through AI-powered contact scoring, sales forecasting, and future action steps.

Freshsales’s Pricing

Freshsales CRM offers a free plan for up to 3 users with basic CRM customizations, data import & export, and a built-in phone dialer. To get more advanced features, select from three pricing tiers:

• Growth: Starts at $11 per user/month, including 20 basic workflows, a visual sales pipeline, and Slack collaboration.
• Pro: Starts at $47 per user/month, including custom sales activities, 50 advanced automated workflows, and sales forecasting.
• Enterprise: Starts at $71 per user/month including a suite of advanced features to manage your leads and deals.

Freshsales’s Pros and Cons

✅ Affordable pricing tiers

✅ Highly customizable

✅ Integrates with Freshdesk, Freshteam, Freshmarketer, and Freshservice

❌ Integration marketplace not available for a free user

#7. Oracle NetSuite

Best for: Comprehensive cloud-based ERP solution with integrated CRM capabilities

Similar to: SAP and Microsoft Dynamics

NetSuite CRM is part of a full enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution offered by Oracle. It provides a complete flow of information across the entire customer lifecycle—from lead generation to renewal, upsell, cross-sell, and support.

Netsuite CRM stands out as a strong Salesforce alternative because while Salesforce is a standalone CRM software, Netsuite is an ERP that offers a standalone CRM tool.

Enterprise-level businesses need a scalable solution and operate in complex industries such as manufacturing and distribution.

Oracle NetSuite’s Top Features

• Automation: Build integrated sales processes from lead management, upsell and quote management, sales forecasting, order management, and commissions.
• Reporting and analytics: Built-in reporting and role-based dashboard allowing marketing, sales, and customer services, to monitor the performance across various areas .
• Case management : Create and automate case management processes so that customers can submit cases online, review the status, and reply with follow-up communications.

Oracle NetSuite’s Pricing

Netsuite CRM is included with the Netsuite platform. It means you need to subscribe to the platform for an annual license fee to access the CRM. This license consists of a core platform, optional modules, and several users.

To implement the platform, there is a one-time fee as well for the initial setup.

Oracle NetSuite’s Pros and Cons

✅ Combines ERP and CRM in one solution

✅ Offers robust reporting and data visualization tools

✅ Gives a 360-degree view of the customer’s life cycle across all stages

❌ Significant upfront investment for implementation and customization

Best for: Comprehensive business management with heavy reliance on ERP integrations.

Similar to: Oracle NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365

SAP offers a comprehensive CRM and ERP solutions suite for large enterprises with complex, industry-specific needs such as manufacturing, distribution, and packaging.

SAP stands out as a Salesforce alternative due to its integration across SAP solutions, offering a unified view of business operations.

Large enterprises, especially those already within the SAP ecosystem.

SAP’s Top Features

• Sales automation: Automate manual tasks and ensure efficiency across various systems and processes.
• Sales analytics: Understand customer needs and improve sales outcomes with dashboards that provide actionable campaign insights.
• Omnichannel experience: Supports consistent customer interactions across multiple channels.

SAP’s Pricing

There is no free plan or trial available and pricing for paid plans is available only on request.

SAP’s Pros and Cons

✅ Large number of third-party integrations

✅ Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities

❌ Initial setup is often complex and time-consuming

Best for: Marketing automation solution that is affordable and easy to implement.

Similar to: Attio and Monday.com CRM

Keap is a user-friendly CRM designed for small businesses, offering a simpler and more cost-effective alternative to Salesforce.

Keap's powerful set of integration with email marketing and e-commerce tools makes it a suitable alternative to Salesforce, particularly for online businesses.

Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and service-based businesses

Keap’s Key Features

• Analytics: Manage your sales pipeline performance through various reports including deal conversions by stage, average deal duration, the average time in the stage, and deal revenue forecasting.
• Automation builder: Drag-and-drop automation builder to eliminate repetitive tasks such as sending text or email follow-ups at the right time or assigning leads to the right sales rep.
• Invoicing and payments: Built-in tools for quotes, invoicing, and payment processing.

Keap’s Pricing

Keap offers a 14-day free trial for its fixed pricing plans.

Unlike Salesforce, Keap offers flat-fee pricing with a minimum of 2 user seats and 1500 contacts starting at $299/month. In this flat fee, you get access to all the features—Automation, CRM, email & text, pipeline, landing pages, payments, appointments, and reporting.

Keap’s Pros and Cons

✅ User-friendly dashboards and navigation

✅ Built-in payment and invoicing tool

❌ Contact based pricing increases the total cost

#10. Monday.com CRM

Best for: Building appealing and customizable databases to manage all sales processes.

Similar to : Folk and Attio

Monday.com CRM is part of Monday.com’s worksuite which helps sales teams build configurable pipelines dashboards. The tool stands out as it integrates with Monday.com’s work management software facilitating better collaboration with cross-functional teams.

Compared to Salesforce, Monday.com CRM stands out as a highly visual, customizable workflow management approach.

Medium and large-size businesses who want a dynamic CRM tool or team who already uses Monday.com’s work management tool.

Monday.com CRM’s Top Features

• Dynamic dashboards: Build custom dashboards by using custom fields and widgets to visualize reports like sales forecasting, deals progress, and activity tracking.
• Centralized client communication : Compose and track of sent emails, and email engagement, and set up personalized email templates for email outreach on scale.
• Automation: Automates repetitive tasks such as lead assignments, email notifications, and activity reminders.

Monday.com’s CRM Pricing

Monday.com offers a 14-day free trial and a free plan for up to 2 users. Their paid plans need at least 3 users and come in four tiers:

• Basic: Starts at $21 per user/month, including unlimited customizable pipeline, Whiteboard collaboration, and two-factor authentication.
• Standard: Starts at $28 per user/month, including Gmail and Outlook integration, 250 actions/month, and deal management.
• Pro: Starts at $48 per user/month, including private boards and docs, Google authentication,. Sales forecasting, and 100GB file storage.
• Enterprise : Salesforce integration, lead scoring, advanced analytics, and post-sales management. Contact sales for a quote.

Monday.com’s CRM beats Salesforce pricing with pricing as low as $21/month making it a suitable choice for smaller team size.

Monday.com CRM Pros and Cons

✅ Dynamic boards with multi-dashboard views

✅ Advanced and flexible automated workflows

❌ Requires a minimum team size to buy or upgrade plan

❌ Basic plan offers limited features

Best for: Customizable CRM dashboard with data enrichment capabilities.

Similar to : Monday.com CRM and Pipedrive

Attio is a low-investment CRM software that helps you track and optimize your business relationships with individuals and organizations.

Attio differentiates itself from other CRMs by offering powerful data modeling capabilities and real-time collaboration features.

Small to mid-sized businesses, startups, freelancers, and solopreneurs that need a lightweight, customizable CRM solution.

Attio’s Top Features

• Flexible reporting: Transform data points into custom advanced reports to visualize progress and make data-driven decisions.
• Unified collaboration: Tag your teammates, leave contextual comments, sync Calendar, and share notes for quick communication and real-time update sharing.
• Data syncing and automation: Use custom fields to configure CRM, create associations between different fields, and automate your decisions.

Attio’s Pricing

Attio’s free plan offers 3 seats, 100 workflow credits, and a limited email send limit/month. The paid plans come in three tiers with a 14-day free trial:

• Plus: Starts at $34 per user/month, including 20 reports, and 200 credits to enrich contacts from LinkedIn and standard data sources.
• Pro: Starts at $69 per user/month, including unlimited emails, 2500 workflow credits, and up top 100 advanced reporting.
• Enterprise: Starts at $119 per user/month, including unlimited custom objects and 100+ reports.

Attio offers lower pricing plans and a free plan, which Salesforce does not offer.

Attio’s Pros and Cons

✅ Automatic data enrichment

✅ Clean and blazingly fast UI

❌ Limited integrations

❌ Lack of native features such as email sequencing, lead scoring and call tracking

Best for: Unifying contact management through dynamic pipelines and native email tools.

Similar to : Pipedrive and Attio

Folk CRM is a relationship management software that helps teams manage their pipeline, communicate, and close deals in a user-friendly platform.

Compared to Salesforce, Folk offers a modern, sleek alternative with emphasis on relationship management and simplicity.

Startups, solopreneurs, and businesses with small team sizes.

Folk’s Top Features

• Pipeline management: Define your deal stages, track deals, and identify your highly qualified leads, all in a customizable dashboard.
• Native emailing tool: Write, plan, and send ultra-personalized emails and set up follow-up sequences within Folk CRM and send in bulk using your domain.
• Unified contact management: Integrates with Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more channels letting track conversation and outreach in a dedicated space.

Folk’s Pricing

Folk offers a 14-day free trial for its three pricing plans:

• Standard: Start at $25 per user/month, including pipeline management, 1/member email account sync, and integration with Zapier.
• Premium: Start at $50 per user/month, including custom objects, automation sequences, and migration services.
• Custom: Start at $100 per user/month for custom features. Contact sales for a quote.

Folk's pricing is consistent across plans, while Salesforce pricing often increases substantially at higher tiers.

Folk’s Pros and Cons

✅ Adaptable and easy-to-navigate interface

✅ Chrome extension that works on every platform

✅ Native emailing and social listening tools

❌ Basic reporting and analytics capabilities

Beyond Salesforce: Choosing Your Ideal CRM Solution

The alternatives we've discussed cater to various business sizes and needs.

If you are an enterprise-level organization and want integrated capabilities such as with an ERP, go for SAP, Oracle Netsuite, or Microsoft Dynamics. For smaller businesses or startups looking for cost-effective, feature-packed solutions, Pipedrive, Attio, or Folk can be the go-to choices.

But, if you're seeking an adaptable, all-in-one work management platform that offers a balance of powerful features, user-friendliness, and value for money, SmartSuite could be your best bet.

With SmartSuite, you get to:

• Automate workflow with dynamic automation
• Manage your contacts and leads in an intuitive interface
• Improve team collaboration with native communication tools
• Predict sales closing and revenue through advanced analytics 

Ready to explore further? Take SmartSuite for a spin or schedule a demo to talk to our sales team.

Experience the Future of Work

More from sales.

Top 9 HubSpot Alternatives for Modern Sales Teams in 2024

Sneaky pricing, limited reporting and sub-par process automation make some sales and marketing team consider HubSpot alternatives. This guide covers both traditional options and modern ones.

Boost Your Sales Performance with Enterprise Sales Teams

As sales organizations grow, it becomes increasingly challenging to track and manage the performance of sales teams. That's where sales performance management software comes in.

Maximizing Sales Operations Efficiency with CRM Integration

In today's highly competitive business environment, sales teams must be equipped with the best tools to help them streamline their operations and achieve maximum efficiency.

Subscribe to ‍ our Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news, updates, and events.

Thank you !

Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter, and thank you for becoming part of the SmartSuite family !

Stack Exchange Network

Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

How to stop a Lead Assignment Rule for certain Leads?

I'd like to stop Lead Assignment Rules from activating for a particular type of Lead, for example, if a Lead is from a particular Country.

What are some force.com tools I could use to accomplish this?

• assignment-rules

• You can bypass assigment rule like create a checkbox called bypass in lead.In assignment rule with your criteria add like bypass = false.If you want to by pass assignment rule through trigger update bypass=true in specific lead. Let me know @R.Rakesh –  Pavan tej Commented Aug 3, 2016 at 17:14

4 Answers 4

Could you just set a rule in your lead assignments of "Country = X" Assign to Same User? This more or less would bypass the Lead Assignment.

• Hi Dan, Thanks for quick reply , in my scenario I want to assign the owner for particular type of lead by apex trigger and if the lead is of other type then go for lead assignment rule. –  R.Rakesh Commented Aug 3, 2016 at 16:57
• Why not just have everything assign via Assignment rules? Why rebuild the wheel? Are you talking about re-assignment AFTER creation? In that case a Trigger or WFR can do the job. –  Dan Commented Aug 3, 2016 at 16:59
• Yes we can do that but in my case I have to further divide the criteria based on zip code so it will take my active rules to more than 50.This is why I have made a list of zip codes with owners that need to be assigned.This will be accomplished with the help of Apex Trigger for a particular type of lead.. –  R.Rakesh Commented Aug 3, 2016 at 17:13

I was able to successfully bypass the lead assignment Rule with the help of workflow rule . As per the order of execution workflow comes after triggers and when we update fields of lead by workflow then triggers execute again but not Assignment rule, thus we can achieve our goal.

• 1 ? Assignment rules (step 8) run before workflow rules (step 10) so some elaboration would be nice –  cropredy Commented Aug 9, 2016 at 21:18

This problem can be a bit tricky

• If the Lead comes in with DMLOptions indicating to use Lead Assignment (such as from Marketo/Eloqua/HubSpot), then the SFDC will execute the assignment rules regardless of what you do.
• Hence, if you have use the assignment rule 'email' checkbox, then the assignee will get notified.
• Should no assignment rule be true, the Lead will get assigned to the default Lead owner.

To avoid the email notification to the wrong person - you will need an assignment rule that assigns the "dont use assignment rules" Lead to a queue InterimQ . Then, using ProcessBuilder/workflow or trigger, reassign the Leads owned by InterimQ to the owner you desire.

If you want to avoid the assignment rules execution programmatically, you can use in the before insert:

Database.DMLOptions dmo = new Database.DMLOptions(); dmo.assignmentRuleHeader.useDefaultRule= false; lead.setOptions(dmo);

Here you have the DMLoptions official doc: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexref.meta/apexref/apex_methods_system_database_dmloptions.htm

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for browse other questions tagged assignment-rules ..

• The Overflow Blog
• Where does Postgres fit in a world of GenAI and vector databases?
• Mobile Observability: monitoring performance through cracked screens, old...
• Featured on Meta
• Announcing a change to the data-dump process
• Bringing clarity to status tag usage on meta sites

Hot Network Questions

• How to count mismatches between two rows, column by column R?
• How can judicial independence be jeopardised by politicians' criticism?
• If Starliner returns safely on autopilot, can this still prove that it's safe? Could it be launched back up to the ISS again to complete it's mission?
• Whence “uniform distribution”?
• What are some refutations to the etymological fallacy?
• How do we reconcile the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8 and the man stoned for picking up sticks on Sabbath in Numbers 15?
• AM-GM inequality (but equality cannot be attained)
• Parse Minecraft's VarInt
• Maximizing the common value of both sides of an equation
• All stationary martingales are constant?
• Can the SLS's mobile launch platform be rotated at the launch complex to keep the rocket on the leeward side of the tower in case of high winds?
• How does the summoned monster know who is my enemy?
• Cannot open and HTML file stored on RAM-disk with a browser
• Is there a nonlinear resistor with a zero or infinite differential resistance?
• Who was the "Dutch author", "Bumstone Bumstone"?
• In Top, *how* do conjugate homorphisms of groups induce homotopies of classifying maps?
• Has a tire ever exploded inside the Wheel Well?
• bash script to run a python command with arguments in batch
• Displaying a text in the center of the page
• Which hash algorithms support binary input of arbitrary bit length?
• Why was this lighting fixture smoking? What do I do about it?
• How specific does the GDPR require you to be when providing personal information to the police?
• If inflation/cost of living is such a complex difficult problem, then why has the price of drugs been absoultly perfectly stable my whole life?
• Can you use 'sollen' the same way as 'should' in sentences about possibility that something happens?