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Think like a salesforce architect: how to design multi-cloud solutions, salesforce lead assignment rules best practices and tricks.

By Stacy O’Leary

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

Salesforce Lead Assignment Rule Example

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

Planning Lead Assignment Rules

Discovery: questions to ask.

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

Refining the requirements

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

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

Creating Lead Assignment Criteria

Leads that shouldn’t be distributed, next criteria.

The Final Empty Criteria

Activate the Lead Assignment Rules

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

Stacy O'Leary

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Guide to lead assignment rules in Salesforce

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

Rachel Burns Jul 24, 2023

15 min read

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What are Salesforce lead assignment rules?

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

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

Boost sales team productivity and efficiency

Prevent high-quality leads from slipping through the cracks

Create a better experience for potential customers

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

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

Key takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

6 benefits of creating lead assignment rules in Salesforce

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to create lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Step 1: build your lead assignment strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: Set up lead assignment rules in Salesforce

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

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

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

To create a lead assignment rule in Salesforce: 

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

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

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

Click Save.

Click the name of the rule you just created.

Click New in the Rule Entries section.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To select a default lead owner:

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

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

Save your settings.

Salesforce lead assignment rule examples

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

Simple rules include just one filter criteria:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taylor emails Nora to set up a qualification call.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s where Calendly comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales Enablement Manager at SignPost

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

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

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

Abbie Deaver

Director of Marketing at RCReports

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

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

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

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

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

Webinar: How Calendly Uses Calendly to Close More Deals

Rachel Burns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Define Assignment Rules

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

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

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

Criteria for Lead Assignment Rules

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

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

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

How to Create Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

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

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

Why Are Your Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules Not Working?

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

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

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

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

Assignment Rule Examples

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

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

How LeanData Simplifies Salesforce Lead Assignment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Salesforce Admin

Salesforce Lead Assignment rules

• Dec 28, 2023

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

What is Salesforce Lead Assignment rules?

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

Type of Assignment Rule 

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

• Lead Assignment Rules
• Case Assignment Rule

How to create lead Assignment Rules

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

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

Consideration for Lead Assignment Rules

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

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

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Salesforce lead assignment rules – Salesforce Tutorials

Creating and managing salesforce lead assignment rules .

In this Salesforce tutorial we are going to learn about What is an assignment Rules , How can we create and manage Salesforce lead assignment rules, and why should we create assignment rules in Salesforce.

What is an Assignment Rule?

Assignment Rules are used to assign Leads and Cases automatically to the assigned users based on criteria. There are two types of Assignment Rules in Salesforce they are

•  Lead Assignment Rules and
• Case Assignment Rules.

What are Salesforce lead assignment rules?

Salesforce lead assignment rules defines the administrators to assign a lead to users and queues based on criteria. A lead can be generated either by manually or generated from the web.

What are case Assignment Rules?

Salesforce lead assignment rules defines the administrators to assign a Case to users and queues based on criteria. A Case can be generated  by manually , generated from the web to case, Email to case etc.

How to create Salesforce lead assignment rules?

Creating and Managing Salesforce lead assignment rules are very important. Let us learn how to create lead assignment rules in Salesforce.com. To create assignment rules login Salesforce and navigate to Setup | Build | Customize | Lead | Lead Assignment Rules.

• Click on Lead assignment rules as shown above.

Click on New Button to create new Salesforce lead assignment rule.

• Enter Rule name.
• The assignment rule must be activated as shown above.
• Click on Save button.

There are only one standard rule in our salesforce. If we create new Assignment rule in Salesforce the first standard rule will be automatically deactivated. At a single point of time only one assignment rule is active. For a single rule there can be multiple rule entries.

• When creating Rule entry we have to learn about these three Order number, Criteria and Assigned to.

How to create New Rule entries in Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules.

In Salesforce we can create many rule entries for single Assignment Rule.

• Click on New Button to create new Rule entry.

• In step 1 :- Enter Sort order as #1.
• In Step 2 :- Enter rule criteria as shown above.
• In Step 3 :- Select the user or queue to assign the lead.
• Select user and Email template as shown above.

Learn how to create Email template in Salesforce.

We have created two Rule entries with order 1 and Order 2. In this Salesforce lead assignment rules, Generated leads will be automatically assigned to the country United State and Country United Kingdom.

Conclusion :

In this Salesforce Tutorial we have learned about What is Assignment rule and How to create Salesforce lead assignment rules. Like wise case assignment rules are also similar to lead assignment rules.

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Assignment rules in Salesforce

• By Ankush Dureja in salesforce

December 6, 2018

Page Contents

What are assignment rules in salesforce ?

Assignment rules in salesforce are used to automatically assign lead or Case to owner( User Or Queue ). Assignment rule is used to automate owner assignment on Case and Lead based on conditions on Case or Lead. For example, there could on lead assignment rule for web-generated leads and one case assignment rule for the holiday use.

Types of assignment rules

There are two type of assignment rules

Lead Assignment Rules

Case assignment rules.

Specify how leads are assigned to users or queues as they are created manually, captured from the web, or imported via the Data Import Wizard.

Determine how cases are assigned to users or put into queues as they are created manually, using Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, On-Demand Email-to-Case, the Self-Service portal, the Customer Portal, Outlook, or Lotus Notes.

Create or Setup assignment rules

• From Setup, enter Assignment Rules in the  Quick Find  box, then select either  Lead Assignment Rules  or  Case Assignment Rules .
• Choose  New , and then give the rule a name. Specify whether you want this to be the active rule for leads or cases created manually and via the web and email. Then click  Save .
• To create the rule entries, click  New . For each entry, you can specify:
• Order : Sets the order in which the entry will be processed in the rule, for example, 1, 2, 3. Salesforce evaluates each entry in order and tries to match the criteria of the entry. As soon as a match is found, Salesforce processes the item and stops evaluating the rule entries for that item. If no match is found, the item is reassigned to either the default Web-to-Lead owner, the administrator doing a lead import, or the default case owner.
• Choose criteria are met and select the filter criteria that a record must meet to trigger the rule.For example, set a case filter to Priority equals High if you want case records with the Priority field marked High to trigger the rule. If your organization uses multiple languages, enter filter values in your organization’s default language. You can add up to 25 filter criteria, of up to 255 characters each. When you use picklists to specify filter criteria, the selected values are stored in the organization’s default language. If you edit or clone existing filter criteria, first set the Default Language on the Company Information page to the same language that was used to set the original filter criteria. Otherwise, the filter criteria may not be evaluated as expected.
• Choose formula evaluates to true and enter a formula that returns a value of “True” or “False.” Salesforce triggers the rule if the formula returns “True.” For example, the formula AND(ISCHANGED( Priority ), ISPICKVAL (Priority, “High”) ) triggers a rule that changes the owner of a case when the Priority field is changed to High. If your condition uses a custom field, the rule entry will be deleted automatically if the custom field is deleted.
• User : Specifies the user or queue to which the lead or case will be assigned if it matches the condition. Users specified here cannot be marked “inactive” and they must have “Read” permission on leads or cases.
• Do Not Reassign Owner : Specifies that the current owner on a lead or case will not be reassigned to the lead or case when it is updated.
• Email Template : We can specifies the template to use for the email that is automatically sent to the new owner. If no template is specified, no email will be sent. When assigning a lead or case to a queue, the notification goes to the Queue Email address specified for the queue and all queue members.
• Predefined Case Teams : Specifies the predefined case team(s) to add to a case when it matches the condition. A case team is a group of people that work together to solve cases.
• Replace any existing predefined case teams on the case : Specifies that any existing predefined case teams on the case are replaced with the predefined case teams on the condition, when a case matches the condition.

After creating the entry, click  Save , or  Save & New  to save the entry and create more entries.

Assignment Rule Example

Following is sample Case assignment rule which assigns case to different queues based on Billing Country, Account SLA and customer type:

For more details about assignment rules please refer to assignment rules  official link.

Assignment rules in Salesforce trailhead

Good luck for creating Assignment rules in Salesforce 🙂

• Assignment rules , Assignment rules Salesforce , Case Assignment rules , Lead Assignment Rules , salesforce , sfdc

Ankush Dureja

Permanent link to this article: https://www.sfdcpoint.com/salesforce/assignment-rules-in-salesforce/

Skip to comment form

• Stremove.com on August 2, 2020 at 9:10 am

Case Assignment Rules Determine how cases are assigned to users or put into queues as they are created manually, using Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, On-Demand Email-to-Case, the Self-Service portal, the Customer Portal, Outlook, or Lotus Notes.

• Dayene on August 25, 2020 at 7:01 pm

Hi! What about when I want my assignment to change when the Lead status is changed? I’ve created two criterias. First when the status is new and second when the status has other values. But when the Lead is updated and the status changes the assignment doesn´t follow this change and it does not assignment the Lead Owner correctly. Thanks.

• Vrushabh LEngade on October 27, 2020 at 3:51 pm

Use Escalation Rules and escalate the case to another user or queue

• subhasini on December 23, 2021 at 6:19 pm

Hi Ankush Dureja, there is a interview question on assignment and the question is : What will happen if the user becomes inactive(or user is deactivated) on whom the rule is assigned. Please reply me ASAP

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How to Create Lead Assignment Rules in Salesforce?

In our organization, the Salesforce lead team mostly manually assigns records to a specific user or queue to work on the leads. So, we thought of automating the lead assignment process. So that when a lead is created, it will automatically be assigned to a specific sales representative. In Salesforce, we have a feature that automatically assigns leads to a user using the lead assignment rule.

I will explain the lead assignment rules in Salesforce and how to create a lead assignment rule in Salesforce.

Table of Contents

Lead Assignment Rules in Salesforce

In Salesforce, the lead assignment rules help automate your organization’s lead generation and assign specific sales representatives to leads. The rules can also determine how leads are assigned to users or queues based on information present in the record.

We need to define some criteria based on record information, and we can assign a user or queue to a lead based on those criteria. The lead assignment rule can assign leads when a new lead is created. Then, that lead can be created manually or automatically.

Create a Lead Assignment Rule in Salesforce

For example, there is a team of sales representatives, and we want to automatically assign a specific sales representative to a new lead when it is created, and the Lead Source is a Phone Inquiry. After that, the assigned sales representative can attend to that lead.

We can create a lead assignment rule in Salesforce using the following steps.

1. Log in to your Salesforce account and go to Setup . In the Quick Find box , search for Assignment Rules , then select Lead Assignment Rules .

2.  Then click on the  New  button to create a new rule.

3.  Enter a  Rule Name . Then, activate the rule by clicking the  Activate  button. 

We can create only one active lead assignment rule at a time. So, if you have any activated lead assignment rule, it will get deactivated as you activate the new rule.

Then, click on the  Save  button.

4.  Open the rule by clicking the  Rule Name .

5.  Then click on the  New  button to add rule entry criteria.

6.  As you click the new button, you need to enter the following details:

• Sort Order: Here, you need to provide the number so that this entry can be evaluated at the time.
• Criteria:  As per our scenario, we need to enter  Lead Source = Phone Inquiry . You can define criteria as per your requirements.
• Select User or  Queue :  Here, we need to assign phone inquiry leads to specific user.
• Do Not Reassign Owner: If you checked this checkbox, after assigned the lead to this user, you cannot change owner later.
• Email Template :  We can select an email template so that when a lead is assigned to a user, they will receive an email regarding the same.

Then click on the  Save  button.

We can also select Queue to assign the lead records. For that, you need to select a queue and click the lookup icon to select a queue. Here, I have selected a custom queue that I created.

Proof of Concept:

7.  Now, to check how the lead assignment rule works, navigate to the Leads tab. Then, create a new lead record with the lead source as a phone inquiry and make sure you have checked the checkbox of assign using the active assignment rule. Then click on the save button.

While creating the new record, you can see the lead owner is different, and you will see that after the record gets saved, the lead owner will be another user.

8.  As you save the record, you will see that the lead owner has automatically changed to another user. That means a new user has been assigned to this lead record.

This is how we can create lead assignment rules in Salesforce.

You can also read the  Lead Assignment Rule in Salesforce .

I hope you got an idea about lead assignment rules in Salesforce. In this article, we have seen what a case assignment rule is. We have also seen how to create a lead assignment rule in Salesforce with an example and step-by-step explanation.

You may also like to read:

• Case Assignment Rules in Salesforce
• How to Assign Records to Queue Using Salesforce Flow
• Web-to-Lead in Salesforce
• Email-to-Lead Using Salesforce Flow

I am Bijay Kumar, the founder of SalesforceFAQs.com. Having over 10 years of experience working in salesforce technologies for clients across the world (Canada, Australia, United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, etc.). I am a certified salesforce administrator and expert with experience in developing salesforce applications and projects. My goal is to make it easy for people to learn and use salesforce technologies by providing simple and easy-to-understand solutions. Check out the complete profile on About us .

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Insert Leads with active Assignment Rule through Dataloader

I want to insert 5000 leads using Data Loader, but I'm don't know how to active "Assign using active assignment rule" on insert. Is there a way to this on insert?

• lead-conversion

3 Answers 3

Go to DataLoader Settings and follow the instructions in the screenshot provided below:

Please note, the assignment rule overrides Owner values in your CSV file and works for Leads and Cases .

Within Data Loader Setting option there is an assignment rule ID.

I like to use the free Appexchange tool from WisdomEdge.

https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000003JLXVEA4

It exposes the assignment rules checkbox on Lead and Cases to be available through workflow rules. Just create a workflow rule to fire and check this box on create.

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