Lead routing

Who gets which lead, and how to stop one rep eating the whole board.

Round robin

New leads are handed out in turn across your active reps. Simple, fair, and it does not need supervising.

Round robin is the right default for most teams. Anything cleverer needs a reason.

Handing a whole list to your reps

Round robin works on leads as they arrive. A list you just imported is a different problem: two thousand leads sitting in one place that need to be in four people's hands this morning.

Open Leads, find the list, and choose Distribute. It is also on the panel that appears straight after an import.

Two ways to split it:

• Round robin across the reps you pick, one lead each in turn until the list is empty
• All to one rep, when a list belongs to a single person

Worth knowing before you use it:

• Owners and managers only. A rep does not see the action, and the server refuses it even if the request is made another way.
• You can distribute lists you hold, which in practice means imports you ran yourself.
• Every rep you pick must be an active member of your organization. If one of them is not, the whole distribution is refused rather than quietly dropping their share. You would otherwise believe a quarter of the list went somewhere it did not.
• A distributed lead moves into that rep's book. It becomes theirs for dialing, for follow-up, and for speed to lead, not just a label.
• Anything on the list that does not belong to your organization is left alone and reported as skipped. The count you get back is what actually moved.

Distributing the same list a second time reassigns every lead on it again, so do it once and move individuals by hand after that.

Ownership

Once a lead is assigned, it stays assigned. That matters more than it sounds: a lead who spoke to Maria on Tuesday and gets called by Dave on Thursday has learned your team does not talk to each other, and that costs you the deal.

If you reassign, reassign deliberately and tell both reps.

Booking against the right calendar

This is the part that breaks quietly.

Each rep's appointments are booked against their own availability and calendar. A rep who never connected theirs is invisible to the booking engine, so it books them on top of whatever they already had.

Check every rep has connected a calendar before they receive leads. It looks like a scheduling bug and it is an onboarding gap. See Invite your team.

Choosing a scheme

Round robin when your reps are interchangeable. Most teams.

Round robin, weighted when someone is part time or newer. Give them fewer.

By territory or vertical when reps genuinely specialize and a mismatch wastes the lead.

Manual only if you actually assign them the same day. A queue nobody assigns is worse than any automatic scheme, because leads age while you decide. See Speed to lead for why hours matter.

When it looks wrong

One rep has everything. The others are inactive, or their availability is empty so nothing can be booked for them.

A lead was called twice by two people. They exist twice. Merge them in Leads.

Nobody is getting leads. Nothing is arriving. Check Bring in your leads before suspecting routing.

Bookings land on the wrong rep's calendar. Two reps connected the same Google account, or one connected a shared calendar.

More in Troubleshooting.