Lead distribution describes the logic and automation that delivers Salesforce records to the right owner at the right time. Interchangeable with the terms “lead assignment” and “lead routing”, there are countless ways that logic is applied (described as “strategies”); to add to the complexity, organizations often need a combination of strategies to be applied with accuracy.
As customer expectations evolve, the demands for highly-targeted record matching and near-immediate response drives up the complexity of requirements.
While it’s front of mind for Salesforce Administrators and managerial stakeholders across the organization, there’s almost always room for improvement. The desire to optimize lead distribution is typically a result of using either of the following:
- Manual methods, causing blockages and rogue assignment.
- Out-of-the-box features, such as Salesforce assignment rules or custom flows, that have been piled high with layers of logic, making it increasingly risky to maintain.
Third-party applications listed on the AppExchange (the marketplace for vetted, Salesforce-compatible applications) empowers organizations to go beyond insufficient assignment methods, and therefore, solve even the most complex record distribution scenarios.
The InVisory team strives to provide “Gartner style” advisory for the AppExchange. Using their proprietary algorithm, InVisory determines a vendor shortlist which is further supplemented with commentary from experts in their respective fields.
All insight is summarized in a “Tower” report, which positions each of the shortlisted vendors either as “Front Runners”, “Contenders”, or “Innovators”.
- Front Runners: The most broadly applicable vendors. In other words, these vendors can cater to a range of use cases (beyond solely lead distribution), and can easily be scaled according to your own Salesforce requirements.
- Contenders: Deliver powerful features while maintaining an intuitive admin experience (fast configuration time), leading to a quicker time-to-value.
- Innovators: Up-and-coming vendors who offer great value. They are heating up the competition while delivering cutting-edge features that can be applied to specific use cases.
Methodology
InVisory has built a proprietary algorithm to analyze data pertaining to market perception, customer reviews, reputation, and business size, among many other factors. Values have been weighted to provide a more accurate app assessment. The pool of vendors from which data was pulled = 315. Selection of the top ten focused on transformational technologies or approaches delivering on future needs.
Salesforce Lead Routing: Definitions
Here are descriptions of the assignment strategies that organizations run using Salesforce:
- Round robin: Focused on a group of possible owners, assign each Lead to an owner until each owner has received a record, then repeat. This ensures equal distribution relative to the number of incoming records.
- Weighted assignment: Either number or percentage based, used for load balancing between owners.
- Territory-based: Considers the Lead and/or owner’s location (territory values) for assignment.
- Shark tank: A queue-based Lead routing model, which allows queue members to take ownership of Leads as they see fit. There’s the risk of duplicating work or ‘crossing the wires’ of communication.
- Skill-based: Route Lead records based on needs, according to the owner’s skillset.
- Account match: When implemented, a Lead to Account matching mechanism will route Lead records to the Account record owner, or use Account field values to determine Lead ownership.
- Reassignment: Move Leads to either different owners or queues, for example, based on inactivity or stages being completed.
- Capacity-based: Account agents’ availability and workload when routing Leads.
- Tiebreakers: If multiple criteria are met, this will determine which owner should take priority when routing Leads.
- Cherry pick: Allows users to decide which Leads they action (and which they don’t) without an automatic, logical way to distribute records.
Front Runners
“Front Runners” are the most broadly applicable vendors. In other words, these vendors can cater to a range of use cases (beyond solely lead distribution), and can easily be scaled according to your own Salesforce requirements.
Distribution Engine
Highlights:
- Set record ownership for any standard or custom object.
- Empower managers to control distribution ‘on the fly’.
- Track your team against SLA targets.
- Salesforce-native application.
Distribution Engine is a strong contender on the market with a comprehensive offering that can fulfill routing and assignment requirements for standard or custom Salesforce objects. This means Distribution Engine can be used to automatically assign Leads, Opportunities, Cases, or various custom objects you have created in your instance.
Key Strengths:
- User Experience: If you are familiar with Salesforce, Distribution Engine will be extremely easy to use, configure, and leverage for your day-to-day tasks. The strength here lies in its visualization and the way all key functionalities are grouped and interlinked for a seamless distribution management.
- Granular control over record distribution: Not only can Distribution Engine support assignment and track SLAs for any standard of custom Salesforce object, but the assignment rules can be controlled easily by both admins and users (such as BDR managers) alike. This way, not only will the criteria always be up to date, but users will also be empowered to properly manage the tool independently.
Managers can visualize which records their team members receive with the use of Distribution Teams and Tags, which can be split by whichever criteria makes sense. This enables control over distribution ‘on the fly’.
The below video shows “My Awesome BDR Team” Distribution Team, which was created for Leads, how users can be assigned, activated or deactivated for this team, and more importantly, how Distributors (assignment rules within Distribution Engine) can be customized.
As seen in the example, not only can assignment mechanisms be chosen out of the box, but any field can be used as criteria for the assignment. The distribution can even be done based on Campaign membership. And the best part? It doesn’t even have to be a Salesforce Admin performing these actions; sales operations or a BDR manager can easily complete these tasks as well.
Track the teams you decide to create based on specific actions and predefined SLAs. Keep in mind that these can change over time, and can also be different for each of the teams.
Setup and Administration:
The setup effort is minimal, however, it does depend on how complex your assignment criteria or team structure is. You can take advantage of the free 30-day trial to test it out in a sandbox – developer edition orgs are not currently supported for the trial.
Kubaru
Highlights:
- Route Leads based on any criteria.
- Send in-app notifications or emails.
- Re-assign unworked/neglected records.
- Salesforce-native application.
Ensure a smooth assignment and reassignment process with Kubaru, to minimize the time your team spends on picking up, actioning, or prioritizing records.
Key Strengths:
- Notifications: What’s enjoyable about Kubaru is the notifications system, and how easily this can be set up. It might seem simple, but notifications are a big part of ensuring workload is actioned in a timely manner, and having both in-app notifications as well as emails out of the box, is definitely handy.
- Account for unworked records: As I’m sure most of us know, sometimes the records assigned to either a person or a queue do not get actioned fast enough for various reasons. Kubaru provides a simple mechanism for these records to be re-assigned.
Kubaru Routers (assignment rules) offer the ability to customize the routing criteria to the most detailed level. Other notable features include the notifications (powered by Salesforce Flow), which can be sent out by selecting a checkbox in the “Settings” tab, as well as the ability to re-assign Leads (or other records) to a certain user or queue in different contexts.
All these can be seen in the short video below. Please note that notifications can be controlled both globally as well as at each router’s level to avoid duplication or spam.
Setup and Administration:
Once again, the time required to set up the rules is dependent on your requirements. To make maintenance easier, Kubaru Territories ensure records get assigned appropriately regardless of how your data model or organization is structured. This flexibility is thanks to the number of custom objects the managed package contains.
The Kubaru trial lasts for 30 days and includes 100 licenses, giving you plenty of time and scope to explore it.
Q-Assign
Highlights:
- Delegate business users’ admin permissions for the tool, allowing them to make routing updates.
- Lead (or Case) custom record distribution within a Salesforce-native application.
- Advanced record owner matching capabilities.
Increase productivity and reduce the time to first response by leveraging Q-Assign groups, while also allowing the possibility of delegating operations users to support with the routing updates needed by the business.
Key Strengths:
- Assignment groups: Representing the groups of users records will be assigned to, these can be easily maintained by business users – hence, removing the Salesforce Admin’s involvement as an intermediary for this simple task.
- Record matching: One special Q-Assign feature is their advanced record matching capabilities, which includes the ability to tackle scenarios where multiple possible record owner matches are found.
The tool itself has great potential. Not only can you properly distribute your Leads, but you can also respect data relationships, for example, the Lead and Account relationship.
Setup and Administration:
The setup is very fast; once the managed package is installed in a Salesforce environment, it’s a matter of minutes before you can have the first Lead assigned. Below is a short overview of the Q-Assign control panel, as well as what an assignment group can contain, including how the matching rules can be leveraged.
The Q-Assign trial lasts for 30 days and includes 50 licenses, giving you plenty of time and scope to explore it.
Contenders
“Contenders” deliver powerful features while maintaining an intuitive admin experience (fast configuration time), leading to a quicker time-to-value. The main differences between “Front Runners” and “Contenders” are the number of features on offer, the robustness of their data models, and their suitability for enterprise organizations.
Super Round Robin
Highlights:
- Ability to handle large data volumes and complex routing scenarios.
- Out-of-the-box analytics.
- Free and paid versions available.
- Salesforce-native application.
With two available versions, Super Round Robin is certainly a great application to try out when combing through your never-ending standard Lead assignment rules.
Key Strengths:
- No volume too large: This tool is suitable, not only for complex scenarios when it comes to Lead assignment, but also really high volumes through their Distribution Algorithms. This combination might present a challenge to be covered only by the standard Salesforce Lead assignment rules, perhaps with a lot of individual rules needed.
- Free version: Super Round Robin provides a free version of their product (which even includes weighted assignment) and also out-of-the-box analytics, readily available for you to check how the assignment process is performing.
Setup and Administration:
The setup of either the free or paid version of this tool is easy, and as expected, will take longer depending on the particulars of your organization’s needs. Also, the trial of the paid version is available for 30 days, allowing you quite a bit of time to get the most out of it.
Lane Four Highroad
Highlights:
- Supports territory-based models.
- Highly accurate Lead-to-Account matching.
- Automatic Lead conversion.
- Salesforce-native application.
As a native Salesforce solution, Lane Four Highroad allows you to overlay complex Lead assignment rules over territory-based models. This means that it can support high volumes as well as multiple teams.
Key Strengths:
- Reduce manual effort: Lane Four Highroad also supports the integration of automatic criteria-based Lead conversion as part of the assignment process. Not only can the conditions be defined, but similar to Salesforce reports, custom logic can also be set to ensure accuracy.
- Contact Roles: While the tool does handle the Account matching as well as the conversion, another useful aspect is the possibility of choosing to create Opportunities and Contact roles.
On top of the points mentioned above, it’s important to note that you can make use of SOQL to identify the correct records if more granular criteria is needed.
Setup and Administration:
While the extra configuration may sound like it requires significant effort, it’s likely that you will find it intuitive, and find your way around the setup easily in just a few minutes. You can take a look at their documentation before getting hands on.
PowerRouter
Highlights:
- Duplicate management for prioritization.
- Lead and Contact criteria-based segmentation.
- Salesforce-native solution.
PowerRouter can support everything routing related, from real-time Lead distribution to duplicate record management, as needed. This solution is also available within both Salesforce Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.
Key Strengths:
- Permission Sets: When deciding who will use PowerRouter (and how), there is actually no need to create permission sets yourself – out of the box, the managed package already includes the admin, manager, and user permission sets, ready to be assigned directly from the PowerRouter page.
- Merge records: Supported for Leads and Contacts, and based on duplicate rules outcome, the merge can be done automatically with a few options to select the behavior of surviving field data.
- SLAs: If the assigned records are outside the predefined SLA, PowerRouter also provides the possibility of having them reassigned to be worked on by another user.
In addition to the above features, PowerRouter reports and dashboards (also included in the managed package) can be used to easily track numbers and performance.
Setup and Administration:
Although there are around 30 custom objects in the managed package, getting started is fairly easy (again, depending on how many rules you require).
There is also enough time to explore the tool during the 14-day trial in either a sandbox or developer org.
Decisions on Demand
Highlights:
- Out-of-the-box routing templates.
- Highly customizable distribution policies.
- Salesforce-native application.
Decisions on Demand is a very easy tool to use, especially as there is comprehensive guidance during the whole setup.
Key Strengths:
- Business Policy: This is the place where the assignment criteria is stored, and it acts like assignment rules which are actually available for all Salesforce objects, not just a few.
- Readily available templates: The most common business policies, such as round robin and other combinations, can be directly implemented by using the template library provided by Decisions on Demand.
As mentioned above, Decisions on Demand aims to give you a streamlined experience, offering plentiful documentation and a step-by-step guide to use while trying out their functionality.
Innovators
Vendors in this section will certainly pique your interest with nice-to-have features for any Lead distribution and routing use case.
Traction Complete Leads
Highlights:
- Salesforce-native application with intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
- Data.com and D&B Optimizer integrations.
- Automatic Lead conversion.
This enterprise-ready platform allows your organization to effortlessly control every single step of your Lead assignment rules. With their very intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Traction Complete Leads is sure to provide a fast return on your investment.
Key Strengths:
- Record matching: Leads can be matched to either standard or (any) custom Salesforce objects from your organization.
- Choose to convert: Traction Complete offers the possibility for Leads to be automatically converted if there is any Account match found, removing the need for custom development.
Not only does the app support a D&B Optimizer integration, but it also allows for different matching scenarios (image below). As mentioned above, you can decide whether Leads should be converted instantly.
Setup and Administration:
It definitely lives up to the expectation of being both easy to install and easy to use, especially for the most common use cases.
RealZips
Highlights:
- Detailed geographical assignment settings.
- Salesforce-native application (Lightning Web Components can be displayed on record pages).
As you may have guessed from the name, RealZips ensures geographic data points can be properly leveraged for Lead Routing, Territory Management, and more.
Key Strengths:
- Location based assignment: Rapidly assign Lead and Account records to users to support specific territory allocation.
- Lightning Web Components: The LWCs will help you take a deep dive into location data once added to the record pages, for either directing prospects to the closest store or scheduling an in-person demo for a tangible product – to just name a couple examples.
Setup and Administration:
The setup time is fairly short considering the amount of data involved. You can also use the RealZips documentation to make sure you’re getting the most out of the 30-day trial.
Round Robin Distributor
Highlights:
- Readily available Lead or Case assignment options.
- Salesforce-native application.
A straightforward native-to-Salesforce application, Round Robin Distributor excels at exactly that – making sure Round Robin Lead (or Case) assignment is on point.
Key Strengths:
- Easy to use: Native to Salesforce and very easy to install and maintain across the org’s round robin use cases.
- Round robin wizard: As the name suggests, this is a tool which will instantly adapt to the existing Queues used for round robin.
Round Robin Distributor has similarities to any other Salesforce setup option, so anyone already accustomed with managing Salesforce will adapt to it in seconds. You can also benefit from a trial to take the tool for a test drive, but billing information is required upon the managed package installation (you won’t, however, be charged until the trial period is over).
Summary
All in all, as the market evolves, so does the complexity of the requirements that need to be implemented.
InVisory’s Tower Report is here to ensure you and your stakeholders are well aware of the best solutions available to support Lead Assignment and Routing in Salesforce. You can then decide between the in-house development option and the third-party application according to your organization’s needs.
To find out more about InVisory, get in touch with the team via their website.