Lead routing rules for a small team: round robin, region or product

Picture two enquiries arriving on a Tuesday morning. One is from a house in Edappally, the other from a poultry farm near Thrissur. The person who would suit the farm is on a site visit with their phone in a bag, and the person holding Edappally already has six open calls. Who answers each? If the answer depends on who happens to look at the inbox first, you do not have a routing rule yet. For a team of three to eight, pick the rule that matches what makes your enquiries different. Use round robin when they are alike, region when buyers differ by place, and product when they differ by what they want. Then name a cover for each person, or the rule fails the first time somebody takes leave.

Ask what differed in your last thirty enquiries

Take thirty enquiries and, for each, ask whether the person who handled it needed to know something specific to do it well. If anyone could have quoted it the same way, the enquiries are alike and round robin suits. If not, find the specific thing: the town, the product or the customer's history. Write that down before you open any software, because the rule follows from the answer, and a person who starts from the tool ends up with whatever the tool offers.

The three rules and where each one breaks

Round robin sends each new enquiry to the next person in a fixed order. Nobody is favoured and nothing waits for a volunteer. It ignores skill and size, though. A newcomer gets a large account as easily as a small one, and a person out on a visit gets an enquiry they cannot touch for hours. It suits alike enquiries and a team in one room.

Region gives each person a set of towns. They know the roads, the dealers and the language. But regions may not hold equal volume: one person drowns while another idles, and an uncovered region goes silent on leave. It suits trades where travel is part of the sale.

Product gives each person a line. Replies are better because the person understands the item. A buyer who wants two products gets two callers, and notices. It suits trades where the product takes months to learn.

Put the rules in an order

Real enquiries match more than one rule, so give the rules a sequence and write it out. A plain version:

1. An existing customer goes to whoever handled the last order.
2. An enquiry above the size you set goes to the sales head or owner.
3. A product that has a specialist goes to that specialist.
4. Everything else goes by region.
5. Anything with no region goes round robin.

Five lines is already a lot. Each must be checkable from the enquiry alone. Define "above the size you set" in your own rupees or quantity; a vague line such as "big enquiries" lets guesswork in, and guessing is where favouritism starts to look like policy.

Leave cover and the clock

This is where routing breaks. Name one cover person for each owner. A pool of "whoever is free" ends with everybody assuming somebody else will pick it up. For a leave of a day or more, the sales head moves the person's open leads to their cover with a one-line note on each, and the cover hands them back on return. Ask the person leaving to add a line to every deal with a promise attached, such as a call on Thursday or a quote due.

Add a clock. If an enquiry has had no first reply by the time you set, it passes to the next person automatically. Without one, a lead assigned to someone in a meeting sits until they remember it. Keep the clock short enough to matter and tell the team what it is.

A solar installer across Kochi, Thrissur and Alappuzha

Here is an invented example. A rooftop solar installer with four salespeople serving Kochi, Thrissur and Alappuzha. They routed by region, one person each, and the fourth took the commercial customers: poultry farms, small factories and apartment blocks.

The weakness showed within a month. Edappally and the nearby neighbourhoods produced the most enquiries, so the Kochi person spent the days answering home queries. A farm's enquiry that mattered more landed with the same person, because it came from that region, and it waited three days. The commercial specialist, best at large quotes, had a thin month. When the Kochi person fell ill, the whole region went unanswered for two days.

They bought nothing new. They changed the order. Any enquiry above a stated sanctioned load went to the commercial person whatever the region. Household enquiries from Kochi and Alappuzha went round robin between those two regional salespeople, and Thrissur stayed with its own person. Each person got a named cover. The commercial specialist disliked giving up a clean territory, since the enquiries now came from three districts, and some weeks a household enquiry still waited a day for pickup. The lists of open enquiries evened out, though, and the farm quote went out the same week.

When not to route by rule

With fewer than about five enquiries a week, routing adds a layer for no reason. One person, the owner or the sales head, should see them all and hand each out by hand with a note. Rules start to pay when two people could reasonably take the same enquiry and neither does.

Be careful with routing by availability too, if records are thin. "Whoever is free" assumes you know who is free, and in a small office often nobody does.

The note on automating lead assignment and follow-up covers the software side once your rules are written. The rest of our sales work sits under sales.

Test the five lines on thirty past enquiries

Write your five lines, name a cover for each person, and run the list over your last thirty enquiries to see where it breaks. Lead routing and assignment is the service that writes and tests the rules with you, and tell us what you need is how that starts.