How should new leads be routed and assigned, and what should the sales SLA be?
Route on rules you can explain, assign instantly, and write the response SLA into the CRM.
Assign every new lead automatically the moment it arrives, using a rule you can explain in one sentence, and enforce the response SLA with a timer and an escalation inside the CRM rather than in a meeting. Speed is the part of lead handling with the best evidence behind it, and it is almost entirely a configuration decision.
Why speed is the whole game
The research here is unusually clear. In "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Harvard Business Review, March 2011), James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington reported that firms attempting contact within an hour of an inquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried even an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited 24 hours or more.
You cannot hit that with good intentions. It requires assignment to happen instantly and someone to be told immediately, in a channel they actually watch.
Pick a routing model you can explain
- Round robin. Simple, fair, easy to audit. Right for most teams selling one thing. Add availability logic so leads do not queue behind someone on vacation.
- Territory. By state, region or postcode. Good for field sales and regulated industries. Requires clean, normalized location data, so fix that first.
- Product or service line. Right when reps have genuinely different expertise. Depends on capturing which product the lead wants at the form.
- Account based. Existing company always goes to its existing owner. This one should sit on top of whatever else you use.
Combining all four produces a rule nobody can explain and an assignment nobody can predict. Pick one primary model, add the account rule, stop.
Write the SLA into the system
An SLA that lives in a slide deck is a wish. In the CRM it is three objects: a timestamp when the lead was assigned, a target for first contact, and an escalation when the target is missed. Missed means the lead reassigns or a manager gets notified, automatically. No exceptions and no manual review.
Set the target from your actual staffing, not from an article. Five minutes for a team with coverage. Same business day for a small team. An SLA you miss constantly teaches everyone to ignore SLAs.
Make sure they can respond
Fast routing is wasted if the rep cannot act. Click to call in the record, texting for the channels where people actually reply, and mobile notifications. We use and recommend Salesmsg for texting alongside HubSpot rather than native SMS. Here is how the calling and texting options compare, and more on generating the inbound leads in the first place.
Related: What is lead scoring and do you need it? | How do you track leads and conversions from paid campaigns? | What causes a CRM setup to break alignment?