Definition
Also written: lead assignment, lead distribution
Lead routing is the logic that decides which person or team receives an inbound lead, based on territory, product, company size, source or availability. It runs automatically in most CRMs, and the rules tend to outlive the organisational structure that justified them.
Routing failures are quiet by nature. A lead assigned to a departed rep, or to a queue nobody monitors, produces no error — it simply ages.
An unassigned-and-unworked alert after a defined interval catches more lost revenue than most optimisation work.
The usual error
Where this goes wrong in practice
Round-robin assignment without an availability check. Leads land with people on holiday and sit until they return.
Related terms
Speed to lead
Speed to lead is the elapsed time between an inbound enquiry arriving and a human making genuine contact. It is one of the few operational metrics where the direction of the effect is not seriously disputed — contact rates fall sharply as the interval grows.
DefinitionRevenue operations (RevOps)
Revenue operations is the function that aligns marketing, sales and customer success around one set of definitions, one data model and one measurement system. Its work is mostly at the seams — handoffs, routing rules, stage definitions, field hygiene and reporting that all three teams accept.
DefinitionLead scoring
Lead scoring assigns a numeric value to a lead based on fit attributes (industry, size, role) and behaviour (pages viewed, emails opened, forms submitted), to prioritise follow-up. Its accuracy depends entirely on whether the model was built from outcomes rather than assumptions.
DefinitionPipeline velocity
Pipeline velocity estimates how quickly revenue moves through a sales process, combining the number of qualified opportunities, average deal value, win rate and average cycle length into a single rate-of-revenue figure.
Definition