Lead Routing.

As soon as more than one person handles enquiries, a question arises: who takes care of this one? In many small businesses every enquiry lands in a shared inbox and whoever looks first picks it up. That works until two people answer the same enquiry, or everyone assumes someone else already has. Lead routing replaces this lottery with fixed rules. When a lead comes in, its details decide which person, team or queue it is assigned to, and that person is notified straight away.

The common models can be combined. In the territory model, location decides (canton, postcode range, language region). In the service model, what is being asked for decides, for instance new installation versus maintenance. Round robin distributes enquiries in turn so that the workload stays even. In the account model, the person who already looks after a client receives their new enquiry, which requires a CRM with a clean client history. On top come rules for absences, office hours and a fallback if nobody responds within a set time.

Lead routing should be distinguished from lead scoring. Scoring rates how promising an enquiry is; routing decides who gets it. In practice the two interlock: a high-scoring enquiry can go straight to an experienced colleague, a low-scoring one first into an automated sequence, see marketing automation. Classifying a contact as an MQL is also a frequent trigger for a routing rule.

Technically, routing needs three things: structured data from the form (location, service and language as separate fields rather than free text), a place where the rules run (CRM, automation tool or custom software) and a notification channel that people actually read, such as a push notification, an email or a task in the CRM. A webhook often connects the form to the CRM. Whoever builds the rules should write them down and check regularly whether enquiries fall through a gap, for example when a location belongs to no territory. The aim is a short response time, see speed to lead.