Lead assignment
Deciding who owns a new opportunity, by rotation, by skill, by source or by who handled the customer before.
Use this definition in team training or when clarifying a sales note.
Definition
Lead assignment, also called lead routing or lead distribution, answers one question: whose name is on this customer. Teams do it by round robin, by source, by product knowledge, by language, or by returning the customer to whoever spoke with them last. Most use some combination, with a manager overriding it when the rotation would hand a serious buyer to someone who just started.
The rule matters less than the follow-through. Every assignment needs a time by which the first contact has happened and a person who notices when it did not, or it becomes an unworked lead with somebody’s name attached.
Why it matters
Fairness drives most assignment rules and results drive none of them. It is worth knowing whether your best closer gets the same share of serious opportunities as your newest hire, and whether leads assigned late at night get worked at all. Reassignment should be normal and quick, because a lead sitting untouched belongs to the company, not to the rep it landed on.