Many companies do. If so, what defines your boundaries? How granular do your territories get? Do you split up Canada by language, region, state, or city? Are US territories considered the same as US states? If so, is Puerto Rico a US territory or part of LATAM? Do you route leads from Israel to EMEA, the middle east, Asia, or is Israel its own territory? And what about New York City? Do you consider it a region, a city, or just part of a bigger state?
When you're executing on an ABM strategy, each sales rep has their own unique accounts. In today's culture of remote work, an account contact may not be in the same geographical region as the headquarters. That means you'll run into issues if you're routing leads based only on geography without considering the routing criteria of key accounts. In other words, because your contact might live in a different region than the location of the company HQ, you're sending the lead to the wrong place.
Existing opportunities can also complicate things. For example, if you route an incoming lead to an SDR to qualify a new lead from an account that's already in your system and flagged as an opportunity, then you're introducing a new record into your CRM. Normally, that lead would route to the SDR who may or may not find the corresponding account-with-opportunity. The rep could easily re-route it to Field Sales—where it may not belong. As your lead-cooling clock is ticking, you're losing valuable time—especially if all that routing happens manually. Ideally, your routing logic and rules should be able to recognize that the lead matches an account with an existing opportunity—and route it immediately to the sales rep assigned to that opportunity.
Are you lead routing by company size?
A lot of companies' sales teams are grouped by company size, and route this way—sometimes while also routing by geography. But company-size lead routing still leaves you with some fundamental questions—like, what's the criteria for determining the company's size? For example, you could look at total company, number of divisions, or annual revenue. Depending on which way you look at it, a large account can turn into a small one—and vice-versa—fast. Whatever criteria you choose, make sure that field is populated or enriched with accurate information to ensure proper routing.
No more "return to sender"
Going back to our Amazon analogy for a moment, how quickly do you think a package addressed to someone at IBM would reach the intended recipient if the box was missing a physical address? Of course, it might get there eventually, but not without a lot of manual intervention. The same is true of lead routing by account. On the surface, this method seems simple: send the lead to the rep who owns the account. But wait.
- What if the lead's address is IBM, but your CRM lists the same company as International Business Machines?
- How do you route a lead if the email address is different from the corporate domain?
- Will a lead land in the right place if they work for a subsidiary of a more prominent company? For example, if the lead is an IT Manager for Olive Garden restaurants, will your system find that lead as a duplicate under Darden Restaurants?
A lead routing tale of hunters and farmers
A vital piece of information necessary for proper sales routing is whether the incoming lead is a prospect or an existing customer. For example, someone may fill out a "contact us" form, unaware that someone else in their company was already working with you. Since you almost always engage with customers differently from the way you'd work with prospects, your lead routing system must be able to discern a customer from a prospect. Typically, customer account managers (farmers) work with existing customers to grow the account and ensure the relationships also thrive. Meanwhile, account executives (hunters) work with prospects and seek out new ones.
Naturally, processing these leads manually in any reasonable amount of time is impossible. (Remember—that lead is getting colder by the minute.) But if you're working with automated leads using a RevOps automation platform, and you're keeping your database clean, the system will find existing customers—even if the new inquiry is from a different person, department, or even physical location. That way, you can be assured that farmers and hunters aren't getting each other's leads, or worse, the lead isn't being called by both.
The name on the box: where does each lead land?
Every company has different ways of distributing leads once they've been sorted and routed. Trying to be equitable, companies rely on many other final-routing methods, including:
- Round-robin: companies distribute leads sequentially among reps—think of it as dealing cards.
- Load balancing: sales reps receive leads based on their current workload. For example, a new sales rep might get the majority of new leads to build up that person's pipeline, and a representative working on 100 deals might not see any new ones for a while.
- Shark tank: first come, first served. The first rep to jump on an opportunity gets the lead. Every coffee or restroom break could be costly.
Some organizations go further, creating routing logic based on product interest and job role to match leads with the rep best positioned to close them. Great Place to Work did exactly this: by building a second sales team, a subset of the first, and using Openprise to infer job roles from job titles, they were able to route leads by product interest level. The result was a 10% increase in close rates and 38% more wins. The logic was simple in principle; the execution required clean data and flexible routing rules that could be updated without IT involvement.
Whichever method your company chooses to get the lead to the right rep, thoughtful lead routing before that final step is crucial. As you can see, successful sales can never be arbitrary. Work behind the scenes to design the process that works best for you, then automate your lead routing process so it happens lightning fast. Using your CRM and a RevOps automation platform removes the roadblocks complex routing rules can cause and lets you act nimbly as processes and people change. Automated lead routing can improve conversions, sales team performance and make your team members happier. No postage required.
UPDATE 3 — Modern routing platforms + Netskope example
How modern lead routing platforms handle complexity
The routing logic described above — by geography, company size, account ownership, and prospect vs. customer status — was already difficult to manage in spreadsheets and native CRM rules. Today's teams layer additional signals on top: lead score, product interest, partner involvement, and upsell potential. Managing all of that manually, at scale, is not realistic.
That's why RevOps teams increasingly rely on dedicated lead routing platforms that separate routing logic from the CRM itself. A purpose-built platform lets ops teams update territory rules on the fly, test changes in a staging environment before going live, and route based on any combination of criteria — without writing code or waiting on IT.
Netskope, the cloud security company, ran into this challenge as the business scaled. Marketing operations director Josh Ren needed to build routing logic that could keep pace with a fast-moving sales organization. By moving lead routing into Openprise, the team was able to define routing rules by account owner, extend the same logic to contacts (not just leads), and maintain accuracy even as territory assignments shifted. As Ren put it: "When I joined Netskope, my first task was to scale lead routing. And I thought, 'Do I try to scale our existing system, or do I dive into Openprise?' It was a no-brainer."
The underlying principle — clean data in, accurate routing out — holds whether you're running a dozen rules or a thousand. The sophistication of your routing is only as good as the data behind it.
Now that you understand a bit more about how lead routing works, explore the next steps. What technology do you need? How will it scale with your organization? What's the best way to ensure a stress-free implementation?
Download the Openprise survival guide to comprehensive lead routing for a deeper dive into all these topics, and get a framework and set of best practices to get started.
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