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By Stacy O’Leary

I confess: I love Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules almost as much as I love the Approval Process . A good set of Lead Assignment Rules will buy you endless friends in both sales and marketing, and will make your incoming data sparkle and look perfect (even if it is not!) In this guide, I’ll be talking about the initial Lead sort, upon creation.

Salesforce Lead Assignment Rule Example

• Criteria #1: If State = California, assign to Stacy
• Criteria #2: If Country = United Kingdom, assign to Ben
• Criteria #3: If Country = France, assign to Lucy
• Criteria #4: If Annual Revenue is greater than $500,000,000 USD, assign to “High Roller Queue”

Planning Lead Assignment Rules

Discovery: questions to ask.

• Where are the new Leads coming from? Marketo? HubSpot? Other integrated systems? Web forms? Are there any examples you look at? Make friends with the people who run these systems, you need to have a good relationship because you’re going to need their help.
• What fields are populated on these newly created Leads? What fields are required? If it’s minimal, can you get more information? Generally, the more information you have, the easier it is to sort.
• What if a Lead comes in from one of your Partners? What if a Lead comes in from one of your competitors? From one of your employees? Are there any kinds of Leads that should never be distributed out to your team, like students or media inquiries? (Remember – ANYONE with access to the internet can fill out your form! They do not have to be a legitimate prospect!)
• Who is covering what territories? Do you have any territories that don’t have a sales rep yet? Do all new Leads have enough data to determine territories?
• What about the Leads that don’t meet any criteria at all? Where will they go? Who will work them?

Refining the requirements

• Our new Leads, almost always, come from Marketo . They could come from a Marketo form, or a list imported from a trade show, but Marketo is the system that pushes them to Salesforce. If a person creates their own Lead, we do not want to take it away from them.
• We always have: first name, last name, lead source, email, company, state and country. We sometimes have # of Employees, but that’s pretty much all we know about them at the moment of creation.
• Any Lead that comes in from a Partner should be directed to our channel team. We don’t want to market to competitors, employees, or students.
• We have a territory plan defined by Sales, and we’d also like to separate prospects for the UK and France, though we do not have a sales rep for those areas yet.
• If something comes in that we cannot otherwise sort, let’s put it in a holding place and let marketing send out generic nurture emails. If a person in this holding place takes interest, we can always give it to the sales team later.

• Partners (any Lead that comes in from a Partner company)
• Disqualified (any Lead that comes in from a competitor, is an employee, or is a student)
• UK + France (any Lead where Country = United Kingdom, or France)
• Unsorted (any Lead that does not meet any criteria)

Creating Lead Assignment Criteria

Leads that shouldn’t be distributed, next criteria.

The Final Empty Criteria

Activate the Lead Assignment Rules

• Leads can only be sorted by a field value at the moment it was sorted.
• The Lead Router does not auto-convert Leads to Contacts
• You cannot deactivate a User license if that person is part of the Lead Assignment Rules (even if the Lead Assignment Rules have been deactivated.)
• Create a report for yourself, for that last criteria – Leads that are unsorted. This way you can review them periodically and see if there’s enough volume to justify sorting them in a certain way.

Stacy O'Leary

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Guide to lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Use SFDC lead assignment rules to get more done, create a better experience, and close deals faster.

Rachel Burns Jul 24, 2023

15 min read

Table of contents

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What are Salesforce lead assignment rules?

What if your sales team could spend their valuable time connecting with prospects and closing deals — instead of losing time doing admin work like assigning and organizing leads?

When you automate lead assignment and routing, your sales team can:

Boost sales team productivity and efficiency

Prevent high-quality leads from slipping through the cracks

Create a better experience for potential customers

Speed up your entire sales pipeline to close more deals, faster

In this blog post, we'll discuss the ins and outs of Salesforce lead assignment. We'll cover the benefits, how to plan your lead assignment strategy, and a step-by-step walkthrough of adding lead assignment rules in Salesforce. We'll also explore the power of scheduling automation to simplify and speed up lead assignment, routing, and qualification.

Key takeaways:

Lead assignment rules help sales teams boost productivity, respond to leads faster, and make better data-driven decisions. 

Matching leads with the right sales reps and teams creates a better customer experience by responding to leads faster and giving them personalized attention.

Before you set up your lead assignment rules, work with your sales, marketing, and RevOps teams to understand your lead generation processes and sales team structure.

Within Salesforce lead management settings, rule entries are the individual criteria and actions. A “lead assignment rule” refers to a set of rule entries. 

Automating lead routing , qualification, and booking with Calendly helps your team be more efficient and organized while creating a better experience for prospective customers.

6 benefits of creating lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Why should your team take the time to set up lead assignment rules in Salesforce? Here are six great reasons:

Ensure leads are assigned to the right reps and teams: Lead assignment rules mean each incoming lead is directed to the salesperson or team who has the relevant expertise and skills to engage and convert that lead. Automated lead assignment also prevents leads from falling through the cracks by making sure each lead is assigned to a rep or team, rather than relying on manual assignment.

Respond to leads faster: With lead assignment rules, leads are automatically assigned to the right salesperson, reducing response time and increasing the chances of converting leads into customers .

Boost sales team productivity: Automating lead assignment reduces manual work for RevOps teams and sales managers. Lead assignment rules also help identify and prioritize leads more likely to convert, saving time and resources that would otherwise be wasted on pursuing poor-fit leads. These time savings let sales teams focus on nurturing leads and closing deals.

Create a better customer experience: Leads can be assigned to sales reps who have relevant industry or product expertise, understand their unique needs, and can provide personalized solutions. This tailored approach creates a better experience for leads, which results in more conversions and higher customer satisfaction.

Improve sales forecasting: With well-defined lead assignment rules, you can gather more accurate data on lead distribution and conversion rates. This data can be used for sales forecasting, data driven decision-making, and resource allocation.

How to create lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Step 1: build your lead assignment strategy.

Before you go into your Salesforce instance and set up lead assignment rules, you need to figure out what exactly those rules will be. The options are limitless — where should you start?

It’s time to bring RevOps, sales, and marketing together to answer some questions:

Lead sources: Where do leads come from? Do we use marketing forms through Salesforce web-to-lead forms or a third-party integration? Are we importing leads via the data import wizard?

Sales team structure: How is the sales team structured? Are different teams or individuals specialized in specific products, industries, use cases, or regions?  

Lead data: What info do we request from new leads? Which standard and custom fields do we require?

Sales territories: How are sales territories defined? Are there specific regions, countries, or territories we should take into account for lead assignment?

Integrations : Do we have any third-party integrations with lead assignment or distribution features? Are we using those features?

Special circumstances: Are there any priority levels or tiers for leads that require special attention? For example, do we have a designated rep or queue for leads with complex needs and use cases?

Poor fits: What should we do with leads who don’t meet any of our criteria?

It’s a lot of information to gather and organize, but it’s important to learn as much as possible up front to cover every scenario and equip your sales team with accurate data. Putting this time and effort in now will pay off tenfold in productivity once your lead rules are in place!

Step 2: Set up lead assignment rules in Salesforce

You’re almost ready to enter your lead assignment rules in SFDC . First, let’s go over some terminology. We’ve been talking about lead assignment rules as individual directives: “If the lead matches X, then do Y.” Within Salesforce lead management settings, a “lead assignment rule” refers to a set of rule entries. Rule entries are the individual criteria and actions (“If X, then do Y”). An assignment rule can consist of up to 3,000 rule entries, and you can only have one active assignment rule at a time.

For example, a rule entry can assign all leads interested in a particular product to a queue of reps who are experts on that product. In Salesforce, a lead queue is essentially a bucket for unassigned leads, and you can choose which sales reps can pull leads from each queue.

Another rule entry can assign all leads from companies with over 5,000 employees to your top enterprise sales rep.

To create a lead assignment rule in Salesforce: 

From Setup, enter “Assignment Rules” in the Quick Find box, then select Lead Assignment Rules.

Enter the rule name. (Example: 2023 Standard Lead Rules)

Select “Set this as the active lead assignment rule” to activate the rule immediately.

Click Save.

Click the name of the rule you just created.

Click New in the Rule Entries section.

Enter an order number that tells Salesforce when to run this rule entry in relation to other rule entries. For example, if you want this to be the first criteria Salesforce looks at when assigning a lead, enter number one.

Select the rule criteria. What attributes must the lead have before Salesforce applies the rule entry? You can use any standard or custom field in the lead record for your criteria. For example, you want to assign leads to your U.S.-based enterprise sales team, so the company size field must be equal to or greater than 5,000 and the country field must equal the United States. You can include up to 25 filter criteria.

Choose the user or queue to be the assignee if the lead meets the criteria. For example, assign to the U.S.-based enterprise sales team queue.

Optional: Choose an email template to use when notifying the new lead owner. After you set up your lead rules, you can also use Salesforce Flow automations to notify lead owners via other channels. For example, at Calendly, we integrate Salesforce with Slack, and a workflow automatically notifies sales reps via Slack when a lead is assigned to them.

Salesforce goes through the rule entries in order until it finds one that matches the lead's info, then routes the lead accordingly. 

Let's say you have small business, mid-market, and enterprise sales team queues. Your first three rule entries would match company size to each of those three queues. If they don't have a company size listed, or the company size doesn't match any of the values in your rule entries, Salesforce will move on to the industry rule entries.

To make sure no leads fall through the cracks, you also need to set a default lead owner. If the assignment rules fail to locate an owner, or you don’t set up assignment rules, web-generated leads are assigned to the default lead owner.

To select a default lead owner:

From Setup, enter “Lead Settings” in the Quick Find box, then select Lead Settings and click Edit.

Define the Default Lead Owner. The Default Lead Owner can be a specific user or a queue.

Save your settings.

Salesforce lead assignment rule examples

As we mentioned earlier, your rule entries can include up to 25 filter criteria.

Simple rules include just one filter criteria:

By country or state/province: Route leads from specific states or countries to sales representatives who understand the regional market. You need this rule if your team uses sales territories to divide leads. For example, if the state/province equals Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, or Washington, assign the lead to the West Coast queue.

By language: Assign leads to sales reps who speak the same language.

By industry: Assign leads from different industries to salespeople who have experience working with those industries.

By company size: Assign leads based on the size of the company, assigning larger companies to a dedicated enterprise sales team.

Complex rules use two or more filter criteria. For example, you could route leads from specific states or provinces to salespeople based on their sales territory and the company size. If you have a particular rep (Bob) working enterprise leads on the West Coast, your filter criteria could say: If the state/province equals Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, or Washington, and the company size equals greater than 5,000, assign the lead to Bob.

These are just a few examples. Lead assignment rules can be customized to fit your team’s and customers’ needs. Review your strategy to choose the right combination of criteria for your sales processes, products, and customers.

What does the built-in Salesforce lead process look like in action?

A website visitor named Nora fills out a contact form to learn more about your product. She shares her name, email address, company name (Acme Inc.), and company size. You use Salesforce’s built-in web-to-lead forms , so Nora’s form submission automatically creates a lead record.

Your team has set up lead assignment rules that assign leads to sales queues based on their company size. Acme Inc. has 5,000 employees, so Nora is automatically assigned to the enterprise sales team queue.

Enterprise sales team queue members receive an email notification that a new lead has been added to the queue. Taylor, an enterprise sales rep in Acme Inc.’s territory, assigns Nora’s lead record to themself.

Taylor emails Nora to set up a qualification call.

Nora, who has been waiting to hear back from your team, agrees to meet with Taylor. After some email back-and-forth, they find a time that works.

What are the limitations of Salesforce’s built-in lead assignment rules?

Salesforce’s built-in lead assignment rules are a great place to start, but there are a few critical limitations, especially for enterprise sales teams:

Single level of evaluation: Salesforce assignment rules operate based on a single level of evaluation, meaning that once a rule matches the criteria and assigns a lead, the evaluation process stops. Your team might miss out on important info, like a complex use case or unique industry, when matching the lead with a rep.

No built-in round robin distribution: Round robin lead distribution is the process of assigning leads to reps based on factors like team member availability or equal distribution for a balanced workload. Salesforce lead assignment rules don't include an easy way to set up round robin distribution — you need an additional tool like Pardot, one of the round robin apps on AppExchange , complex Apex code , or a third-party lead routing platform .

No lead escalation settings: Lead escalation is the process of flagging a lead to higher levels of management or specialized teams for further assistance or action. This process comes into play when a lead requires additional attention or intervention beyond the assigned salesperson or team's capabilities. Unfortunately, Salesforce doesn’t have built-in settings for lead escalation rules. If your customer success team uses Service Cloud, you can set up escalation rules for customer support case escalations, but this feature isn’t included in Sales Cloud.

High maintenance for large organizations: Managing and maintaining a comprehensive set of assignment rules can become challenging and time-consuming in large organizations with complex sales structures and multiple teams or regions. Sure, you can include up to 3,000 rule entries in a single lead assignment rule, but that’s a lot to set up and keep up to date — especially if you’re trying to save your team time, not add to their workload.

Built-in Salesforce lead assignment rules and automations are a solid starting point, but what about automating lead qualification and booking? If you use Salesforce on its own, your reps might still spend a ton of time on lead reassignment to balance their workload, manual lead qualification, and email back-and-forths to schedule sales calls.

That’s where Calendly comes in.

How to automate lead assignment, qualification, and booking with Calendly

Your scheduling automation platform can be an excellent lead generation, qualification, and routing tool — especially when it integrates with Salesforce. Calendly’s Salesforce integration helps your team be more efficient and organized while creating a better experience for prospective customers.

When a lead books a meeting via a sales rep or team’s Calendly booking page, Salesforce automatically creates a new lead, contact, or opportunity. If the lead already exists in your Salesforce instance, the event is added to the lead’s existing record, so you don’t end up with duplicate lead records or time-consuming manual reassignment.

What if you don’t want to let just anyone book a meeting with your team? When you add Calendly Routing to your marketing forms, you can show scheduling pages only to leads who meet your qualifications, like prospects from specific industries or companies of a certain size. That way, your busy team can spend time on the most valuable deals.

Calendly Routing works with HubSpot , Marketo , Pardot , and Calendly forms and is built for your Salesforce CRM. You can use any form field (email, domain, company name) in any Salesforce standard object to match visitors with their account owner. Account lookups let you send known leads or customers from your website form directly to their account owner’s booking page, without needing to manually reassign leads to the right rep.

Remember the lead assignment example we walked through earlier featuring Nora from Acme Inc.? Here's what that process looks like when you add Calendly:

Nora fills out your “contact sales” form, which is already built in HubSpot, connected to Calendly Routing , and enriched with Clearbit .

She enters her email address in the form, and Clearbit fills in the company name, size, and industry. This shortens the form, so Nora only has to input her name and job title.

Calendly checks to see if Acme Inc. has an account in your Salesforce instance. They don’t, so the next step is lead qualification .

Based on Nora’s information — company size, industry, job title — she’s a highly qualified lead, so she’s automatically routed to the booking page for your enterprise sales team.

Nora is happy about that, and immediately books a meeting time that works for her, with the exact team she needs to talk to.

On the backend, Calendly’s Round Robin meeting distribution is set to optimize for availability, so it assigns the meeting to the first available sales rep — in this case, Taylor. This automation helps your team respond to meeting requests faster, hold initial sales calls sooner, and balance the workload across reps.

Calendly creates a lead record in Salesforce with the info Nora entered into your website form (including the data from Clearbit) and an activity log of any meetings she books with your team via Calendly. Salesforce automatically makes Taylor the lead owner.

If you were relying on Salesforce’s built-in lead assignment rules, Nora’s lead record would have gone to an enterprise sales queue, and she would have had to wait for a rep to pick up the lead and reach out to her to book a meeting.

“ A good tool is one that’s so simple, sales reps can basically forget about it and let the meetings roll in. That’s essentially what happened when we implemented Calendly. ”

Sales Enablement Manager at SignPost

What happens if a lead doesn’t qualify for a meeting? Instead of sending them to a booking page, you can display a custom message with next steps, ask them for more information, or redirect them to a specific URL, like a piece of gated content or a webinar signup page.

Automating lead assignment with Calendly Routing has been a game changer for RCReports , a compensation analysis solution for accountants and business valuators. Before connecting Calendly Routing with their Salesforce instance, RCReports’ AEs spent at least five hours a month reassigning leads booked on the wrong calendar. This created a disjointed customer experience and frustration for the sales and marketing teams.

“ Now that we’ve implemented Calendly’s routing feature with Salesforce integration, demos are always booked with the correct AE, reducing friction for both our team and the customer. ”

Abbie Deaver

Director of Marketing at RCReports

Users on Calendly’s Teams plan and above can connect Calendly to Salesforce. The full suite of Salesforce routing features , including routing by Salesforce ownership, is available on Calendly’s Enterprise plan.

To learn more about Calendly Routing, get in touch with our sales team .

Spend less time on manual lead assignment and more time closing deals

When you automate Salesforce lead assignment and routing, high-value leads stop slipping through the cracks, the workload is balanced across the team, leads are matched with the sales reps best equipped to help them, and team members have more time to focus on connecting with prospects and closing deals. 

The results? A more productive team, faster sales cycle, higher conversion rates, and better customer experience.

Webinar: How Calendly Uses Calendly to Close More Deals

Rachel Burns

Rachel is a Content Marketing Manager at Calendly. When she’s not writing, you can find her rescuing dogs, baking something, or extolling the virtue of the Oxford comma.

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Leandata showcases power of modern revenue orchestration at opsstars 2022, leandata announces winners of the 2022 opsstars awards, what are lead assignment rules in salesforce.

Lead assignment rules are a powerful feature within Salesforce to assist your team’s automation of its lead generation and customer support processes. Assignment rules in Salesforce are used to define to whom your Leads and Cases (customer questions, issues or feedback) are assigned based on any one of a number of specified criteria you determine. 

Organizations typically develop lead assignment rules for their GTM processes or flows:

• Rules for inbound Leads
• Rules for website-generated Leads
• Rules for importing Leads from an event

For case assignments, a company might establish one case assignment rule for weekdays and another assignment rule for weekends and holidays. 

A lead or case assignment rule often consists of multiple rule entries to specify exactly how leads and cases are assigned throughout your go-to-market teams. For example, related to customer service inquiries, a standard case assignment rule might have multiple entries. Cases with “Type equals Gold” are assigned to the Gold Level service queue, cases with “Type equals Silver” are assigned to the Silver Level service” queue, and so on. 

As organizations grow and scale, they operationalize multiple GTM motions: inbound, outbound, account-based, upsell/cross-sell, and hybrid. However, many are limited to having just one rule in Salesforce.

As a work-around, many organizations create one massive lead assignment ruleset. They then wedge all of their rule entries into that one big ruleset, regardless of how many different motions that represents. Over time, Salesforce lead assignment rules can quickly become unmanageable .

This post covers the best practices for Salesforce lead and case assignment rules. The ultimate goal is to fully engaging your hard-won leads and speed up your organization’s time-to-revenue.

How to Define Assignment Rules

Your Salesforce administrator can only have one rule in effect at any particular moment in your go-to-market motions, and that assignment rule is intended to both automate lead generation processes and other customer-facing processes routed through your CRM. 

Lead assignment rules specify how leads are assigned to users or queues as they are created manually, captured from your website, or imported via SFDC’s Data Import Wizard.

Case assignment rules determine how cases are assigned to users or put into queues as they are created, either manually or through the use of Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, On-Demand Email-to-Case, the Self-Service portal, the Customer Portal, Outlook, or other data generation applications.

Criteria for Lead Assignment Rules

Okay, so you’ve decided that lead assignment rules in Salesforce make sense for your revenue operations team – now what?

Well, first, you’ll need to determine the edition of your Salesforce instance. Lead assignment rules are available in the Group, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions of SFDC. Case assignment rules, conversely, are available only in the Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions.

With regard to User Permissions, to view assignment rules, you’ll need View Setup and Configuration permissions. However, to create or change assignment rules, you’ll need Customize Application. If you are not your organization’s Salesforce administrator, you should check with them before attempting to head off on your own.

How to Create Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

Creating lead and case assignment rules in Salesforce is a relatively straightforward process. 

• Login to Salesforce and select Setup in the upper right corner of the horizontal navigation bar.
• In the Setup search box , type “assignment rules” and then select either Lead Assignment Rules or Case Assignment Rules.
• Select New to create a new assignment rule.
• In the Rule Name box, type a name and specify whether it should be active for leads or cases created manually and by those created automatically by web and email. When done, click Save .
• Click open your newly created rule and select New in the Rule Entries to specify your rule criteria.
• Step 1 in the “Enter the rule entry” window requires you to enter an Order for your new rule (the Order is the order in which the entry is processed, like a queue).
• In Step 2, you determine whether your new rule is based on meeting a set of criteria or a formula. In the Run this rule if the dropdown box, select either “criteria are met” or “formula evaluates to true.”
• Lastly, in Step 3, select the user or queue to whom your rule will assign your new lead or case (use the lookup feature to find specific users or a queue). After completing Step 3, select Save .

Why Are Your Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules Not Working?

If you discover your lead or case assignment rules are not working, here are a few tips to quickly troubleshoot the root cause.

First, check to ensure the assignment rule is active. Remember, only one case or lead assignment rule can be active at one time. Secondly, ensure the record is assigned to the correct user or queue.

Make certain to select the checkbox Assign using active assignment rule . In support of this step, enable field History tracking on case or lead owner, as well as add object History (case or lead) in your page layout. 

One common problem is overlapping rule entries, or rule entries in the wrong order. With dozens of rule entries, many will overlap, causing records to get assigned unpredictably. For example, if entry #1 assigns California leads to John, and entry #2 assigns Demo Request leads to Jane, then John might wonder why he’s receiving Demo Requests leads who are supposed to go to Jane. 

Assignment Rule Examples

The image, below, shows sample rule entries being entered into Salesforce for a variety of “what if” situations:

• Junk leads containing “test” are sent to an unassigned queue
• Demo requests are routed directly to SDR 3
• Leads at accounts with over $100 million in annual revenue are routed to AE 1
• Leads in certain states are sent to their respective representatives

How LeanData Simplifies Salesforce Lead Assignment

Creating lead and assignment rules in Salesforce is relatively straightforward. However, as your GTM motions become more and more complex, it becomes necessary to populate that one rule with multiple defining rule entries. As you grow and scale, your rule threatens to become unwieldy. Then these problems arise:

• Difficulty in both comprehending and managing
• Poor visibility, making it difficult to troubleshoot and validate
• Restrictions allowing only the criteria on the routed record

LeanData’s lead routing flow and assignment solution is a native Salesforce application that allows users to create flows in an easy-to-understand visual graph. Its visible representation of an organization’s desired lead flow affords many benefits to users, including:

• Easier ability to visualize and understand complex flows
• Real-time visibility of the routing of leads and the ability to quickly troubleshoot and make adjustments
• At-a-glance ability to use information on matched records for routing decisions and actions

Assignment rules in Salesforce are a relatively easy-to-learn feature that can be very quickly implemented, delivering a flexible and powerful logic to your CRM processes. Automating your lead and customer processes will accelerate your GTM motions and deliver your organization a sustainable competitive advantage.

For more best practices, read the eBook, “ Best Practices for a Winning B2B Marketing Data Strategy .”

• lead assignment rules
• lead assignment rules salesforce

Ray Hartjen

Ray Hartjen is an experienced writer for the tech industry and published author. You can connect with Ray on both LinkedIn  &  Twitter .

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How to use Salesforce lead assignment rules

When your organization gets to the point that you have a) leads coming in on a regular basis and b) multiple sales reps, you quickly realize you need a way to divide up those leads among your reps. If you're using Salesforce, you may have noticed a built-in feature called Lead Assignment Rules. Sounds perfect, right? Sort of. We'll walk you through it.

Here's our agenda:

• The basics of lead assignment rules

Matching and assigning with rule entries

• Issues and challenges with lead assignment rules

The basics of lead assignment rules in Salesforce

Let's take a look at lead assignment rules in Salesforce. Go to your Salesforce org's Setup section and search for "lead assignment" in the Quick Find box. You'll find these buried under Feature Settings > Marketing > Lead Assignment Rules. If you don't see it, make sure you have permissions for "View Setup and Configuration" and "Customize Application".

• Unique names - Every lead assignment rule has a unique name [1].
• A lead assignment rule is really a list of "rule entries" - Salesforce calls each of the individual rules in the list a "rule entry" [2]. Each rule entry allows you to say something along the lines of: "if a lead meets these criteria, assign it to this user (or queue - more on that in a moment)".
• Rule entry order matters - The list of rule entries [2] is processed in a specific order you define. Salesforce will process each rule entry until it finds a match. Once it finds a match, it will assign the lead based on how the rule entry is configured.
• Only one active rule at a time - You can only have one lead assignment rule set to active [3].

Now that we've got a decent idea about what a lead assignment rule looks like, let's dive into rule entries.

Every rule entry has three parts:

• Order - This is a number that indicates where the entry exists in the list. Rule entries are evaluated starting at 1 and then processing until one of the rules matches.
• Matching Criteria - Leads are compared to the matching criteria for each rule to determine if the lead matches. The first rule that matches is used to determine assignment.
• Assignment - This tells Salesforce what you want to do once a lead has matched the matching criteria. Usually, you'll tell Salesforce to assign it to a user or a queue.

Order is pretty straightforward. The complexity really lies in matching criteria and assignment. let's spend some time on those.

Matching criteria

There are two types of matching criteria: filter criteria and formulas. You'll probably use filter criteria the most, so let's start with that one:

One key limitation is that you can only configure criteria using fields from the lead, the current user, and the campaign associated with the lead.

Here's what it looks like to create a formula rule entry:

hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(8216850, 'e84fc167-06c5-4b7b-bb34-42ccff0e2db4', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Let's go back to the rule entry screen and focus on the assignment section:

So, what's the difference between a user and a queue?

• User - In business terms, this is a particular sales rep who will be responsible for managing the lead. In technical terms, this is an active Salesforce user configured in your Salesforce org.
• Queue - A Queue is a list of records (usually Leads, but not always) that are accessible to a specific group of users. Each of those users can take ownership of a record from the queue, removing it for the others. When you assign ownership of a Lead to a Queue, you're effectively making it first-come, first-serve for a group of users. This is not the same as a "round-robin" assignment where you assign the Lead to one person from a list of users.

There's one last thing to know about assigning ownership. Note the checkbox labeled "Do not Reassign Owner"[3]. This controls what happens when a lead is updated and matches the criteria. If this is checked, the assignment will essentially be ignored. Use this to prevent toggling users back and forth.

The last field, "Email Template" [4] allows you to specify a particular email template to use for notifying the new assignee when the assignment is complete.

Issues and challenges

Lead Assignment Rules are a reasonable choice for a small team with simple rules. They work and the only cost to you is the administrative overhead of creating and maintaining them. Unfortunately, they're extremely limited and don't cover many common use cases. They also become very brittle as your team size and lead velocity increase. Here are a few common issues and challenges:

• Leads only - They only apply to the Lead object (there are Case Assignment Rules for Cases, but that's it). This may make them a poor fit for your sales process if you need to do lead-to-account matching or you're pursuing an account-based strategy . If you need to assign other things besides Leads, you'll need to try a more flexible automation solution like Flow .
• Hard to test - Unlike Process Builder or Flow, your Lead Assignment Rules don't provide any form of versioning or debugging so it's hard to test them without just doing it live.
• Hard to audit  - There's no record of  why a lead was assigned in a particular way. You'll have to go look through your rule entries to figure it out. This can quickly get painful as the number of rules increases.
• One rule at a time - If your company has very different rules for different leads (e.g. from different campaign sources or applicable to different product lines), it can be very challenging to craft your rule entries in a way that handles more than one lead routing flow.
• No round-robin - It's technically possible to do a very poor version of round-robin with Lead Assignment Rules, we don't recommend it. It's extremely brittle and will break without lots of maintenance.

Where to go from here?

If you've got a small team with simple processes, give Salesforce lead assignment rules a try; they may give you just what you need. If you find yourself needing to assign other objects besides Leads, perform round-robin rep assignments or maintain a full audit trail, you might want to consider Gradient Works.

Hayes Davis

Hayes Davis is co-founder of Gradient Works. Previously, Hayes was SVP of Revenue Operations at Cision, where he ran a global team of 50 supporting nearly 600 sellers. He was also co-founder and CEO of Union Metrics until its successful acquisition by TrendKite in 2018. Hayes has a background in computer science.

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Effective lead management in Salesforce’s changing environment is essential for boosting sales. They are automated processes within Salesforce that determine how newly created leads are assigned to users or queues. Lead assignment rules in Salesforce are essential for making sure that leads are managed and dispersed in your company correctly.

This technical blog will walk readers through the nuances of Salesforce’s lead assignment rules, look at actual cases, and comprehend the significant advantages they provide.

Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules are used to automatically assign lead records to a particular user or queue based on different conditions. It can contain many rule entries that determine the assignee of a lead. Rule entry specifies the following:

• Sort Order, which determines the order of evaluation of rule entries.
• Entry criteria determine which rule entry the response will be sent through.
• Name of the user/queue to which the record should be assigned.
• An email template will be used to send the response.

We can create as many assignment rules as we want, but only one can be active at a time. “Don’t Reassign Owner” determines if the user whose process stack is in use becomes the owner of the rule entity or if it remains owned by its creator user.

Source-Based Assignment –  Leads originating from the company’s website forms are assigned to the inside sales team. These leads are automatically directed to the relevant representatives based on the web form source, ensuring a quick response.

Territory-Based Assignment –  For leads generated from trade shows, assignment rules are configured to assign them to the field sales representatives responsible for the respective geographic territories. This ensures that local representatives handle leads effectively.

Round-Robin Assignment –  Marketing campaigns yield a large volume of leads. To distribute these leads equitably, the organization uses round-robin assignment rules. Leads are systematically rotated among the sales representatives, ensuring a fair distribution of opportunities.

How to Create Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules? 

Creating lead and case assignment rules in Salesforce is a relatively straightforward process. 

Step 1: After logging in, go to the horizontal navigation bar’s upper right corner and choose Setup.

Step 2: Type “assignment rules” into the Setup search box, then choose Lead Assignment Rules.

Step 3: To add a new assignment rule, select New.

Step 4 : Enter a name in the Rule Name box and Click Save when finished.

Step 5: To specify your rule criteria, click open your newly generated rule and choose New in the Rule Entries.

Here, the “Enter the rule entry” window requires you to enter an Order for your new rule (the Order is the order in which the entry is processed, like a queue).

Next, you need to determine whether your new rule is based on meeting a set of criteria or a formula. In the “Run this rule if the” dropdown box, select either “criteria are met” or “formula evaluates to true.”

Lastly, select the user or queue to whom your rule will assign your new lead (use the lookup feature to find specific users or a queue)

Step 6: After completing these steps, select Save.

Implementing lead assignment rules in Salesforce provides several key benefits:

• Leads are automatically routed to the most suitable representatives or teams, reducing manual assignment efforts.
• It is used to assign the owner to a lead record, which is stored from Web-to-Lead. But while creating lead records manually, the ‘Assign using active assignment rule’ option is visible, which lets the owner be assigned as per the criteria defined in the assignment rule. The owner will be the creator of the record.
• With source-based rules, organizations can ensure that leads are promptly attended to, resulting in faster response times and increased lead-to-opportunity conversion rates.
• Territory-based rules allow organizations to align leads with representatives who have in-depth knowledge of specific regions, increasing the chances of successful conversions.
• Round-robin assignment rules prevent the overload of leads on a single representative and ensure that all sales team members have an equitable opportunity to engage with potential customers.
• Automation reduces the likelihood of manual errors in lead assignment, ensuring that no lead is overlooked.

Lead assignment rules in Salesforce are potent tools for optimizing lead management. Whether it’s routing leads by their source, assigning them to the proper territory, or equitably distributing them among your sales team, these rules streamline the process and enhance efficiency.

By understanding the principles of lead assignment rules and harnessing their capabilities, organizations can ensure that no lead goes unattended, resulting in increased conversion rates and driving sales success.

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Salesforce Assignment Rules Deep Dive

• July 7, 2022

What Are Salesforce Assignment Rules

Assignment rules are a standard feature in Salesforce used to automate the assignment of leads and cases. They can be a great alternative to manually assigning records. However, there are more than a few limitations you’ll want to be aware of. In this article we’ll discuss the benefits and limitations of Salesforce assignment rules so you can decide if they make sense for your organization. We’ll also share advice and guidance on how to effectively configure assignment rules.

The Benefits of Assignment Rules

Salesforce assignment rules are a powerful tool designed to streamline the distribution and management of leads and cases within an organization. By automating the assignment process, these rules ensure that leads and cases are instantly assigned to the most appropriate team members based on specific criteria such as product interest, priority, and geographic location. This target approach helps to accelerate response times, balance workload, improve team performance, and increase customer satisfaction. The use of assignment rules in Salesforce, therefore, represents a strategic advantage for businesses looking to optimize their sales and support workflows, ultimately driving growth and customer loyalty.

Limitations of Assignment Rules

While Salesforce assignment rules offer significant advantages, they also have limitations that organizations should be aware of:

• Limited to leads and cases : One of the most significant limitations of Salesforce assignment rules is the inability to assign standard or custom objects beyond leads and cases. This restriction often prompts organizations to look for an alternative solution that can assign any object .
• Lack of round robin assignment : They do not support round robin assignment, which is essential for most modern sales and support teams. Instead, each rule assigns records to a specific user or queue you designate.
• Lack of workload-based assignment : They don’t consider the existing workload of team members, potentially leading to an uneven distribution of leads and cases. This can result in slow response times and employee burnout.
• Lack of availability-based assignment : They don’t consider the availability of team members, resulting in leads and cases being assigned to team members that are away from work or otherwise unavailable.
• Difficult to maintain : Assignment rules can quickly become difficult to manage—even for small teams with simple assignment logic. Here’s an example of what a small portion of a typical assignment rule looks like:

Assignment rules can still be very useful despite these limitations. Continue reading to learn how assignment rules can be used to optimize your lead and case routing process.

How Assignment Rules Work

An assignment rule is a collection of conditional statements known as assignment rule entries. Each assignment rule entry contains one or more conditions and a user or queue to whom matching records will be assigned.

The Sort Order field can be used to change the order in which assignment rules are executed. Leads and cases will be evaluated against assignment rule entries in order and assigned by the first assignment rule entry that matches.

In the example above, we’ve prioritized our rules for Canada provinces (e.g. Ontario) higher than our country-wide Canada rule entry to ensure that leads from specific provinces don’t get assigned to the wrong person.

Next we’ll step you through how to actually create an assignment rule. 

How to Create Assignment Rules

You’ll need the “Customize Application” permission in order to manage assignment rules. If you don’t have this permission, contact your Salesforce administrator.

Ready to create your first assignment rule? Follow these steps:

• Login to Salesforce.
• Navigate to Setup .
• Search for “assignment rules” in Quick Find and click either Lead Assignment Rules or Case Assignment Rules .
• Click New to create a new rule.
• Name your rule and then click Save . We recommend leaving the Active box unchecked for now. 

Now you’re ready to specify how leads or cases will be assigned.

• Click on the rule you created.
• Click New to create a rule entry.
• Sort Order : this controls the order in which rules are executed.
• Criteria : you can enter one or more filters to define which records should be assigned by this rule.
• Owner : choose a user or queue to which records should be assigned. Alternatively you can check the Do Not Reassign Owner checkbox if this rule should not assign records.
• (Optional) Select an email template for notifying users of assignments.
• Click “ Save. ”
• Repeat the above steps for any additional rule entries.

Activate Your Assignment Rule

You can follow these steps to activate your assignment rule:

• Navigate to your assignment rule.
• Click the Edit
• Check the Active
• Click Save .

Keep in mind that only one assignment rule can be active at a time. We’ll discuss how your active assignment rule can be used to assign records in the next section.

What Triggers Assignment Rules in Salesforce

There is often some confusion about how and when assignment rules run. There are a few different ways these rules can be triggered:

• Creating a New Record : When a new lead or case is created, either manually or through an automated process, assignment rules can be triggered to assign the record to the appropriate user or queue.
• Updating a Record : If a record is updated and meets certain criteria set in the assignment rules, this can also trigger the reassignment of the lead or case.
• Web-to-Lead or Web-to-Case Submission : When leads or cases are generated through Salesforce’s web-to-lead or web-to-case features, assignment rules can automatically assign these incoming records.
• Data Import : When importing data into Salesforce, you can opt to apply assignment rules to the imported records, ensuring they are assigned according to the established criteria.
• API Creation or Update : Records created or updated via Salesforce’s API can also trigger assignment rules, depending on the configuration.
• Manual Triggering : Users with the appropriate permissions can manually apply assignment rules to leads or cases, either individually or in bulk.

Understanding these triggers is essential to effectively utilizing assignment rules in Salesforce, ensuring that leads and cases are assigned to the right team members promptly and efficiently.

Tips and Tricks

• It’s always a good idea to include a final rule entry with no conditions. This will be used to catch anything that didn’t match your rule criteria and assign it to a user or queue for review.
• It’s also a good idea to include a rule entry that assigns junk (e.g. spam, test records, etc.) to a queue for review and deletion.
• We recommend you test assignment rules in a sandbox before you add to your production org. However, keep in mind that assignment rules cannot be deployed from a sandbox to a production org.
• Custom formula fields can help to simplify complex assignment rules. For example, rather than entering lengthy criteria (e.g. lists of states by region) you could create a formula field instead. This would reduce your criteria from “STATE/PROVINCE EQUALS IL,IN,IA,KS,MI,MN,MO,NE,ND,OH,SD,WI” to “REGION EQUALS Midwest”.
• You can enable field history tracking on the owner field to track assignments made by your assignment rules.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens to records that don’t meet salesforce assignment rule criteria.

These records will be assigned to whomever is designated as the default lead owner or case owner.

What are the different types of assignment rules in Salesforce?

Salesforce currently support lead and case assignment rules. Additionally, account assignment rules can be created as part of enterprise territory management.

What is the order of execution for assignment rules?

It’s important to understand exactly when assignment rules are run in relation to other events. For example, assignment rules are run after apex triggers and before workflow rules. See Salesforce’s Triggers and Order of Execution article for a comprehensive list of events and the order in which they’re executed.

How do you run assignment rules when creating or editing records using the REST API?

You can use the Sforce-Auto-Assign header when making REST API calls to control whether or not assignment rules run.

Salesforce assignment rules can be a valuables tool for many organizations. However, it’s important to understand the limitations. If you’re struggling with assignment rules it may be time to look at alternative solutions. Kubaru is a powerful automated assignment application for Salesforce. Check us out on the Salesforce AppExchange or contact us to schedule a demo.  

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Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules: How To Manage The Salesforce Lead

You're busy, and managing leads in Salesforce is a pain. You want to use the system but there's just too many hoops to jump through. This blog post will help you understand how salesforce lead assignment rules work and show you how they can make your life easier when assigning leads in Salesforce.

Lead assignment is a critical function in any sales organization and it has been our experience that many companies are not following these simple rules due to lack of understanding or poor training. 

We hope to help you avoid these mistakes by sharing some of the most common mistakes made when assigning leads in Salesforce with you.

What Are Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

Salesforce lead assignment rules allow a user to specify rules that pick up a specific value from a custom object and assign it to the Contact Manager field of the Lead.

Lead assignment rules are created based on your business requirements, for example: If a prospect fills out an interest form or email marketing survey , you can automatically add their information as Leads in Salesforce, which makes them available for sales reps to follow up with.

Or maybe your company is growing rapidly and you need opportunities to be auto-assigned every time one is updated by an internal team member. In all these cases, lead assignment rules come in handy .

A lead assignment rule can be executed when a custom object record has been created, updated or deleted. It starts with a trigger and ends with an assignment rule.

For example: whenever a user updates the 'Lead Status' field on the 'Opportunity' object, update or delete (depending upon whether Lead Status is set to Closed/Lost or Reopened) the associated Contact record on the 'Cust Team' custom object.

To create this Lead Assignment Rule

• Navigate to Setup
• Leads  and click on New Assignment Rule. Give your lead assignment rule a name and select Sub Object as Opportunity then choose Trigger as Updated Opportunity Status.
• Leave Conditions as Blank and click Save.

The moment you save the lead assignment rules, Salesforce creates a picklist of Available Values with two options – Yes and No.

This is because a lead assignment rule can either create or update a record on another object, depending on the condition that you set.

Now, let's say you want to automatically create a new Lead record whenever the 'Lead Status' field on the 'Opportunity' object is set to Closed/Lost. To do this, we'll need to add an Assignment Rule. Select Assignment Rule as New Lead and choose the action as Create.

Under Object Type , select Lead and under Field Name , select Status . Leave Conditions blank and click Save .

You've now created a lead assignment rule that will automatically create a new Lead record whenever the 'Lead Status' field on the 'Opportunity' object is set to Closed/Lost.

But wait, this rule will create Leads for Closed/Lost Opportunities only. What if you also wanted to automatically create a lead whenever the Status is set to Reopened? 

Well, all you need to do is add another Assignment Rule and choose both rules as New Lead . Select the action Create under the object Salesforce creates a picklist with three options – Yes , No , and No Match. This signifies that it will either update or create records depending upon its conditions.

To edit an existing assignment rule, follow these steps:

• ‍ Navigate to Setup | Customize | Leads | Assignment Rules. The Assignment Rules page displays all of your existing rules together. You can filter this list by selecting a particular object, such as Accounts or Contacts, and then clicking on the Edit button.
• ‍ The Rule Details page for the selected rule displays. This page enables you to edit the rule's name, description, and conditions. You can also specify which objects the rule applies to, what type of action to take (such as Create or Update), and which fields on those objects to use.
• When you're finished editing, click Save.

You can also delete a lead assignment rule by following these steps:

• ‍ Navigate to Setup | Customize | Leads | Assignment Rules. The Assignment Rules page displays all of your existing rules together. You can filter this list by selecting a particular object, such as Accounts or Contacts, and then clicking on the Delete button.
• ‍ The Rule Details page for the selected rule displays . This page provides information about the rule, including the rule's name, description, and conditions.
• ‍ Click Delete to remove the rule from Salesforce. There are many different ways to use lead assignment rules in Salesforce. By creating rules that automatically update or create records on other objects, you can save time and ensure that your data is always up-to-date.

The Seven Rules Of Compliance: Salesforce Lead Assignment Policy

Now that we have covered the basics of Lead Assignment Policy, it's time to get into the specifics. Below are the seven rules of compliance for Salesforce Lead Assignment rules:

Rule 1: All leads must be assigned to a user. 

This is a basic rule and should go without saying. All leads must be assigned to a user in order for them to be worked. If you're not sure who should receive a lead, consult your company's sales process and procedures.

Rule 2: Leads must be assigned in a timely manner.

Leads should be assigned as soon as they are created in order to ensure that they are worked promptly. 

However, there may be cases where a lead expires before it has any activity. In these cases, you can either let the lead expire or reassign it to another user who may work it later on.

Rule 3: A user cannot belong to more than one owner-recipient pair in a single Salesforce organization.

A lead must be owned by one person, but that same lead can be assigned to one or more users within your team using owner-recipient pairs. 

However, no single user should appear in multiple owner-recipient relationship fields for different leads in your database. If this happens, then all recipients will receive every opportunity created from every new lead that's assigned to the problematic user! 

To avoid this, create a new lead assignment policy with the problematic user excluded. Then, create a new lead assignment policy without the problematic user and re-assign all of your leads to the appropriate users using owner-recipient pairs.

Rule 4: A user cannot be a recipient in more than one owner-recipient pair within a single Salesforce organization.

As shown by Rule 3 above, you can have an owner for a lead as well as multiple recipients on that same lead record. However, no single user should appear as both an owner and a recipient on different leads that are under the same qualifying rules. 

If this happens, then all of those leads will route directly to your Salesforce Inbox ! To avoid this, simply create a new lead assignment policy with the problematic user excluded and re-assign all of your leads to the appropriate users using owner-recipient pairs.

Rule 5: A recipient cannot be a member of more than one owner-recipient pair in a single Salesforce organization.

This is another rule that should go without saying, but just like Rules 3 and 4 above, it's important to ensure that you're not setting up multiple recipient relationships for the same user within your Salesforce instance. 

To avoid this problem, simply create a new lead assignment policy with the problematic user excluded and re-assign all of your leads to the appropriate users using owner-recipient pairs.

Rule 6: Recipients must own at least one opportunity to be considered valid.

If you're looking for the most basic rule to begin with, this is it. If recipients are not set up to own one or more opportunities, then they won't have any activities in Salesforce automatically created for them when a lead is assigned. 

This means that Leads will need to route directly into your Salesforce Inbox until you either create some activities for your team or manually assign the lead back to the original owner. 

To avoid this problem, simply create a new lead assignment policy with all of your existing recipients included and re-assign all of your leads accordingly!

Rule 7: You cannot add existing users as recipients if their user records contain fields that are incompatible with assignment policy criteria.

There may be one or more cases where you have users who are already in your system but are not set up to receive leads through your lead assignment policy. 

If you try to add these users as recipients for this newly created rule, then their accounts will show up in red because they won't meet the criteria defined in the assignment policy's qualifications field. 

To fix this problem, simply create a new lead assignment policy by including existing recipients in your Salesforce instance. Then, re-assign all of your leads accordingly!

What Are The Drawbacks Of Using Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules?

Lead Assignment rules are an extremely powerful tool inside Salesforce. They enable business users to control who can view and respond to leads, while also streamlining workflows and ensuring that important leads aren't being ignored.

However, as with all features in Salesforce, there are several drawbacks or limitations that need to be taken into account when a lead assignment rule is put into use:

• A lead has to meet the criteria of all lead assignment rules assigned to it, which might not always be possible. Imagine a Business Development Manager using a Lead Assignment Rule so they receive all high priority leads from two queues - one for new accounts and one for existing customers. But what if the lead doesn't have an account? In this case both queues would be evaluated, even though the lead should only go to one of them.
• Rules can be time consuming and complex to set up. The business user has to have a good understanding of how the rule works in order to create it.
• Rules can be overridden by other users if they have access to the lead. This means that although the Lead Assignment Rule was supposed to ensure that a specific person received the lead, it could end up going to someone else if they're faster at responding or have more seniority.

Overall, Lead Assignment Rules are an extremely valuable tool for controlling workflows and ensuring that important leads don't fall through the cracks. 

However, it's important to be aware of the drawbacks and limitations when using them in order to make sure they're being implemented in the most effective way possible.

Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules are an extremely powerful tool inside Salesforce. They enable business users to control who can view and respond to leads, while also streamlining workflows and ensuring that important leads aren't being ignored.

Himangi Lohar

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Salesforce lead assignment rules – Salesforce Tutorials

Creating and managing salesforce lead assignment rules .

In this Salesforce tutorial we are going to learn about What is an assignment Rules , How can we create and manage Salesforce lead assignment rules, and why should we create assignment rules in Salesforce.

What is an Assignment Rule?

Assignment Rules are used to assign Leads and Cases automatically to the assigned users based on criteria. There are two types of Assignment Rules in Salesforce they are

•  Lead Assignment Rules and
• Case Assignment Rules.

What are Salesforce lead assignment rules?

Salesforce lead assignment rules defines the administrators to assign a lead to users and queues based on criteria. A lead can be generated either by manually or generated from the web.

What are case Assignment Rules?

Salesforce lead assignment rules defines the administrators to assign a Case to users and queues based on criteria. A Case can be generated  by manually , generated from the web to case, Email to case etc.

How to create Salesforce lead assignment rules?

Creating and Managing Salesforce lead assignment rules are very important. Let us learn how to create lead assignment rules in Salesforce.com. To create assignment rules login Salesforce and navigate to Setup | Build | Customize | Lead | Lead Assignment Rules.

• Click on Lead assignment rules as shown above.

Click on New Button to create new Salesforce lead assignment rule.

• Enter Rule name.
• The assignment rule must be activated as shown above.
• Click on Save button.

There are only one standard rule in our salesforce. If we create new Assignment rule in Salesforce the first standard rule will be automatically deactivated. At a single point of time only one assignment rule is active. For a single rule there can be multiple rule entries.

• When creating Rule entry we have to learn about these three Order number, Criteria and Assigned to.

How to create New Rule entries in Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules.

In Salesforce we can create many rule entries for single Assignment Rule.

• Click on New Button to create new Rule entry.

• In step 1 :- Enter Sort order as #1.
• In Step 2 :- Enter rule criteria as shown above.
• In Step 3 :- Select the user or queue to assign the lead.
• Select user and Email template as shown above.

Learn how to create Email template in Salesforce.

We have created two Rule entries with order 1 and Order 2. In this Salesforce lead assignment rules, Generated leads will be automatically assigned to the country United State and Country United Kingdom.

Conclusion :

In this Salesforce Tutorial we have learned about What is Assignment rule and How to create Salesforce lead assignment rules. Like wise case assignment rules are also similar to lead assignment rules.

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• Salesforce Admin

Salesforce Lead Assignment rules

• Dec 28, 2023

Salesforce Lead Assignment rules automate your org lead generation and support processes. Lead Assignment Rules are a powerful tool that enables the automatic assignment of leads to the right sales representatives based on specific criteria.

What is Salesforce Lead Assignment rules?

Lead assignment rules are used to specify how leads are assigned to users or queues. This is used to assign the owner of leads based on lead generation, like leads created from the web or imported from a data loader.

Type of Assignment Rule 

There are two types of assignment rules we have in Salesforce.

• Lead Assignment Rules
• Case Assignment Rule

How to create lead Assignment Rules

Let’s see the step-by-step guide to set up the lead assignment rules.

• Creating Lead Assignment Rule
• Creating Lead Assignment Criteria
• Specify the lead assignment method
• Activate the lead assignment rules
• Test the lead assignment rules

Consideration for Lead Assignment Rules

• We can create as many assignment rules as possible, but only one can be active.

Lead Assignment Rules can help streamline your lead management process, improve lead conversion rates, and increase sales productivity by ensuring that the right leads are assigned to the right representatives.

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September 30, 2021

Speed Up and Sell More: Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules Best Practices

Get the latest RevOps insights

When a lead comes in, an opportunity should come knocking.

But there’s a lot more under the hood. You need solid lead assignment rules in place, and one key variable to keep in mind.

Time. According to LeadSimple, responding to a lead in the first 5 minutes is 21x more effective.

No surprises here. If you’re a scaling business, you know that responding first to a lead is mission-critical.

If you’re manually triaging leads or waiting for IT to make business-critical changes to your lead assignment rules, it’s not scalable. Nor fast.

As an operations leader, you feel this pain across your entire organization. 

Demand teams work hard to generate incoming leads, so it doesn’t make sense to abandon them just because they’re not getting to the right rep in real-time. Your leads, after all, are directly tied to sales revenue.

Automating the process doesn’t solve the problem alone, either. It’s an important piece to speeding up, but not the only piece to the lead assignment puzzle.

You’re inundated with the notion often – speed is everything!

Well, we’re here to tell you:

Respond right is the new respond first.

Shotgun responses don’t help if your lead happens to work for a target enterprise account of yours. You definitely want your Enterprise sales rep, Rachael putting her best foot forward.

Setting the right lead assignment rules also helps with what ‘future you’ couldn’t know ahead of time.  Say a lead comes in from a territory that doesn’t have a rep assigned – It’s going to sit in a queue. A potential quality lead slipped through the cracks of time because there’s no accountability or rule in place.

Complex business processes and go-to-market efforts add additional layers of friction. How can you get it right if you’re constantly evolving at scale?

Your lead assignment process could be stunting your growth potential.

It’s time to speed up, starting with smarter lead assignment rules. 

Give your operations teams their sanity back, and set your sales reps up for speed-to-lead success.

Go ahead and skip the next section if you’re already aware of the challenges to overcome as a scaling business, and want to get right to Salesforce lead assignment rules for success.

Businesses Quickly Outgrow Native Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules

Asana, a project management platform, was scaling fast.

They were grappling with increasing volumes of leads, lagging response times, and complex assignment rules that became impossible to keep up within Salesforce.

As more leads came in from a variety of sources, and with complex territory assignments and hundreds of sales reps that change frequently, lead assignment became a nightmare to manage in native Salesforce.

That’s because creating and changing lead assignment rules can quickly become very complex:

Only a dozen or so lead assignment rules are implemented here, primarily basic rule sets like location, company size, industry, or lead quality. You can imagine how cluttered your rules would get as you continued to add more criteria.

Asana knew that not having a more sophisticated Salesforce workflow automation process meant they didn’t have the flexibility to adapt at scale.

There were two problems Asana needed to overcome:

1. Complex, evolving go-to-market rules

You wouldn’t want sales reps responding to a lead that’s not in their sales territory. You also wouldn’t want junior reps following up with your largest target accounts.

But it happens.

Typical go-to-market (GTM) models are unique by company and can vary by:

• Named account
• Role or product focus
• Partner channels and more

How a company sets up their go-to-market strategy informs how they need to route or assign leads to reps. SaaS sales teams are regularly selling into different territories, market segments (SMB, mid-market, enterprise), verticals, and industries.

What’s more, lead assignment rules often require changing daily with large enterprise businesses. 

Asana, for example, consistently had leads assigned to reps that no longer worked with them.

Imagine juggling complex territory assignment rules and hundreds of sales reps that change frequently?

It can take weeks or months for IT to get involved whenever a Salesforce lead assignment rule needs to be changed:

• IT has to define the required changes, scope them, slot those into a sprint, which may occur weeks or months later
• During the sprint, the team will make the changes, validate them, test them
• Push them from the development environment to the QA environment, and perhaps a staging environment, and then finally into production

Doing things manually, or not at all, is not a scalable alternative.

You can automate to help you move faster, but speed is sidelined when you don’t have the flexibility to adapt to your changing assignment or routing environment.

And it only gets worse as your lead volume climbs.

2. Massive volumes of incoming leads and lagging response times

When too many cars are trying to get to various destinations, traffic jams occur, with some drivers giving up and going somewhere else altogether.

If companies are slow to respond, the chances of those leads sticking around drops with every. passing. minute. Someone else will hop on a plane instead and get facetime sooner.

You need to move faster.

On average, it took companies 42 hours, or almost two days, to respond to a lead .

That’s basically a lifetime:

Dramatics aside, it means most B2B companies are still falling behind and not responding to leads within the five-minute-or-less sweet spot. But it’s there for the taking.

In the past, we had people manage catchall queues, trying to figure out who should own each lead. – Jim Maddison, Veracode

In Xant’s Lead Response Study 2021 of 5.7 million inbound leads at 400 plus companies, they found that 57.1% of first call attempts occurred after more than a week of receiving a lead.

So why are most companies lagging behind? They need to automate and create more adaptable lead assignment rules that actually reflect their go-to-market.

Speed might be serving up the silver platter, but you’re only going to get the deal if you implement effective salesforce lead assignment rules.

Here are some best practices to help set yourself up for success.

Lead Assignment Rules Best Practices For High-Growth Companies

You’ve got massive volumes of incoming leads and ultra-complex go-to-market rules. You’re in the right place.

First things first.

Automate, automate, automate. 

Let’s get to that golden window of 5-minutes. Picture Tesla’s “Come to Me” app (it comes to you and eliminates a long trek to your parking spot).

It requires one tap.

Once a lead enters Salesforce, they follow the defined rule roadmap according to lead assignment rules that you set and ultimately land with the correct salesperson in record time.

You’re giving back those precious minutes to your revenue and sales operations teams.

Now about those rules.

Define Your Go-To-Market Rule Baseline

Carving out territories based on geography, segments, verticals, industries, named accounts, or whatever your go-to-market strategy is, is the first step. This is your baseline.

Any lead that falls into a sales rep’s territory should be assigned to them based on these defined rules, but that’s easier said than done. They’re constantly changing based on several factors.

You need to define your criteria  

In other words, the set of criteria that you will be implementing – you know the drill. To do so, you ask all the necessary questions:

• Which rep will take on what territories?
• What happens if new reps are hired and old ones leave?
• What happens if someone goes on vacation? Or doesn’t work on Fridays?
• A lead comes in from a partner, where do you want this to go?

The beauty is that the sky is the limit.

But how do you get there with native Salesforce constraints lacking the required sophistication?

We had about 800 or 900 rule criteria. We needed something flexible and something that could change, or help us change as we change our business a year to year. – Jim Maddison, Veracode

The next step:

Create customer rule criteria 

Veracode, a security company, had incredibly complex criteria. They had to hire a developer to manually code changes to lead assignment rules. Things changed daily for them, and they grappled with how to adapt.

Ditching the code for the intuitive drag and drop Complete Lead’s interface gave Veracode more flexibility to create assignment rules on the go.

Remember when we said the sky’s the limit?

Implement Nested Flows to Tackle Ultra-Complex Rule Sets

If there were a way to make it easier, you do it right?

Nested flows keep your rules organized. 

At a high level, think of it like nesting dolls: each “nested” or child assignment flow sits within a bigger, or parent assignment flow.

These parent-child relationships can span far beyond just one or two levels, giving you the freedom to allow each business unit to oversee their own GTM processes and territories.  This is a huge win for Rev Ops organizations looking to simplify and speed up ultra-complex lead management.

Department Managers can even set and keep track of rules for their own set of assignment flows, for different GTM teams and within different nested flows. That means lines are drawn in the sand but teams still have visibility and control of how a lead is tracked for their particular team.

Your business depends on data getting where it needs to go, fast. That’s why no matter how complex, your assignment rules should never feel out of hand.

Leverage Powerful Account-Based Assignment

Account-based strategies should be a cornerstone to your go-to-market strategy, and you want to know that your strategic investments are being implemented successfully.

• In a survey conducted by ITSMA , 87% of B2B marketers said that ABM initiatives outperform their other marketing investments.
• COVID-19 caused companies t o rush to create ABM strategies to respond to an increased need for a strong digital presence.
• 56% of the 800 B2B marketers that LinkedIn surveyed said that they are using ABM. Over 80% said that they plan to increase their ABM budget over the next year.

Use account-based assignment.

Account-based marketing targets specific companies, so setting up account-based rules in your lead flow process allows you to route leads from these target accounts to your most experienced reps quickly and easily.

The rule of thumb is that leads from target accounts need to go to the account rep that owns the account. The account owner has the deepest knowledge of the account and the highest chance to convert. Simply put, account based routing  has a positive impact on your bottom line.

With a more robust lead assignment solution to align with their account-based selling and marketing strategies, Alfresco was able to increase their close/won rate by 10%!

Enterprise hierarchy assignment is a no-brainer for account selling.

Imagine if you could automatically visualize all the related customer accounts including subsidiaries, and assign one strategic rep to the parent enterprise account?

You can and you should. Complete Hierarchies gives you the ability to automatically build and visualize complex account hierarchies, so that you’re able to route leads to the right rep no matter how complex the account structure.

Let’s say a new lead comes in from Hulu, but you’ve no idea that it’s a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Chances are the same rep won’t be assigned the account if other go-to-market rules are in place.

Also, you’ve already given a discount to The Walt Disney Company, and this information is not available to the rep who gets the new lead. Account Hierarchies can be a trick up the sleeve when it comes to account-based assignment.

But what happens if a lead comes in and it’s not associated with any account or go-to-market territory?

Set Up A Sophisticated Round Robin

You’re leaving revenue on the table when you let leads sit and die without a timely response.

Native Salesforce just isn’t sophisticated enough to handle more complex round-robin criteria that’s required to keep your leads flowing when they hit a snag.  It’s limited and cumbersome to manage – major setbacks when it comes to your speed-to-lead.

For certain territories or situations, you may have multiple reps covering the territory or a catch-all queue for leads that don’t have enough information to assign properly.

In those cases, businesses often have someone dedicated to manually triaging and assigning leads. This is an incredibly time-consuming operational nightmare and a good way to tank your response times.

And with a lack of accountability, reps often cherry-pick the ideal leads and leave others to the crows.

To avoid these assignment pitfalls you need to push leads to a chosen pool of sales reps and evenly distributed to your sales team, giving everyone an equal opportunity to generate a sale. But you also need more flexible options.

Use sophisticated dynamic round-robin assignment to:

• Set sophisticated criteria like rep speciality or languages
• Use availability settings to ensure leads can be responded to immediately (e.g. office hours)
• Automatically notify reps when new leads are pushed through
• Enforce SLAs on response times to make sure leads are responded to as quickly as possible
• Pair with a rep response dashboard that gives you a complete view to help you monitor how fast a rep is following up with their round-robin leads

Weighted round-robin:

Give your best-performing reps more leads, and improve your overall chance at generating more pipeline. Based on:

• Performance
• On their speciality
• Any desired field

If you’ve found that reps have hit their max capacity for being able to manage any more leads, you can cap the number of records assigned to your team members in the round-robin.

Hit a snag? Re-route your leads:

If reps aren’t responding within their SLA, you can reroute the lead and assign it to someone who will respond. This helps prevent further roadblocks and keeps data flowing, even when there’s a bottleneck.

It’s typical for our team to get four to five requests a week to change territories for a user. Onboarding and offboarding now takes just a few minutes to run all our leads back through the system and automatically get reassigned. – Jim Maddison, Veracode

The ultimate speed-to-lead tactic to keep in your back pocket.

Go Beyond Leads, Assign Any Object

Just imagine that feeling you get if you could create assignment flow, beyond leads. It’s a whole new world.

Assign any object

Go beyond leads and create any assignment flow across any object. You can assign any record, update any field, and trigger any action.

It works similarly to the assignment flow you create for leads, so define your goals and determine your set of criteria for each particular object.

No more manual effort!

This presents endless opportunities to customize your assignment flows, resulting in streamlined processes and less manual administrative time spent manually sifting through information.

What Are You Waiting For?

It’s time to speed up and sell more. 

Speed is crucial, but there’s so much more than that underpinning your speed-to-lead. You need the flexibility to handle your go-to-market complexity and to keep your leads flowing to the right reps in real time.

When you’re scaling fast, you can’t afford to let good leads slip through the cracks.

Interested in hearing more?

We’re happy to talk you through how you can elevate your lead assignment rules in Salesforce, and dramatically improve your speed-to-lead game.

Book a personalized demo with one of our experienced team members today.

Don’t let data hold you back. Build a better way with Complete Leads.

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Assignment rules in Salesforce

• By Ankush Dureja in salesforce

December 6, 2018

Page Contents

What are assignment rules in salesforce ?

Assignment rules in salesforce are used to automatically assign lead or Case to owner( User Or Queue ). Assignment rule is used to automate owner assignment on Case and Lead based on conditions on Case or Lead. For example, there could on lead assignment rule for web-generated leads and one case assignment rule for the holiday use.

Types of assignment rules

There are two type of assignment rules

Lead Assignment Rules

Case assignment rules.

Specify how leads are assigned to users or queues as they are created manually, captured from the web, or imported via the Data Import Wizard.

Determine how cases are assigned to users or put into queues as they are created manually, using Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, On-Demand Email-to-Case, the Self-Service portal, the Customer Portal, Outlook, or Lotus Notes.

Create or Setup assignment rules

• From Setup, enter Assignment Rules in the  Quick Find  box, then select either  Lead Assignment Rules  or  Case Assignment Rules .
• Choose  New , and then give the rule a name. Specify whether you want this to be the active rule for leads or cases created manually and via the web and email. Then click  Save .
• To create the rule entries, click  New . For each entry, you can specify:
• Order : Sets the order in which the entry will be processed in the rule, for example, 1, 2, 3. Salesforce evaluates each entry in order and tries to match the criteria of the entry. As soon as a match is found, Salesforce processes the item and stops evaluating the rule entries for that item. If no match is found, the item is reassigned to either the default Web-to-Lead owner, the administrator doing a lead import, or the default case owner.
• Choose criteria are met and select the filter criteria that a record must meet to trigger the rule.For example, set a case filter to Priority equals High if you want case records with the Priority field marked High to trigger the rule. If your organization uses multiple languages, enter filter values in your organization’s default language. You can add up to 25 filter criteria, of up to 255 characters each. When you use picklists to specify filter criteria, the selected values are stored in the organization’s default language. If you edit or clone existing filter criteria, first set the Default Language on the Company Information page to the same language that was used to set the original filter criteria. Otherwise, the filter criteria may not be evaluated as expected.
• Choose formula evaluates to true and enter a formula that returns a value of “True” or “False.” Salesforce triggers the rule if the formula returns “True.” For example, the formula AND(ISCHANGED( Priority ), ISPICKVAL (Priority, “High”) ) triggers a rule that changes the owner of a case when the Priority field is changed to High. If your condition uses a custom field, the rule entry will be deleted automatically if the custom field is deleted.
• User : Specifies the user or queue to which the lead or case will be assigned if it matches the condition. Users specified here cannot be marked “inactive” and they must have “Read” permission on leads or cases.
• Do Not Reassign Owner : Specifies that the current owner on a lead or case will not be reassigned to the lead or case when it is updated.
• Email Template : We can specifies the template to use for the email that is automatically sent to the new owner. If no template is specified, no email will be sent. When assigning a lead or case to a queue, the notification goes to the Queue Email address specified for the queue and all queue members.
• Predefined Case Teams : Specifies the predefined case team(s) to add to a case when it matches the condition. A case team is a group of people that work together to solve cases.
• Replace any existing predefined case teams on the case : Specifies that any existing predefined case teams on the case are replaced with the predefined case teams on the condition, when a case matches the condition.

After creating the entry, click  Save , or  Save & New  to save the entry and create more entries.

Assignment Rule Example

Following is sample Case assignment rule which assigns case to different queues based on Billing Country, Account SLA and customer type:

For more details about assignment rules please refer to assignment rules  official link.

Assignment rules in Salesforce trailhead

Good luck for creating Assignment rules in Salesforce 🙂

• Assignment rules , Assignment rules Salesforce , Case Assignment rules , Lead Assignment Rules , salesforce , sfdc

Ankush Dureja

Permanent link to this article: https://www.sfdcpoint.com/salesforce/assignment-rules-in-salesforce/

Skip to comment form

• Stremove.com on August 2, 2020 at 9:10 am

Case Assignment Rules Determine how cases are assigned to users or put into queues as they are created manually, using Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, On-Demand Email-to-Case, the Self-Service portal, the Customer Portal, Outlook, or Lotus Notes.

• Dayene on August 25, 2020 at 7:01 pm

Hi! What about when I want my assignment to change when the Lead status is changed? I’ve created two criterias. First when the status is new and second when the status has other values. But when the Lead is updated and the status changes the assignment doesn´t follow this change and it does not assignment the Lead Owner correctly. Thanks.

• Vrushabh LEngade on October 27, 2020 at 3:51 pm

Use Escalation Rules and escalate the case to another user or queue

• subhasini on December 23, 2021 at 6:19 pm

Hi Ankush Dureja, there is a interview question on assignment and the question is : What will happen if the user becomes inactive(or user is deactivated) on whom the rule is assigned. Please reply me ASAP

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6 Ways to Manage Lead Assignment in Pardot

• Marketing Automations , Pro Tips
• January 13, 2022

min. reading

Pardot lead assignment routing can trip up even the most experienced sales and marketing teams. 

There are so many different ways to assign your prospects within Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot). Whether you want to manually assign prospects or utilize automation rules or completion actions to assign prospects based on their activity or information, the options can seem overwhelming.  

In this post, I’ll dive into 6 different ways to manage lead assignment in Pardot and how to determine what the best option is for you. After all, cultivating interest, inspiring action, and responding to people who raise their hands is why we’re here, right?

Six Pardot Lead Routing Methods

Choosing the right lead management strategy and tools to automate the process is challenging, but it’s super important. Read on to understand what you should know to make the right choice for your organization.

 There are multiple ways to assign new leads in Pardot ranging from manual assignments to complex and automated assignments based on lead criteria or activity. 

• Assign to User
• Assign Prospect Via Salesforce Active Assignment Rule
• Assign to Group
• Assign to Queue in Salesforce
• Assignment via Prospect list actions
• Assign via advanced lead assignment rules in Salesforce

1. Assign to User

Assigns a prospect to the specified user when the requirements of the rule are fulfilled.

How to use it

Completion action:.

Assign to user can be set up as a completion action for your forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, emails and page actions, by selecting “Assign to user” and selecting the user’s name from the dropdown

Automation Rule:

Assign prospect to user can be set up as an action within an Automation Rule. This is a great way to assign leads if you have criteria the lead needs to meet before assigning the prospect to Sales. 

For example, if you want to only assign leads to sales that meet a certain scoring threshold, use an automation rule.

Engagement Studio Program:

Assign to user can also be set up as an action with an Engagement Studio Program, by selecting add element > action > assign to user .

2. Assign Prospect via Salesforce Active Assignment Rule

Pushes a prospect to your Salesforce active assignment rule when the rule’s criteria are met (see more information on this process below). The prospect syncs to Salesforce without an owner. 

The assigned user is synced to Pardot when the active assignment rule determines who to assign it to.

To get started, review this Pardot help article: Assigning Prospects

First, you will need an active lead assignment rule setup in Salesforce. This should include all the criteria for your lead assignment as well as a default user to assign the lead to if the lead does not meet any of the criteria.

Assign via active Salesforce assignment rules can be set up as a completion action for your forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, emails and page actions, by selecting “Assign prospect via Salesforce active assignment rule”.

Assign prospect via the Salesforce active assignment rule can be set up as an action within an Automation Rule.

Engagement Studio Program

Assign prospect via Salesforce active assignment rule can also be set up as an action with an Engagement Program, by selecting add element > action > assign prospect via Salesforce active assignment rule .

3. Assign to Group

Assigns a prospect to a user in a specific group (round robin lead assignment) when the requirements of the rule are met.

First, create a group in Pardot (Admin > User Management > Groups > Add User Group) .

Navigate to the user you should belong to the group (Admin > User Management > Users) and click Edit Groups . Select the group to add the user.

Assign to user can be set up as a completion action for your forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, emails and page actions, by selecting “Assign to group” and selecting the user’s name from the dropdown

Assign prospect to user in group can be set up as an action within an Automation Rule.

Assign to group can also be set up as an action with an Engagement Program, by selecting add element > action > assign prospect to group .

4.  Assign to Queue in Salesforce

Assigns a prospect to the Sales Cloud lead queue when the rule’s criteria are met. Prospects assigned to a queue are considered assigned to an owner and aren’t reassigned. You can assign only leads to Sales Cloud lead queues.

First, you must have a lead queue set up in Salesforce.

Assign to queue can be set up as an action within an Automation Rule.

Assign to a queue can also be set up as an action with an Engagement Program, by selecting add element > action > assign to Salesforce queue .

5. Assignment via Prospect list actions

Prospects can be assigned to a User or Group via prospect list actions.

Navigate to the prospect table, select the prospects you want to assign and select one of the options from the drop down menu.

6.  Assign via advanced lead assignment rules in Salesforce

If you have more complex business rules, assigning leads via an app on the Salesforce AppExchange might be a good option. Most apps offer a visual way to view lead assignment rules and some advanced functionality, including auto-merging duplicate leads and lead to account matching. 

Traction Complete is a good option we’ve used before.

Lead routing in Salesforce

Here are some additional ways Sales Cloud handles lead routing.

Lead assignment rules

In Sales Cloud, you can set up lead assignment rules to automate the assignment of new leads to your sales team or queues based on the specified rule criteria. 

The rules will execute and evaluate in the numbered order as leads enter Sales Cloud. Each lead assignment rule consists of multiple rule entries that specify exactly how the leads or cases are assigned. When a lead matches the rule, it will be assigned to the correct person or queue. Only one lead assignment rule can be active at a time.

To get started, review this Salesforce help article: Set Up Assignment Rules

Round-robin lead assignment

The round-robin lead assignment rule in Sales Cloud helps you automate the assignment of new leads in an even way to your sales team or queues.

Here’s how the repeating round robin assignment looks if your sales team for lead assignment has 3 members:

• Lead 1 is assigned to sales person 1
• Lead 2 is assigned to sales person 2
• Lead 3 is assigned to sales person 3
• Lead 4 is assigned to sales person 1
• Lead 5 is assigned to sales person 2
• Lead 6 is assigned to sales person 3

To get started, review this Salesforce help article: Create a Round-Robin Lead Assignment Rule . 

Still not sure what lead assignment method is best? Run through this flow chart to see what the recommended option is for you.

Additional Resources

• Salesforce Lead Assignment Rules Best Practices and Tricks
• Lead Routing in Salesforce
• Trailhead: Qualify and Route Leads to Your Reps
• Trailhead: Grow Your Business with Sales Cloud
• Trailhead: Convert and Assign Leads
• Trailhead: Sell as a Team
• ParDreamin’ on-demand video: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t! Lead Routing Basics for Pardot Admins
• The Three L’s in Pardot: Lists, Location, and Lead Assignment
• 6 Ways to Manage Lead Assignment in Pardot and How to Determine The Best Option

Complex lead routing with third-party tools

Third-party tools enable you to create complex lead routing rules that go beyond out-of-the-box Salesforce and Pardot lead routing features. Different tools serve specific purposes that may be the right fit depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Here are the most common ones.

LeanData is a native Salesforce lead matching and routing platform that is easy to use and customize with their visual drag-and-drop interface functionality and complex rule building.

RingLead is a native Salesforce lead routing, data normalization, enrichment, and duplicate managing platform.

DemandTools from Validity is a data management platform to help with importing, assigning, standardizing, manipulating, and the deduplication of your Salesforce data quickly.

Feel the Relief of Knowing Your Leads Are In Good Hands

Think you’re a Pardot lead routing pro now? Still have no idea where to start? Either way, tell us about it in the comments! And reach out to Sercante when you need Pardot consultant expertise for extra help and customization.

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Jenna is a Marketing Operations leader with over 10 years of experience working with both enterprise organizations and start-ups. She started her career as a consultant, helping B2B and B2C clients get the most out of Marketo, Pardot, Marketing Cloud and Salesforce. She then moved in-house, working with B2B SaaS companies, helping them build their sales and marketing technology stacks and processes from scratch.

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Force Lead Assignment Rules to Always Run

We are having an issue where our lead assignment rules are not being processed. I have verified that the rule is active.

We have data integration services in our org that update our leads via data integration rules. These updates do not trigger the lead assignment rules. The goal is to force them to always run as we have a formula field that is used to determine when the lead assignment rule should and should not run. The formula field is checked as the first step in the assignment rule.

I started by following this article . I have an invocable method:

This method accepts a formula value in the PB of lead.Id .

I have also tried:

Since PBs are called in the after part of the execution order I am making sure to query for my leads:

I am defining my DML options as:

And assigning this dmo to my records by:

I have added debug lines into my code so I know that my code is running and there are no errors occurring during execution. With a test lead, if I click edit and go to the bottom and select the option to use assignment rules, the owner is changed as expected. Change the owner back and using the same lead with the above code, the owner does not change.

Future methods are not an option as one of the data services processes via scheduled batchables and future methods cannot be called form batchables.

I have tried a queueable but that created an infinite loop. The queueable updated the leads and then re-enqueued itself. I am currently looking at possibly fixing this infinite loop but it would be nice to not have to use queueables. I suppose even if I did get the above issue fixed, an infinite loop is still very possible.

I am unsure of what I am doing wrong, any help would be appreciated.

• assignment-rules

• so in the data integration scenario, your debug shows that the invocable apex is running ? –  cropredy Commented Nov 7, 2019 at 22:45
• That is correct –  gNerb Commented Nov 7, 2019 at 22:46
• and the debug does not show that Lead Assignment rules execute (these would be under (Work)flows ? (as an aside, the queueable infinite loop suggests the lead is updated and then the PB re-executes the invocable apex etc.) –  cropredy Commented Nov 7, 2019 at 22:48
• There is this bit WF_RULE_EVAL_BEGIN Assignment but when looking at the formulas that are being evaluated within that WF they are not in the assignment rule, not sure where they are AND that appears before the code above executes so I'm mostly positive that there are no assignment rules running. –  gNerb Commented Nov 7, 2019 at 23:05
• The assignmentRuleHeader Property spec states: The assignmentRuleHeader property specifies the assignment rule to be used when creating a case or lead. *** It does not state any support for Lead/Case updates. I understand this was working previously (that post is from 2015) - my first assumption is that some Salesforce change made this stop working. I'm using annonymous apex with that invokable code and nothing - so even removing the process builder execution order and all of your complex context, the update is not triggering assignment rules to re-evaluate and assign the lead using DMLOptions –  Glen De Marcos Commented Nov 8, 2019 at 0:15

EDITED 11/08/2019 9am pst

Note: Found sf bug while testing. On my assignment rule, I had to deselect the active flag, save, then select it again and save again. Once I did this and ran the update on the list of leads it worked and the UPDATE did fire the re-assignment (contrary to my prior assumption in my previous comment)

After testing your code in the same exact scenario I got the correct result and leads were reassigned. I used PB and invokable apex for POC. I noticed a change I had to do to fix your code and is that you CAN'T use the incoming List parameter as a dynamic binded param in the SOQL query directly because it throws a Bad rightOperand type: got SObjectScriptRow: operator e dataType 1 error. To solve this I generated a new List (called leadsFinal) by iterating over the incoming and adding to the new one. You stated that you were logging the code to verify no errors were occurring in apex, but your debug levels might be lower than needed to capture the automated process actions which throw this error. Hope this update helps you solve this issue:

My invokable:

• Thanks, as stated in my question, when I check the box manually there is no error and everything works so I don't think this answer applies to me. I do appreciate your effort and it sounds like you were able to resolve your own issue which is great! –  gNerb Commented Nov 8, 2019 at 15:02

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