A sales success is closely coupled with the everyday activities of the reps, such as - number of follow-ups, promptness in getting back to the customers, offering quick answers to their queries and responding to the support tickets. All these factors play a crucial role in moving the leads rapidly through the sales funnel eventually leading to a successful sale closure.

An important aspect in achieving the above is, how well-organized and planned the lead assignment process in an organization is? Most businesses rely on multiple sources for generating leads. This increases the likelihood of getting leads from varied locations, industries, interests, or requirements. With each lead/customer having disparate requirements, it is not advisable to assign them randomly to any sales rep. Because, reps with experience in managing leads from a particular region or specific product could relate better with the customer's requirements. Though its important to identify and separate the reps based on the above factors, it may be difficult to accomplish it manually.

Zoho CRM's assignment rule tool is designed to let you automate the lead assignment process by defining rules based on which leads are assigned to a set of reps. You can configure different criteria based on your industry's specifications like territory, product interest, lead source etc., such that only the leads that satisfy the criteria will be automatically assigned to the selected rep. By automating the lead assignment process, you can save a lot of time and effort and also reduce the inadvertent slips that may occur due to manual interventions.  

   

Availability 

You can create an assignment rule for leads, contacts, deals, cases, and custom modules. Configuring assignment rules consist of the following steps.

You should specify the module, rule name and description. 

The rule can be created either for all records or selected records based on a criteria. For instance, a Sales Manager can set a rule for all the leads from India. 

The records can be assigned to the users either based on category or condition.

Category - The record can be assigned to individual users or users in roles or groups. When multiple users are selected, the records will be assigned based on the round-robin pattern.

Condition- The user will be assigned to a record based on the defined criteria, such as the country they are handling. For instance, Steve handles records from India, and Jerusha handles records from the USA. When a lead from USA comes in, it will be assigned to Jerusha.   

While assigning records you can choose to check the user's availability. The availability of the users is checked based on online status (logged in to CRM) and/or shift timing (if it is mentioned in the company details).  

Once the record is assigned to the user, you can add a follow-up task too. For example, you can specify if the user should call or send an email to the lead after the record is assigned. 

In step 3 you would have selected some users. There can be cases when the records cannot be assigned to these users, then it is advisable to select a user (default user), to whom the records will be assigned. Following are the reasons when the record will be assigned to the default user: 

Note

A default user can either be a logged in user (who has initiated the record action) or any other user in CRM. A logged in user for the following cases are

1. Import: A logged in user is one who initiates the action
   
2. API: The user whose authtoken is used in the API
   
3. Webform: User who created the webform rule. However, if they are deactivated or deleted, the super admin becomes the logged in user.