Most teams obsess over lead generation and ignore lead plumbing. But between "form submitted" and "rep says hello" is where marketing spend quietly dies. Five failures show up over and over in the orgs I audit.
Mistake 1: Routing to people who aren't there
Leads assigned to reps on PTO, reps who left last quarter, or a "sales queue" nobody owns. Fix: a weekly check (or automation) that validates every active assignment target, and a fallback owner for every routing rule.
Mistake 2: Territory logic from two org charts ago
Routing rules encode how you sold in 2024 — regions you've collapsed, segments you've renamed. Every reorg leaves rules behind. Fix: print the routing rules and have the sales leader read them aloud. The laughter tells you what to fix.
Mistake 3: No SLA, no alert
Assignment isn't response. A lead can be perfectly routed and still sit for nine hours. Fix: measure time-to-first-touch, and alert someone when a lead crosses your SLA (30 minutes is a fine start). What gets alerted gets worked.
Mistake 4: Enrichment before routing (that never finishes)
Some orgs hold leads for enrichment, dedupe, and scoring before a human sees them — and when a step silently fails, the lead ages in the pipeline's waiting room. Fix: route first, enrich in parallel. A rep with a name and an email beats a stalled workflow with firmographics.
Mistake 5: Round robin as a fairness tool, not a speed tool
Strict rotation with no capacity awareness sends the hot lead to whoever's "next," including the rep with 40 untouched leads. Fix: cap open-lead counts per rep in the rotation, or route hot segments (demo requests, pricing-page visitors) to whoever responds fastest.
The pattern underneath
All five mistakes share a root: routing is set up once and never watched. It needs a heartbeat — something checking assignments, SLAs, and rule health continuously. That's precisely the shape of job an agent does well: Soleil's Lead Routing & Response agent routes to match how you actually sell and alerts when leads sit, from $2,500 setup + $500/month. Or run the checks manually — the fixes above cost five minutes each, and the free audit will tell you which ones you need.
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Book a free callFrequently asked questions
What is a good lead response time for B2B?
Minutes, not hours. Contact rates drop sharply as leads age; a lead worked within five minutes is dramatically more likely to connect than one worked the next morning. Your routing should measure time-to-first-touch, not just assignment.
How should leads be routed in Salesforce?
Match routing to how you actually sell: round robin is fine for undifferentiated territories; what breaks pipelines is stale territory logic, leads assigned to people on PTO, and no SLA alert when a lead sits untouched.