What we built when sales spent nine hours a week on lead routing

The starting state

The shape was something like this. A lead filled in a contact form on the website. The form posted to a marketing automation tool, which scored it. If it cleared a threshold, the tool dropped a message into a Slack channel called #new-leads. An SDR saw the message, copied the details into the CRM, looked up which territory it belonged to, checked the round-robin sheet to see whose turn it was, and assigned it. If the assignee was on holiday or already overloaded, the SDR reassigned. The ops manager spot-checked the queue once a day to catch anything that had been dropped.

Nothing in that loop was complicated. The cost was the small drag of doing it forty times a day, across two people, with occasional mistakes.

What we built

The fix had three pieces.

First, a webhook from the marketing automation tool into a small routing service. When a lead cleared the threshold, the service immediately created a CRM contact with the right source attribution, territory, and any campaign tags. The Slack channel got the same message it always had, but now the lead already existed in the CRM by the time anyone clicked through.

Second, a round-robin engine that respected vacation, current load, and skill tags. SDRs marked themselves out via Slack command or calendar; the engine routed accordingly. If everyone was at capacity, the lead went to a small overflow queue that the ops manager reviewed twice a day. No more checking a shared sheet to find the next assignee.

Third, a small dashboard that showed lead response time per SDR and the current overflow queue size. The team had not had clean visibility on either before.

The result

Nine hours a week came back across the three people. Lead response time, defined as the time between form submission and first touch from a human, dropped from four hours to eight minutes on average. The number of leads that got accidentally double-assigned went from a handful a week to zero. The overflow queue, which had previously been an unwritten responsibility, became a visible thirty-minute task twice a day.

What we did not build

We did not replace the CRM. We did not introduce a lead scoring layer to improve the threshold; the threshold the marketing team had set was fine for them and not the problem. We did not add a new tool that the SDRs had to log into. The Slack channel still works the same way. The CRM still works the same way. The routing service is invisible.

The reason that matters: the team did not have to learn anything. They just stopped doing nine hours of plumbing.

The shape this fits

If your team has a moment in the day where a lead, a ticket, or any inbound thing has to be picked up, looked up, assigned, and acknowledged before the actual work can start, you are looking at the same shape. It is rarely interesting work. It is reliably about ten percent of someone’s week. And the fix is almost always smaller than people expect.