The engine asks the same questions of every lead, in the same order: who covers this area, who has priority there, who is already full, who is carrying least right now — and when the answer is nobody, who catches it. A lead with no location, or one no rep can take, goes to the sales manager (or the person you name) with the reason on the card. It never parks a lead. Built only for post-frame and barndominium builders, so coverage is drawn the way your trade sells: by county, out from the yard, as simple as this office serves these counties or as deep as two tiers per rep.
Also called: round robin leads · assign leads automatically · lead routing · who gets the next lead · lead owner
Every lead is somebody's from the first second
With automatic routing on, a lead off your website form, a Facebook or Google ad, or any app you have connected is routed while the form is still saying thank you — and anything that slips through is picked up again every ten minutes for the rest of its first day. A lead a rep types in is born owned: by whoever made it, or whoever their manager picks. On the board every card says whose it is — under the name and as a chip in that person's colour — when it came in, to the minute, and how long it has waited: teal under an hour, amber under a day, red after. Source and value sit on the same card.
A website lead lands at 7:58 on a Monday, three reps glance at it, each assumes one of the others has it, and nobody rings until Wednesday.
An owner on every card kills the most expensive thought in sales — "somebody else probably called". The rep who sees his name on a card feels it is his to win, and the clock beside it turns slow follow-up into something he can see and fix himself, before a manager has to say a word.
How one lead finds one rep
Five questions, same order, every time. Coverage first — a rep who does not cover the area is never in the running, however good they are. Then priority, then are they full, then who is carrying least. The last question exists so the answer is never nobody.
The lead that lands at 4:40 on a Friday goes to whoever happened to be looking at the screen, and by Monday it has gone cold.
The order is fixed and published so the floor can argue with the rule instead of with each other — a rule nobody can see is a rule nobody trusts. For the floor it is fairness they can check — nobody suspects favouritism when the rule is printed — and for the owner it means the fastest closer is never starved.
A catcher for leads the map can't place
Some leads arrive with no city, county, state or ZIP. Some arrive when every rep is full. Neither goes to nobody: they go to the catcher — your sales manager, else the owner, else an admin, or the person you name under No location, or no rep can take it. The catcher is told how many came in and why, so they hand them out instead of wondering why they got them.
A form with a blank address used to sit unassigned — the one kind of lead routing could not handle was the one kind nobody looked for.
A person who is told "this is yours because it had no address" hands it out in a minute; a lead with no owner gets assumed handled for a week. Naming one catcher also takes the guilt out of the gap — it is somebody's job, so it is not everybody's worry.
The card says why it landed there
Open any card and the Owner field carries the router's reason in one plain sentence: routed by location, shared fairly among the reps who cover the area, sent to the overflow rep because everyone was full, given to the rep with the fewest open leads because nobody covers the area, or came in with no location, so it went to the sales manager to hand to a rep. A manager hands it to someone else from the same field — type two letters, pick a name. A rep sees the owner and cannot change it, and only managers and admins ever see a lead nobody owns — see who sees which leads.
Every odd assignment turns into a conversation — why did she get the Hostetler lead? — and nobody can answer it.
A visible reason answers the question before it is asked, so a rep never wonders whether the system is playing favourites. And a hand-over that takes two letters and a click actually happens, instead of waiting for the next sales meeting.
Once it lands, the checklist tells the rep what to do
A routed lead opens with its owner already filled in on the New Lead checklist, and the next step waiting: make first contact — call, text, or email. Every step can become a task with a reminder, and every step takes a note. When it moves to Contacted, that stage's own steps take over — the first attempt, the follow-ups, the nurture. A new rep does not need the owner standing behind him; the card says what comes next. You write the steps yourself in stage SOP protocols.
The lead lands on a new hire's board and he does not know whether to call, text or wait — so he waits.
Telling someone the one next thing removes the fear of doing it wrong — a new rep acts sooner when the step is written in front of him. For the owner that is his best rep's routine copied onto every card, without standing over anybody.
Start with your offices
Most builders do not need per-person territories on day one. Set the area each office serves — once. That is the whole of the simple version, and for a single-location builder it is the whole thing full stop.
Nothing can route until somebody sits down and draws a patch around every single person on the team, so routing never gets switched on at all.
Coverage hangs on the yard rather than on the person standing in it, which means the map survives a hire, a resignation and every reshuffle after. A setup a builder can finish in ten minutes is one that actually gets switched on — the hardest part of any routing is starting it.
One rep, as many offices as they work from
Try itTick the offices a rep works out of — one, or several at once — and their counties fill in from each. Un-tick one and it takes back only the counties no other ticked office covers, so a county painted by hand survives every toggle. The rep's row is one line: tier, weight, open cap, daily cap, and coverage as a count with the list behind it. Take someone out of the rotation and everything they had is still there when they come back.
Your rep works out of two yards, the old control only took one, and picking the second quietly wiped the first.
Coverage that follows the yards a person actually works from is coverage nobody has to redraw — and a rep who sees his patch drawn the way he really works trusts the leads he gets. Keeping the coverage when he is taken out of rotation means a week off never costs anyone an afternoon of redrawing.
When a rep needs their own patch
Try itOffices get you most of the way. When they don't — a rep who lives an hour north, a new hire you want kept close to home — draw their coverage directly. Drag across the map and the counties fill in. Paint to add, Radius to take everything within a distance of a point.
Your north-end rep drives ninety minutes past two other crews to reach a lead the office map insists is his.
Drag-to-add and a radius tool exist because these exceptions are geographic, not administrative — and a patch drawn by hand is read exactly the same way as one that arrived from an office. The rep with the long drive gets work near home, which is the kind of thing that keeps a good rep from quietly looking elsewhere.
…and a backup tier underneath it
Try itHere is the layer that solves the argument. A county can be painted twice: tier 1 is this is mine, tier 2 is I'll take it if the owner is buried. Without it you get one of two bad outcomes — either two reps overlap and it's a fight, or nobody overlaps and a lead sits waiting for one person who is flat out. Backup coverage means the owner gets first refusal and the lead still moves the same day.
Two reps both believe that county is theirs, so the same homeowner gets two calls in an hour — or, just as often, neither of them makes one.
Painting a county twice at two depths turns an overlap from a dispute into a queue: the owner gets first refusal, and the second name is only reached when the first is over cap. The owner of the county feels respected — first refusal is his — and the backup stops resenting the leader because there is a clear moment the lead becomes his.
See the whole team at once
Try itEvery rep in their own colour, across state lines, on one map — tier 1 solid, tier 2 faded. Every county in your service area gets one of five answers: one primary, shared primary, backup only, only reps with no drawn area, or nobody. The side panel counts each and lists the gaps by name; click any county to see everyone who covers it. Hide a rep to see who picks up their ground. The routing reads coverage with the same matcher the map draws with, so what you see is what it does.
A county nobody covers never announces itself — you find out in March, when a customer mentions they called in November and never heard back.
A list of empty counties is a job you can finish; a map you have to squint at is a worry you carry. Naming every gap turns "are we covered?" from a feeling into a short list — and the reps stop arguing about borders because the border is on the screen.
Tiers, weights, and how many they can hold
Try itPer rep: a tier, a weight, and a cap. Tier is priority. Weight is how big a share within that tier. The cap is the honest one — how many un-worked leads this person can hold before the engine stops feeding them, whatever their numbers say.
Your best closer keeps getting more because he is your best closer, until he is sitting on twenty leads he has not phoned.
Tier and weight decide who deserves more; the cap decides when more stops helping — because the eleventh lead in a full queue is worth less than the first in an empty one. A cap also protects the rep from himself: nobody does good work buried under twenty untouched leads, and nobody feels like a failure for not clearing them.
Who counts as the top performer
Two numbers over a rolling 90 days: how often they close, and how fast they answer. That is the whole formula, and it is on screen. A rep with fewer than twenty leads in the window reads Unproven rather than badly — a new hire should not be ranked on four data points.
"Top performer" is whoever the owner says it is out loud, and the rep who quietly answers fastest never gets the credit for it.
Both weights sit on screen at the ratio the routing actually uses, and the third column is greyed because it is not counted yet. A score that hides its own inputs is just favouritism with a number attached. Reps work harder at what they can see measured — speed to lead improves the week it starts counting.
Settle the argument before it runs
Try itChange a tier and watch the split move. Weighted shares proportionally so the top rep gets the majority and nobody starves; Strict tiers gives the top tier everything until capped. Run it in front of the room and the fairness conversation stops being a conversation.
The fairness conversation happens after the fact, in a meeting, against five people's memories of who got what last month.
The split moves as you change the rule, before anything is live, so the room is arguing with a number rather than an impression — and the owner picks the shape that survives being shown to the floor. People accept a rule they watched being set far more readily than one handed down — the meeting ends with agreement instead of grumbling.
Moving in from another system
Day to day, new leads route the moment they arrive. This screen is for the other day: the one where you import thousands of leads out of your old CRM and they all land unowned at once. The count here is the same number as Waiting in the pipeline's Leads Manager — one definition, both places — and one run works through the pile, naming who got what and what is still waiting.
Three thousand leads arrive out of the old system, a few dozen get picked up, and the rest sit unassigned for a year without anyone noticing.
One number in two places means nobody argues about which count is right before the leads even move. And watching a thousand-lead backlog fall to zero in one run is the moment a team stops dreading the switch from the old system.
Set it up in four steps
Turn it on, add the reps, set the coverage, and — optionally — drop your offices on the map. The screen tracks which of the four you have done, so the module tells you what is missing instead of failing quietly.
You switch routing on, assume it is working, and find out weeks later that half the team was never added to it.
The checklist reports its own state rather than sitting there as instructions — and marking the offices step optional earns its place, because a single-location builder who thinks it is required will stall on it forever. A checklist that ticks itself gives the owner the small win of seeing it done, which is what gets a new system past its first week.
- 1With automatic routing on, website-form, ad and connected-app leads are routed the moment they arrive — and anything that slips is picked up again every ten minutes for the rest of its first day
- 2It narrows to the reps whose territory covers that county, ZIP or state — primary coverage beats backup
- 3Among those, priority tier: a tier-1 rep pulls 4× a tier-3 of the same weight, tier 2 pulls 2×
- 4Anyone already holding more un-worked leads than their cap is skipped, however good they are; of who is left, it goes to the rep carrying least right now
- 5No location at all? It goes to the catcher — your sales manager, else the owner, else an admin, or whoever you name
- 6Nobody covers that area? The rep with the fewest open leads, then the best performer. Every rep full? The catcher again
- 7The card's Owner field says why it landed there; a manager can hand it to someone else from the card in two letters and a click
- 8A lead typed in by hand is born owned — by whoever made it, or whoever their manager picks
- 9Migrating from another system? One run clears the whole imported backlog
Ask a sales floor what is unfair and you get the same answer twice. The reps say the good leads go to the same people. The owner says the leads go to whoever happens to be nearest the screen, and half of them go cold. Both are describing the same missing thing: no rule anybody can see. A rule nobody can see is a rule nobody trusts. So the routing is written down, it is the same every time, and it is weighted toward the two things an owner actually cares about — whether a rep closes, and whether they answer. A rep who is buried is skipped no matter how good they are, because the eleventh lead sitting in somebody's queue is worth less than the first lead in somebody else's. And the argument is settleable: dry-run the split in front of the room before a single lead moves. And a lead with no owner is worse than a lead with the wrong one. Everybody assumes somebody else called. So nothing is born without an owner any more: a lead the map cannot place goes to a person whose job is to place it, and the card says why — because the question every manager asks the morning after is not who has it, it is why does she have it.
- Routing nobody can see, and therefore nobody trusts
- A rep buried in un-worked leads still being handed more
- Leads landing outside every territory and going silent
- Two people assigning the same lead at once
- A backlog of thousands with no way to clear it in one go
- Leads with no location, or no free rep, belonging to nobody
- No visible reason for why a lead went where it went
- A lead typed in by a rep being created with no owner
Draw a Rep's Territory on a Map
A full-screen map with three tools: click one county, drag across several, or drag a circle. Counties keep loading as you zoom, straight across state lines, so a rep sitting at a three-state junction gets drawn in one pass. Coverage has two levels, primary and backup, so a rep is first choice at home and cover in his neighbour's patch. Leave a territory empty and he covers everywhere.
Tiers, Weights and Workload Caps
Per rep: on or off, a priority tier from 1 to 3, a weight, a cap on open leads, and an optional daily limit. A tier-1 rep pulls about four times what a tier-3 rep of the same weight does. The tier also sets how many unworked leads he can hold before the next one goes elsewhere. Only the daily limit takes a rep out of the pool completely.
Try the Split Before You Save It
A what-if screen. Pick how many leads and watch them land, one at a time, in each rep's column. It runs both ways of splitting: proportional, where everyone gets a share and the top tier takes most; and strict, where your top tier takes every lead until they're full. Click a rep's column to change his tier or weight right there, and it carries back to your settings.
Leads Nobody Covers Get Flagged, Not Dropped
When nobody's territory covers a lead's location, the lead stays unassigned and a gap gets flagged. One flag per lead, ever — running it again doesn't pile up more. The run report tells you how many leads your coverage map is missing, so you know exactly how much territory is left to draw.
When Everyone's Full, the Lead Still Goes Out
Two ways to handle the overflow. Top performer ranks the eligible reps on conversion rate and speed to first contact, weighted the way you set it. Nominate a rep pins overflow to one person, and falls back to the ranking whenever that person can't take it. A new rep who hasn't proved anything yet never wins on a fluke — but he stays pickable, so nothing ever stalls.
Routed Leads Count Toward a Rep's Score
Every lead the engine assigns is recorded against the rep who got it, dated the moment he got it. That's what lets his conversion rate and his speed to first contact include the leads that were routed to him. His clock starts when the lead reached him, not when it was imported.
