Round robin is fair to reps and expensive for you
The biggest inbound lead of the quarter arrives Tuesday morning. Corporate subsidiary, 180 employees, the inquirer is a division head and writes in the free-text field that the decision will be made this quarter. The routing briefly checks who’s up next and assigns the lead to the junior in his second month. The senior who has worked exactly this industry for years gets, ten minutes later, the student who needs a price list for his term paper.
Both were fair. Both were wrong.
Round robin optimizes for the one variable that plays no role in revenue: perceived fairness within the team. Everyone gets the same number of leads, nobody can complain, the sales director gets peace. Except leads are not equal units. An enterprise lead with a buying signal and a curious blog reader differ in expected value by a factor of a hundred, and a distribution mechanism that treats both identically systematically burns the valuable ones.
What instead? Routing as decision logic with three layers. First, fit: segment, industry, region, deal size, each matched to the rep with the best close rate for it. The data for this has long been sitting in the CRM, it just never gets asked. Then availability: whoever is on vacation, sick, or buried in deals up to the ceiling gets nothing, no matter how long they’ve been “up.” Last, and truly only last, as a tiebreaker among equally good options: the rotation. That’s where round robin gets to live. As a last resort, not as a principle.
The objection from the team comes immediately, and it deserves to be taken seriously: if the good leads always go to the seniors, how are the juniors supposed to grow? Fair point. The answer is a deliberate quota, say every fifth mid-market lead to a junior with shadowing by a senior. That’s a training program with a calculated price. The difference from round robin: you decide when you trade expected value for development, instead of leaving it to the luck of the queue.
Technically, this is no dark art. Every CRM worth taking seriously does rule-based routing natively, HubSpot as well as Salesforce, and for the rest a manageable automation is enough. The hurdle isn’t the tooling, it’s the conversation within the team where someone has to say out loud that not all reps are equally good at all leads.
Who worked your last fifty-thousand-euro lead: the best person for it, or the person whose turn it was?
