Workflow Round Robin - rotate leads evenly & in set order
Hi there,
We want the round robin to distribute leads to reps in a set rotation order that is even and predictable (not randomized).
Currently, we move reps in and out of the round robin based on vacation time and also at time to focus on other types of sales opportunities. With the current assignment logic, a rep that goes on vacation will then get MORE leads when they get added back into rotation. We want the rotation to be even from the point they are added back in. We also want it to be in a set / predictable order and not randomized.
An update for those interested, the specific feature of distributing ownership unevenly in the Rotate Object action (ie. assign owner A 70% of leads and owner B 30% of leads) is currently in planning.
We hope to have a beta for this feature later this year. Stay tuned for updates!
Re: Workflow Round Robin - rotate leads evenly & in set order
My name is Megan and I'm a product manager for the workflows tool. Thank you for your feedback and votes on this idea!
To start, I'd like to clarify a couple of things about how the "rotate owner" action logic currently works, as there is some confusion throughout the thread. Also, when contact workflows were upgraded to the new workflows system at the end of 2019, we made a slight modification so that the assignment order would be more predictable/ordered. I'll illustrate with an example:
A "Rotate contact to owner" action is configured with 3 owners.
If 3 contacts are enrolled in the workflow, each owner will be assigned one contact (if 6 contacts are enrolled, each will be assigned 2, etc..):
contact 1 > owner A
contact 2 > owner B
contact 3 > owner C
This pattern will continue, with each subsequence contact being assigned in this order and in an even distribution.
Assignment order: owner A, owner B, owner C, owner A, owner B, owner C, owner A, owner B, owner C... etc.
If you add or remove owners from the action after your workflow has been turned on, the assignment counts for that action will completely reset and the assignments will re-start. Newly enrolled objects will be rotated to all of the currently selected owners evenly, regardless of the previous rotation assignments.
Continued example: A new, 4th owner is added to the "Rotate contact to owner" action.
contact 4 > owner D
contact 5 > owner A
contact 6 > owner B
contact 7 > owner C
This pattern will continue, with each subsequence contact being assigned in this order and in an even distribution pattern.
Assignment order: owner D, owner A, owner B, owner C, owner D, owner A, owner B, owner C, owner D, owner A, owner B, owner C... etc
This is what the original poster is requesting (ordered and even assignment), but I see themes for other feature requests in the comments:
Handle owners being OOO - This is something that workflows won't specifically introduce options for at this time. There are other places in HubSpot where OOO handling would be helpful, so this would be better suited to be addressed at the account level than individually in workflows. For now, when an owner is OOO they should be removed/added to the rotation, and as outlined above, the rotation will adjust to ensure even distribution from there on out.
Distribute leads unevenly (ie. assign owner A 70% of leads and owner B 30% of leads) - This is a feature we're currently thinking more about! If you have feedback about this specific concept, please let me know how you'd like a feature like this to work/what options you'd like to see.
Please let me know if questions remain, or if you have additional feedback about an uneven distribution option.
Hubspot team - any update on this? It seems like the request of a set-order rotation is actually simpler than the current round robin distribution and this has lots of upvotes. Please help us out! This is very challenging for our sales team with it's current set up.
"Rotating your objects with a workflow will evenly distribute incoming objects to specified owners, or owners within the specified team. The lead rotator will randomly assign leads to whichever owner has the lowest lead count."
This is (still) SERIOUSLY a PROBLEM. (as described in the previous vacation scenario as well) When we onboard new hires, and add them into lead routing workflows, or meeting links, with this methodology, all of the new leads and new opportunities route only to the new hires.
New reps are not prepared to handle that volume
It disadvantages experienced reps for their equitable share of new opportunities
"What? You didn't hit your sales numbers this month? Gee, too bad. I'm so sorry.... HubSpot assigned all of our new inbound leads to the newer hires, who have much lower ramp-up quotas than you."
If I want to catch someone up, it's much easier to pull an audit and bulk reassign, than to muck with what should be a scalable consistent process, or try and rationalize this function. Seems much less common that we'd be looking for automation to level out volume, rather than perform a true round-robin rotation.
We want this as well. If reps are doing any outreach on their own, and enter some contacts manually, it ruins their chances for being assigned inbound leads until the other reps are caught up. We'd rather have it rotate through a list, one at a time.
I totally agree. Earlier we used the leads last digit in phonenumber to determine what salesguy would get the lead. We have now moved over to Round Robin, but it does not really work well since I want one of my salesguys to get more leads than the others. Possible to add function for weighting, Hubspot?
Did I miss a post on this or has there not been any response for this functionality? We'd like to have the ability to do more with customizing and automating lead assignment. There are too many needs that companies have to only give them two automated options to rotate leads. If a new person, for example, we don't want to evenly distribute the same amount of leads to them right away. We'd want to limit the amount they receive until they are more up to speed. **This is just one other example as to why we need more options for rotating leads (There are plenty more to add).**
We would also really like the ability to mark an employee as out of the office ideally on a calendar in advance. This would ensure they are left out of the round robin during the days they are out.
Very useful information around here. I also think there should be more flexibility on lead assignment. Our idea was to implement lead assignment based on contact owner performance (speed dealing with leads, generated income, years of experience...). I guess there should be included a "Contact owner" object with is properties in play in order to set this up.
I would like to add that for us here it would be important to define the amount of leads to be assigned to each sales rep. For example, is there a way I can assign the first 2 leads of the day to one sales rep and the third leads to another and so on?
yes, round-robin should have an option between random and even distribution. Random may be the fairest way to schedule a large volume of meetings for a big team. But for small teams that meet with 2-3 clients/ day, the randomness creates extra manual work/ supervision to ensure meetings are booked in a reasonable and equitable split. You'd assume a random assignment would be fairly close to 50/50 if only 2 agents share the scheduler, but that is certainly not reality.
Hubspot team, this feature will help the growing businesses you wish to help most. This one should be an easy fix and alternative, low-cost scheduling solutions have already beat you to the punch on this one. like Calendly: Automatically distribute meetings to your team based on availability, priority or equity.
I agree wholeheartedly. We have 4 people handling incoming leads and the current approach leads to very unpredictable assignments. This should apply to both the workflow round robin function and the conversations inbox.
We definetely need a control of distributing the leads unevenly or on specific conditions, as when a new sales rep join it is impossible for us to evenly distribute them evenly.
Hubspot being focused on helping companies to boost up their sales, they should consider this feature on priority and should plan to implement it soon.
