Lead routing
Definition
The rules that decide which person a new lead goes to, and how fast a human follows up.
How it works
A lead submits a form, a rule matches it to an owner, a notification fires and the clock starts. In my experience response time is the lever that moves conversion hardest, and it is an operations problem: interest peaks the moment the form is sent, while the person is still at their desk. A lead called within the hour is worth more than the same lead called on Thursday, and the difference was decided by a workflow rule. What changes the answer is team shape: two reps in one market need a notification that someone owns; forty reps across twelve markets need rules for territory, language, segment and seniority, and a fallback for the lead that matches none of them.
What to watch for
Pull the time from form submission to first human activity; both timestamps already sit in your CRM. Read it for evenings and weekends separately, because the median hides the nights, and find out whether a lead that arrives Friday at five waits until Monday. Open last month’s assignments and look for round-robin blindness: the enterprise lead with the newest rep, or the German-speaking lead owned by someone with no German. Check for leads still assigned to a user who left the company. Then submit your own form after hours under an unfamiliar name, and time what happens.
The question you ask
“How long did it take us to call the last ten leads?”