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Understand lead distributions in assignment rules
- 9 minutes to read
- 3 contributors
In Dynamics 365 Sales, assignment rules define how leads are automatically distributed to sellers. When a lead is created and meets certain conditions that are defined in assignment rules, the lead is automatically assigned to the right seller. The automated process saves time and optimizes the workload across your sales team.
The following factors help to determine how leads are assigned:
- How many active leads are already assigned to sellers
- When a seller was last assigned a lead
License and role requirements
Basic lead distribution.
There are two types of basic algorithms for lead distribution:
Round robin
Load balancing.
In a round-robin-based assignment, the system looks at all the matched sellers of the lead and assigns it to the one who was assigned a lead least recently. This includes lead assignments from other sources, such as manual assignment or via an add-in.
Let's take an example to understand round-robin distribution criteria.
A lead comes into the system, and an application identifies the following potential sellers who can work on the lead, based on the selection criteria defined in the assignment rules.
The algorithm looks at the sellers' last assigned lead times and identifies that Seller 2 was assigned a lead least recently; thus, the lead is assigned to Seller 2. In this example, the routing takes place on 12 July 2021 at 13:30, so the algorithm updates Seller 2's last-assigned lead time to this value.
Now, taking this process through one more cycle, another lead comes into the system. But only Seller 2 and Seller 3 have the required attributes to work on the lead. So, the algorithm again looks at the following table and observes how the last assigned lead time has been updated for Seller 2.
The algorithm finds that Seller 3 was assigned a lead least recently; thus, it assigns the lead to Seller 3 and updates Seller 3's last assigned lead time to the time of routing.
In a load-balancing-based assignment, the system looks at all the matched sellers of the lead and assigns it to the seller who has maximum available capacity. This method helps to ensure that all salespeople are equally busy and minimizes uneven workloads.
Let's take an example to understand load-balancing distribution criteria.
Because Seller 3 has the maximum available capacity of all eligible sellers, the lead is assigned to Seller 3, whose available capacity is updated.
Now, to understand this better, consider the following series of events and assume that Sellers 1, 2, and 3 are all possible owners for the incoming leads.
Event 1 : Two new leads that match the rule come into the system.
Both leads are assigned to Seller 3, and the table looks like the following.
Event 2 : One more lead comes into the system.
The lead is assigned to either Seller 2 or Seller 3, because they both have equal available capacity. Say that the lead is assigned to Seller 2. The table is updated to look like the following.
Event 3 : Seller 1 closes three active leads, and a new matching lead comes in for routing.
For the incoming lead, the available capacity looks like the following; thus, the lead is assigned to Seller 1.
Additional lead distribution criteria
In addition to being assigned leads through round-robin and load-balancing distribution criteria, sellers are sorted according to their respective priorities. This helps us to select the top candidate for the lead.
Let's consider the following table as an example.
In a round-robin distribution, the priority of sellers is as follows.
In a load-balancing distribution, the priority of sellers is as follows.
To fine-tune the lead assignment, we need to introduce additional processing to better prioritize sellers according to our requirements. The following additional options are available:
Consider seller capacity
Consider seller work schedule.
When this option is selected, leads are routed only to those sellers who have available capacity to work on the leads—that is, positive available capacity. If none of the eligible sellers have available capacity, the lead will be marked as unassigned. For more information on managing seller's capacity, go to Set capacity for sellers .
Let's take an example for round robin. A lead comes in, and the following matched sellers have the last-assigned lead times and available capacity shown in the table.
For round-robin distribution, the priority is defined as follows for the sellers.
Because Seller 1 and Seller 2 have negative available capacity, they won't be considered as eligible owners, and the table will be reduced to the following.
The lead will be assigned to Seller 3.
When you select the Consider seller capacity option, it removes the sellers with negative or zero available capacity from the list of owners at the time of routing.
When this option is selected, the system considers the work schedule of sellers that has been defined in the sales accelerator and filters sellers based on their availability to work on the leads.
The algorithm analyzes sellers' availability in the order of the lead assignment priority (load balancing or round robin) and assigns the lead to a seller who is currently available.
In this example, you configured a time limit of 120 hours to assign a lead record that is created in the application.
If the matched sellers are currently unavailable, the leads are assigned to sellers who are available within the next 24 hours of the time of routing. If no sellers are available within the next 24 hours, the leads are assigned to sellers who are available within the next 48 hours, and so on up to 120 hours. If no seller is available within 120 hours, the leads are marked as unassigned.
The sellers are divided into six buckets, based on their availability. The buckets are viewed in top to bottom order. At the first non-empty bucket, the lead is distributed among the sellers in the bucket based on round-robin criteria. (For load balancing, only the first bucket is evaluated.)
To know more about how sellers update their personal work schedule in the sales accelerator, which is also used by assignment rules, go to Configure your work availability .
Let's take some examples to walk through this.
We'll use the following notation for availability at the time of routing:
- 0D - Currently available
- 1D - Earliest available within 24 hours
- 2D - Earliest available from 24 to 48 hours
- 3D - Earliest available from 48 to 72 hours
- 4D - Earliest available from 72 to 96 hours
- 5D - Earliest available from 96 to 120 hours
Example 1 : We've matched Sellers 1 through 5 to the lead, and the primary distribution criteria is round robin.
Because we have two sellers who are available currently, the lead will be distributed between them based on round-robin criteria.
When a lead comes in, it will be assigned to Seller 5. Further incoming leads for this rule will be assigned to Seller 3 and Seller 5 in a round-robin distribution, until the availability of the matched sellers changes.
Example 2 : We have matched Sellers 1 through 5, and the primary distribution criteria is load balancing.
Because Seller 3 and Seller 5 are currently available, and the primary distribution criteria is load balancing, the lead is assigned to Seller 3.
Example 3 : We've matched sellers 1 through 5, the primary distribution criteria is load balancing, and Consider seller capacity has been selected.
Because Consider seller capacity has been selected, Seller 3 and Seller 5 aren't eligible for routing.
The earliest availability bucket is 1D; therefore, Seller 1 and Seller 2 are considered.
Because the sellers aren't currently available, round-robin distribution will be used for these sellers.
Remember that the primary selection criteria in this example is load balancing.
So, let's assume the following last-assigned times.
The lead will be assigned to Seller 1. Further leads for this rule and this seller match will be assigned to Seller 2 and Seller 1 using round-robin criteria.
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Automatic Lead Assignment
Posted by: Dian Taylor | on June 15, 2021
I keep coming across more features that are getting enabled as part of 2021 Release Wave 1 and each time another feature is added I feel like I received another birthday present! Microsoft is not sitting still and new features are being added almost constantly! I think this feature is going to be a game changer for a lot of sales organizations. Keep in mind this feature is currently in public preview, which means it’s not a finished product as of yet. You have the ability to test it out and see how it works and provide feedback to Microsoft. As the title suggests, as part of this feature a lead distribution engine will be added to the Dynamics 365 organization. You can then configure the logic for leads to be automatically assigned to users or teams based on assignment rules. Keep in mind that this feature is part of the Sales Accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales, which means you’ll need to purchase the Sales Insights add-on license in order to get access to this functionality. To learn more about the Sales Accelerator check out these two articles I wrote about it: What’s new with the Sales Accelerator and Sales Accelerator(Preview) .
How does it work?
So first let’s talk about how this auto-assignment actually works. When a lead flows into the system the assignment rules that were configured are applied to the leads. If the condition(s) in the assignment rule is met, the lead is automatically assigned to a Dynamics 365 Sales user or team. Keep in mind that if there are multiple rules. The the system always looks at the order of the rules, the rule that is on top will be ran first, then the one beneath that one, and so on. So when you are creating new rules, these new rules will automatically be added to the top of the list, but if you need to you can move the rules’ order around so that the most important rules are ran first.
Seller Attributes The assignment rules work hand in hand with seller attributes that are part of the lead assignment functionality as well. We can use these attributes to track certain things on a per user basis, for example certain skills different users have, like the ability to speak another language besides English. Another example is there maybe certain types of leads that should only be sent to certain sales people. Seller Attributes allow us to create attributes and associate them with Dynamics 365 users (the sellers). We can use some of the fields that are related to the lead table for this (option sets) or we can create our own attributes with their corresponding values. Let’s create a new seller attribute to track which languages our users are speaking. In the Sales Hub, navigate to Sales Insights settings and click on ‘Assignment Rules(preview)’ on the sitemap. You’ll notice ‘Seller attributes’ on the bottom right side of the screen. Click on ‘Manage’ then click the ‘+New seller attribute’ button. In the window that pops up, enter a name for the seller attribute, which in my case is ‘Language’ or ‘Languages Spoken’. Below the seller attribute you’ll notice an dropdown field that reads ‘Data field linked to attribute’. These are fields that I mentioned earlier which are related to the lead table. If there was an out of the box ‘Preferred language’ field for leads (which would represent the language the lead prefers), you would be able to choose that here, and you would even be able to remove any of the values from that field in the seller attribute! So for example if I had the languages ‘German’, ‘Spanish’ and ‘English’ in the ‘Preferred Langage’ option set field, but only needed to use ‘Spanish’ and ‘English’, I could remove the ‘German’ option from the seller attribute.
Since the ‘Preferred Language’ field doesn’t exist as part of the lead table, there are two different options you have: you can select ‘Do not link with fields’ (This allows you to add your own values to the attribute by typing the values in the ‘Attribute Values’ field and hitting enter on your keyboard) or you can manually create the ‘Preferred Language’ field for the lead table and using that. Honestly I would suggest trying both just to you understand what I’m talking about and get to learn more about this functionality. Managing Sales Teams You can access the sales users or sellers by clicking on the ‘Manage button’ on the Sales Teams section on the Assignment rules page. This will take you to a page that shows all the sellers and their related information, like ‘Max capacity’ (see explanation below), ‘Current leads assigned’ ( if there are leads assigned to sellers prior to creating assignment rules, the total number of assigned leads will not show in this list immediately. Once a lead gets assigned, a leads’ status is updated or a lead is deleted, this number of currently assigned leads will be updated) . Seller attributes that are assigned to each seller, whether or not a seller should be part of the users that gets leads assigned by the assignment rules (Assign Leads slider) and a list of ‘Roles’. If you want certain sellers to be excluded from getting leads assigned you can turn this off on a per user basis. Unfortunately there is currently no way to mass update sellers, you’ll have to turn them off one by one. Roles represent the security roles that are assigned to the user.
Applying Seller Attributes Once you have created the seller attributes you will still need to add them to the different sellers. You can start this process by clicking on the ‘Manage’ button on the Sales Team section on the Assignment Rules page. Keep in mind these seller attributes can only be assigned to users, not to teams. In order to assign the seller attributes to Dynamics 365 users in bulk, check the box next to the seller names, then click ‘Apply Attributes’ and select the attributes you want to assign. Another button on the top is the ‘Set Lead Capacity’ button. This will allow you to set how many leads any seller could have assigned as a maximum. This is important because this works hand in hand with the assignment rules. If (based on the rule) a lead is to ready to get assigned Tom, and Tom’s lead capacity is 10 but he already has 10 leads assigned to him the lead will not be assigned to him. The lead capacity can also be updated for multiple users at a time. Assignment Rules The assignment rules is where we configure the data (which leads should be assigned) and the logic of the lead assignment. (when does a lead needs to get assigned?) You’ll notice ‘Assignment rules’ on top of the screen. This is where you will be creating the assignment rules. Click ‘+New Assignment Rule’ to start creating a new rule. You will need to enter the name of the rule and select a lead segment. NOTE: Once the rule is activated, all of the leads in the segment will be assigned based on the logic in the rule. If you want this rule to apply to all leads you can leave the ‘Set lead segment’ field blank. If you’ve read my previous article about the sales accelerator and how segments work, then you know that we can filter out leads in a segment.
When you select a segment in the assignment rule, you can add additional filters to the assignment rule by clicking ‘+ Additional Condition’. This will take you to a query screen where you can configure the filters you want to use for this specific rule. You have the ability to filter on lead columns but you can also add filters for tables that are related to the lead, just like we can in advanced find. For this particular example I added a field/column to the lead table called ‘Preferred Language’ with the values “English’, ‘Dutch’ and ‘Spanish’ so I can track which language the lead prefers to speak. Under the assignment rule I am adding an additional lead condition where the ‘Preferred Language’ equals ‘English’. This means that all leads in the segment that I tied to to this rule that have this field set to ‘English’ will be included to be assigned. In the ‘ Assign these leads to ‘ field we can define who to assign the leads to. These could be individual users or to owning teams. (Make sure the teams/users have the correct privileges otherwise the leads won’t be assigned to the user/team.) If you choose to assign the leads to users, you’ll notice you can assign the leads to ‘Sellers with matching attributes’. These refer to the seller attributes that I discussed earlier. This option also allows us to add filters for those seller attributes. In this example we only want to assign the leads to sellers who speak English, so I choose the ‘User seller attributes defined for assignment rules’ option, and then picked ‘Language’ (<-this is the seller attribute) equals ‘English’. This means that these leads will only be assigned to sellers/users that have the ‘English’ language seller attribute. Under the ‘Distribute leads by’ section you have the option to choose load balancing or round robin assignment. Load balancing means that the leads will be distributed based on a users’ current load. Example: According to the rule a lead would need to be assigned to sellers/users who speak English. Let’s say there are two users, Bob and Scott who both speak English. Scott has a current load of 10 leads and Bob has a load of 5 leads currently assigned to him. This means the lead would be assigned to Bob, because his load is less than Scott’s. Round robin assignment is where the leads get distributed evenly. Let’s say we have 4 leads that need to be distributed, then both Bob and Scott will get 2 leads assigned regardless of how many leads they own. Below the ‘Load balancing’ and ‘Round robin’ assignment options you see the ability to consider a seller’s capacity. As mentioned before, a seller’s capacity is the maximum number of leads that can be assigned to the seller. If this box is checked, a seller’s capacity will be taken into account.
You’ll also notice a check box named ‘Consider seller availability’. If you check this box, then the seller’s calendar will be taken into consideration. Example: If a seller has marked days off on their calendar the lead won’t get assigned to that seller on those days even if that seller meets all other conditions. The system would try to assign the lead to another seller who meets the conditions in the rule or the lead would remain unassigned (if no other seller meets the condition(s)). In order for a seller to set their availability they would need to configure this. Before they can do this, the setting needs to be enabled first. You’ll need to navigate to ‘Sequences’, where you will see a ‘Settings’ button on the top right of the page (image above). The seller availability settings can be turned on here. Once this is turned on, each seller can configure their own individual availability by navigating to the Sales area in the Sales Hub and then selecting ‘Sales Accelerator’ on the sitemap on the left hand side. On the top of the work items lists you’ll notice a gear icon. This is where some of the personal settings can be configured. When clicking the gear icon the ‘Personal Settings’ window will pop up where users can configure their availability. To learn more about setting up sellers’ availability c lick here . One last thing I wanted to mention is that this engine runs each time a lead is created or updated, so it’s not like it runs in batches every couple of hours. I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!
Posted in D365 Sales , Release Wave | Tags: auto assignment , automatically assign leads , Lead Assignment , lead assignment engine , Sales | 2 Comments »
2 Comments to Automatic Lead Assignment
Thanks Dian for sharing this. One query regarding lead assignment engine. As it runs each time a lead is created or updated, if the lead is already assigned to a seller and a particular attribute changes on the lead, I believe such leads are not considered for reassignment to the sellers. Correct me if I am wrong over here.
I haven’t tried this myself, so I would definitely recommend playing with it to try that scenario out.
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Automate lead assignment and routing with Dynamics 365 Sales Insights
The sales process contains a lot of moving parts, including the sales team themselves. Each team member has their own schedule and lead capacity. Keeping track of these pieces is difficult and time consuming for a person to do, and team members may overestimate their availability to take on new leads as they come in. With Sales Accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, save time and effort by automatically assigning new leads to sales team members as they come in. Sales Insights is available by default for Sales Premium licenses or as an add-on for Sales Enterprise. The Sales Accelerator can be activated by navigating to the Sale Insights Settings area. Use the Change Area menu at the bottom of the navigation pane to switch over. Users will also need to have the sequence manager, sales manager, or administrator role.
Setting up assignment segments
After configuring Sales Accelerator, segments can be created for use in assignment rules. These segments are not the same the same as the segments used in Dynamics 365 Marketing. Users will need to have the sequence manager, sales manager, or administrator role to set up segments. The segment builder works pretty similar to an advanced find window. Currently, these segments can only target leads and opportunities. In the builder, rows can be added for different conditions and appended to previous rows using AND/OR connectors. For example, all leads created by a specific user could be pulled into the segment. There is also a Simulate results feature to take a look at what the segment will approximately look like. New leads that fit within the criteria will also be added to the segment.
Creating assignment rules
Assignment rules can be set to target all incoming leads or be specified for a created segment. These rules are what tell the system how to break up leads within the segment and assign them out to the sales team members. When choosing the leads eligible for the rule, additional rules and conditions can be applied outside of what’s within the chosen segment. After assigning the proper set of leads or opportunities, the sales team members eligible for the rule can be set. The Any seller option does just what its name says. It opens the rule to all sales team members. Use the Seller with matching attributes option to specify conditions that the salesperson must have. This works just like the segment creator for the leads and opportunities themselves. As an example, large sales teams that span across multiple regions may want to focus lead assignments to local areas. Say a lead from Florida is submitted. The rule can grab that Florida lead and assign it to one of the sales team members that is also in Florida.
There are also Specific sellers and Specific teams options for assigning leads. Use the Specific sellers option if there is a set list of salespeople that should be receiving the leads. They may not have matching attributes or be on the same sales team in D365, so it could be easier to list them out this way. Similarly, if there are defined sales teams in the system, leads can be assigned out at the team level before being divided up among those members.
Now the group of salespeople has been set, but how does the system know how to hand out the leads among them? That is done with the Distribute leads by setting. There are two primary options available here: Round robin and Load balancing. Round robin uses an even cycle to distribute the leads. It starts with one member and will move on to the next person with each incoming lead. Load balancing takes the current assignments of the salespeople into account before assigning leads. It aims to keep each person approximately equally loaded.
Additional seller assignment options
In addition to those two main distribution options, there are another two option checkboxes to adjust how the leads are assigned: Consider seller availability and Consider seller capacity . To consider seller availability, the sellers will need to turn on the seller availability settings switch in the Sequence settings of Sales Accelerator. After turning it on, sellers can set their availability in the work list settings. Normal working hours can be set and modified based on specific days of the week or set as general hours for all days. Non-working hours can also be added for any planned breaks or days off. With availability properly set, Sales Accelerator will avoid loading new leads onto sellers that are not going to be available to properly follow up.
Seller capacities are limits that can be placed on the number of leads and opportunities that an individual salesperson can be assigned at a time. These can be done at an individual level, or set as a standard level for all members of the sales team. The capacity settings can be found in the Team Settings of Sales Accelerator. On this page select one or multiple salespeople and use the Set Capacity button at the top. On this page, there is a switch on each salesperson to completely turn off lead assignment for that person. This can be useful if that person is on vacation and has not set their availability.
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To create and activate an assignment rule · Sign in to your Dynamics 365 Sales Hub app. · Go to Change area in the lower-left corner of the page
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