Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Round Robin Lead Assignment
Some of my customers over the years have used a Round Robin method of assigning leads. So the first lead that comes in goes to Sales Rep A, second lead goes to Sales Rep B, etc. It works well with smaller sales teams that occupy the same geographic territory. I haven’t encountered one of these customers in quite some time. Fast forward 6-8 or more years, and I got a call from Paul. Paul asked me about the easiest way to assign leads as they come in to sales reps in a Round Robin mechanism.
Back in my early days of consulting, I used to use a product that had a feature called lookup.ini. It was an awesome little utility. One of the hand uses for it was doing round robin lead assignment. My initial thought was to use the lookup.ini… But wrong product for that. So with Microsoft CRM’s powerful workflow engine, we created a very simple engine to assign leads to reps one at a time.
The basics of this are pretty easy. This sample is for inspiration and I would make sure you modified it before you put it in your production servers. 🙂
1. Create A Lead Round Robin Entity.
On that entity, create an integer with the name of Lead Assignment. Make the entity visible in the settings area of CRM. Make a 1:N Relationship with Leads. Don’t make the link visible so you don’t have a bunch of things hanging off the left Navigation area. 🙂
2. – Create The “Main Workflow”
In the main workflow, you want to update the lead to relate the Lead Round Robin to the Lead. And then you want to do a number of If Statements. If Lead Round Robin = 2, then apply Workflow #2. Do that for each of your sales reps. (So in my example, we have 5 sales reps, so all of the workflows will be identical for each of the reps minus the 5th one.)
All of the IF statements will end up firing off workflows that we will create. All of the workflows are identical, minus the last one. The last one will in turn reset the counter back to 1 and start the process over again.
This sample will work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online or CRM on Premise.
