Many of you leverage assignment rules for distributing leads to your inside sales teams but sometimes you need a distribution system that provides a random and equal flow of inbound leads to everyone on your team. This is where a lead sprinkler (aka: lead router, round robin) comes in handy.

Originally posted in the document, 100 Ways to Use Formula Fields, this is one worth repeating…

In this example we will assume you have 3 inside sales people and you want to assign an equal number of incoming leads to each person.

To implement you’ll need to add 2 new fields to leads

1. Lead_number – this should be an auto-number field

2. Round_Robin_ID – this is a custom formula field populated with the following formula MOD(Value(Lead_Number__c),3)

How it works: 

The formula uses the custom auto-number field, Lead Number, and assigns each lead a sequential number starting with 1. The MOD function divides the lead number by the number of reps (3 in this example) and returns a remainder of 0, 1, or 2 in to the Round_Robin_ID field.

Now we can use this value in assignment rules to assign leads to our different reps. For example:

• Round_Robin_ID = 0 is assigned to Sales Rep A
• Round_Robin_ID = 1 is assigned to Sales Rep B
• Round_Robin_ID = 2 is assigned to Sales Rep C

If you need to increase the number of reps, say to 10, just modify your formula as such MOD(Value(Lead_Number__c) ,10) and add in the additional assignment rules.