The lead was worth having for two hours. It was routed in five days.

A lead has a half-life, and manual routing outlives it

Five thousand leads a month arrived across more than fifty dealer territories, and each one was distributed by hand. Someone worked out which territory it belonged to, which dealer within it, and passed it on.

That took up to five days. By then the enquiry has usually been answered by someone else. The value of a lead is highest at the moment it is created and falls away quickly, which makes routing latency a conversion problem rather than an admin one.

Manual distribution failed in more than just speed:

• Follow-up was inconsistent, because nothing tracked whether an assigned lead had actually been actioned.
• Prioritisation did not exist. Every lead looked the same in the queue, so the best one waited behind whatever arrived first.
• A missed response surfaced late, when a report was run rather than while the lead was still warm.

Routing is a rule, not a decision

Which dealer should receive a lead is determined by territory, and territory is knowable from the lead itself. Treating that as a judgement call made every lead wait for a person who was adding nothing to the outcome except delay.

The same is true of prioritisation and of chasing. Which leads deserve attention first is a scoring question, and whether a response has happened inside the window is a timer. Neither needs a human until something goes wrong, and that is exactly where a human should be spending the attention.

Territory mapping, scoring, and an SLA that escalates

Sales Cloud carries lead management with the routing automated: territory mapping resolves each lead to the right dealer as it arrives, without a queue in between. A lead rating engine scores and prioritises, so a dealer opens the list already ordered by what is worth calling first.

Experience Cloud gives dealers their own view of the leads and opportunities assigned to them, which removes the handover step entirely. SLA monitoring tracks response timelines against the two-hour target and triggers escalation when one is at risk; the exception surfaces while it can still be recovered, rather than in next month's conversion report.

Response time fell about 60%, from roughly five days to a two-hour target, and lead-to-opportunity conversion rose 30%. The second number is the consequence of the first: the leads were always convertible, they were simply being reached too late.