Routing leads fairly across your team
Distribute incoming leads evenly across your agents so every lead has a clear owner and nothing falls through the cracks.
When leads land faster than any one agent can work them, fair distribution keeps your pipeline moving and your team accountable. This playbook shows how to assign every new lead an owner, route live transfers to that owner first, and make sure a missed handoff always becomes someone's task.
Give every lead an owner
Ownership starts in your intake Workflow. Add an Assign Agent step right after your trigger so each lead is handed to a person the moment it arrives — before any text, call, or task fires.
Open your intake workflow
In Workflows, open the automation that runs when a new lead comes in (for example, a Lead Received or Contact Created trigger).
Add the Assign Agent step
From the step palette, under the Data group, drop in an Assign Agent step. Place it early — ideally as the first action after the trigger — so ownership is set before outreach begins.
Pair assignment with a stage change
Add a Change Stage step so each newly assigned lead also moves into your working stage in the Pipeline. Now ownership and pipeline position stay in sync.
Notify the new owner
Add a Send Notification step so the assigned agent knows a lead just landed on their plate and can act on it fast.
Assign before you nurture. Putting the Assign Agent step ahead of your first SMS or AI call means every downstream notification and task already points at the right person — no orphaned leads waiting to be claimed.
Route live calls to the assigned owner
Your SAMI Bots respect that ownership when they transfer a live lead. The default routing pattern, assigned then group, rings the contact's assigned agent first, then cascades to the rest of the routing pool if that agent isn't available.
- Assigned agent — rings only the agent assigned to the contact.
- Simultaneous group — rings the whole matched pool at once.
- Assigned then group — rings the assigned owner first, then the group on the second attempt. This is the default, and it's what keeps round-robin fairness intact on live calls.
An agent is only rung if they're toggled available for calls and inside their schedule. If the owner can't take it, SAMI falls through to the group, then to your fallback numbers — so a fairly assigned lead still gets answered.
Keep ownership clear after the call
The assigned owner should never go stale. On key call outcomes, SAMI both notifies that owner and can hand the lead to someone new when needed.
- On a Successful Transfer, SAMI cancels the remaining cadence and notifies the assigned user (and the owner) that the lead was answered.
- On a Missed Transfer, SAMI notifies the assigned user and creates a follow-up task so a real person calls back fast — the miss never just disappears.
- Use the Assign to a user outcome action when a result should reassign the lead — for example, routing a qualified buyer to a closing agent so ownership always reflects who's actually working it.
Done right, fair routing means every lead has a name next to it within seconds, the right agent gets the live call, and a dropped handoff turns into a task instead of a lost deal.
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Last updated 2026-06-21