Workshop Recap: Routing Recipes for Your Sales and Ops Teams

Lead routing is one of the best ways to improve your speed to lead and win more deals. But automated routing does more than that. Delivering your leads to the right rep increases efficiencies and ensures happy customers — and it goes beyond sales. Customer success and account managers also benefit from intelligent assignments. These can be leads, accounts, opportunities, or cases. Basically, any record in your Salesforce instance can be routed.

So, does that make lead routing a misnomer? Should it be called CRM routing instead?

We asked our ops experts, Scott Haney and Gaines Murfee, who've been hacking Salesforce flows and routing records since birth. During our first-ever customer-only workshop, Scott and Gaines gave us the best routing recipes for implementing new workflows and improving your customer experience.

Ready to get cooking? Here are their top recipes (with easy directions) that you can follow at home:

Recipe 1: Sales and Marketing Alignment

One of the most persistent tensions in go-to-market teams is the friction between marketing and sales over lead distribution — who gets credit, who qualifies what, and when a lead is "ready." The solution Scott and Gaines recommend is routing first engagements to SDRs.

When prospects engage through inbound channels or outbound cadences (via tools like Salesloft), intent data from Kickfire helps determine whether a lead merits SDR attention. As Scott explained:

"These are typically 'warm' leads, not necessarily hot leads. We want our SDR team to qualify and have a conversation with them before handing them off to an AE."

SDR queues are organized by region and company size, so the right rep gets the right lead based on geography and account profile. The routing logic follows two scenarios:

If an SDR already owns the account: The system evaluates the account against a rule set — avoiding alerts for existing customers or accounts with open opportunities, while alerting the appropriate rep for qualified or semi-qualified accounts.

"We don't want to alert them if they're a customer or open opportunity. But if they're a qualified or semi-qualified account, it'll go to the appropriate rep." — Scott Haney

If the account is unassigned: The lead attaches to a net-new rep through round-robin assignment, distributed by region and company size.

This keeps marketing and sales aligned, ensures faster follow-up on higher-quality accounts, and removes the ambiguity that typically causes inter-team conflict over lead ownership.

Recipe 2: Onboarding Automation

Manual handoffs between account executives and customer success managers create frustrating delays for new customers. When an AE closes a deal but then has to manually notify a CSM, assign accounts, and coordinate kickoff scheduling, the process can drag on for days.

Gaines put it simply:

"We don't like always having to have human intervention with things. Relying on a human to do the things that could easily be accomplished with technology doesn't make any sense to us."

"I know one of my big metrics is how fast we can onboard customers."

The solution is Distro, Chili Piper's record routing product. Unlike native Salesforce capabilities, Distro can listen for field changes or new record creation and automatically assign records using custom lookup fields — functionality Salesforce doesn't natively support.

Here's how the onboarding automation workflow runs:

1. When an opportunity reaches "Closed Won" status, Distro triggers routing to both an account manager and a customer success manager simultaneously.
2. Email alerts notify the assigned account executive about the new assignment.
3. A five-minute delay allows Salesforce field values to populate and welcome communications to send via HubSpot before CSM outreach begins.
4. The customer success manager makes an introduction and the customer is prompted to schedule a kickoff call through Chili Piper's assigned owner queue.

"Clients can immediately schedule their kickoff call right after they sign up."

The results were significant:

"From a results standpoint, we significantly decreased the time it takes to get a kickoff call scheduled with the customer due to removing the human intervention." — Gaines Murfee

For cross-sell scenarios, separate routing flows handle different segments — SMB, mid-market, and enterprise — with region-based rules layered in. The entire process completes in approximately ten seconds.

Recipe 3: Building the Best Tech Stack

Routing tools are essential infrastructure — but choosing the right one matters. SwagUp, an inbound-heavy business with complex routing needs, learned this the hard way.

Their previous system relied on custom Salesforce routing built by a specialized developer. The router analyzed multiple qualification factors: budget, partnership affiliations, account ownership history, and existing customer status. Tyler from SwagUp described what maintaining it was like:

"We relied heavily on a custom router in Salesforce that a Salesforce developer built out and we were maintaining indexes and queues."

As their routing logic grew more complex, the cost and effort to maintain it became unsustainable:

"It got really expensive to maintain and scale because we wanted to have complex routing logic. And anytime we wanted to make a change, it required a developer to make that change, and it would go into testing and deployment."

Change cycles extended to 72 hours, consuming developer resources on platform maintenance rather than core product work. The solution was clear:

"So that's why we implemented Distro."

With Distro in place, SwagUp eliminated their dependency on Salesforce developers for routing changes, reduced modification timelines from days to minutes, and gained the flexibility to build and adjust complex routing logic without engineering involvement.

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Want to see how automated CRM routing could work for your team? Schedule a demo to learn more about what's possible with Distro.

Lead routing is one of the best ways to improve your speed to lead and win more deals.

But automated routing does more than that.

Delivering your leads to the right rep increases efficiencies and ensures happy customers — and it goes beyond sales. Customer success and account managers also benefit from intelligent assignments.

These can be leads, accounts, opportunities, or cases. Basically, any record in your Salesforce instance can be routed.

So, does that make lead routing a misnomer? Should it be called CRM routing instead?

We asked our ops experts, Scott Haney and Gaines Murfee, who’ve been hacking Salesforce flows and routing records since birth.

During our first-ever customer-only workshop, Scott and Gaines gave us the best routing recipes for implementing new workflows and improving your customer experience.

Ready to get cooking?

Here are their top recipes (with easy directions) that you can follow at home:

1. Sales and marketing alignment

A tale as old as time…

Your marketing team and sales department squabble over leads, MQLs, opportunity credits, you name it.

The secret ingredient to connect these teams?

Routing first engagements to SDRs.

When prospects come inbound — or even outbound through a Salesloft cadence — we look at intent data from Kickfire to determine if that lead is worth passing over to the SDR team.

New prospects and accounts are sent to the SDR team so they can decide whether to reach out or not based on their own discretion.

“These are typically “warm” leads, not necessarily hot leads. We want our SDR team to qualify and have a conversation with them before handing them off to an AE,” Scott said.

But, backing up… how do we determine which lead goes to which rep?

Since our SDRs are spread all across the world, we have queues based on region and company size.

Let’s take a peek inside the router.

1. The account is already owned by an SDR.

“If somebody comes in and they engage with us, a signal is populated from our analytics team, which is basically a trigger on a field update in Salesforce,” Scott said.

We evaluate the opportunity based on a certain rule set:

• We don't want to alert them if they're a customer or open opportunity

• But if they’re a qualified or semi-qualified account, it'll go to the appropriate rep and alert them

2. The account is unassigned.

If the lead is not already attached to a specific SDR – which is determined by the lookup field on the account – then it'll be assigned to a net new rep in round robin fashion.

The big result we're looking for is a quick follow-up on higher qualified accounts — the end goal is more qualified opportunities.

2. Onboarding automation

Account executives or managers are usually responsible for getting new customers to the customer success manager to start their onboarding.

But what happens if the AE or AM is out for a couple of days?

Three, maybe four days go by before the account is finally assigned and a kickoff call is booked.

As you can imagine, that’s not the best first impression.

“We don't like always having to have human intervention with things,” Gaines said.

Relying on a human to do the things that could easily be accomplished with technology doesn’t make any sense to us.

There’s just too much room for error.

You create a better customer experience and get everything flowing through the funnel quicker when you automate the process.

“I know one of my big metrics is how fast we can onboard customers,” Gaines said. “And if I'm sitting there taking five days to get the accounts assigned, then we're already five days behind.”

Our rec for spicing up your account assignment?

Distro.

What is Distro?

“The best way I can describe it is like it's assigning leads in Salesforce or accounts or cases on two custom lookup fields,” Gaines said. “That’s one of the best parts – because Salesforce doesn't let you do that.”

Salesforce doesn’t let you listen for a “trigger” to happen in Salesforce – like a change in any field or new record creation.

“Our use case was for closed won opportunities,” Gaines said. “There’s a bunch of processes that happen after. But instead of human intervention, we just trigger this route to run when an opportunity is closed won and then route it to an AM. We also route it to a CSM at the same time, alert them both, and then fire off an email to the account executive. So the account executive knows who's been assigned that account.”

There’s a five-minute delay step after the op gets closed. This is so we can:

1. Populate the values in Salesforce

2. Send an email from HubSpot that says, “Welcome to your new account. Here's the link to sign up and create your account”

A few moments after that, a CSM can make an intro and suggest times for a kickoff call via Chili Piper using an assigned owner queue.

“Clients can immediately schedule their kickoff call right after they sign up,” Gaines said.

Gaines said that he no longer has to sit there and watch the reports to make sure things are getting assigned properly, which no one wants to do.

“From a results standpoint, we significantly decreased the time it takes to get a kickoff call scheduled with the customer due to removing the human intervention,” Gaines said.

Here’s the flow a closed won opportunity goes through:

“We also do onboardings for cross sell. You buy a new product, so we split those out. And so we have different routes that run.”

Here’s the flow for cross selling:

“So these are the routers that run based off of a trigger of this closed one opportunity over here. And then our rules are basically configured within the rules in Distro. And so we have these different segments. Is it SMB? Is it at market? Is it enterprise? What region is it in? And so on and so forth for signing the resources. So this whole process from here to here, I think it takes ten seconds.”

3. Building the best tech stack

One thing we know for a fact? Having a routing tool is crucial.

And Distro is the best in the business.

Just ask SwagUp.

“SwagUp is a pretty inbound heavy business,” Tyler said. “So a lot of our leads are coming to our site and filling out a form or filling out a demo booker, things like that. And based on how qualified they are, we want them to go to different teams.”

All of their teams function at different levels.

They have strategic account executives and SDRs. When new opportunities are coming in, they look at source to determine where to route the lead.

Different lead sources have different levels of qualification:

• If they have the right budget

• If they're working with one of SwagUp’s partners or affiliates

• If there's a previous owner of that account

• If they're an existing account

“We relied heavily on a custom router in Salesforce that a Salesforce developer built out and we were maintaining indexes and queues,” Tyler said.

But it wasn’t cost effective for them to keep up.

“It got really expensive to maintain and scale because we wanted to have complex routing logic,” Tyler said. “And anytime we wanted to make a change or required a developer to make that change, it would go into testing deployment.”

Not only was it expensive, it was time consuming and an inefficient use of their resources.

“So say like 72 hours to make tweaks and modifications. And it was taking developer time to maintain what we couldn't really spend on maintaining our platform,” Tyler said.

“So that's why we implemented Distro.”

Curious to learn more about the possibilities with automated CRM routing?

Schedule a call with our team.