Chili Piper vs. Salesforce Lead Assignment for Lead Routing

If you’re using Salesforce as your CRM, you might be using Salesforce Lead Assignment rules.

And if you're using Salesforce Lead Assignment rules, you might look like this anytime you need to update your routing rules: 

OK, OK — we love Salesforce Lead Assignment. It's perfect for small teams that are just getting started.

It's included with Salesforce.

And can certainly get the job done when doing basic lead routing on a small team.

But as you grow, maintaining all your rules in Salesforce Lead Assignment can be… let's just say challenging. 

So if you are tired of…

• Manually updating queues if your rep takes a last-minute sick day or goes on PTO
• Scrambling when a lead has been misrouted 
• Being the only person at your company who can put out lead routing fires

… you might be looking at alternatives. 

Enter: Chili Piper Distro 🕺

What is Chili Piper Distro and Benefits?

Chili Piper Distro is a lead distribution solution that helps companies distribute leads from webinars, events, MQL/PQL lead scoring, ebooks, and more. It’s ideal for sales teams with 5 or more reps — who are starting to get some complexity in round-robin-ing leads to reps — but without anyone working full-time on just lead routing.

The main benefits of Distro are: 

Complex lead routing, but like... easy

If you know how to go “click click” with your mouse, you can figure out how to set up lead routing rules in Distro. But you can also get as complex as you want — routing by Account Owner, Territory, Company Size, and any standard/custom field in Salesforce. 

Here’s an example of how you’d route by country and employee size: 

Make updates in under 2 minutes

Change to your team? Experimenting with a new type of routing? Someone taking vacation? Make those updates in 2 minutes or less (seriously, we timed it). 

Grows with your team 

You can get as simple or as complex as you’d like with your routing. As your team structure or routing rules change, Distro can easily keep up. 

Faster speed-to-lead

Since Chili Piper doesn't compete with other Salesforce operations running in the background, we can distribute leads to reps instantly.

The faster your reps get leads, the faster they can follow up.

What is Salesforce Lead Assignment?

Salesforce Lead Assignment provides basic functionality for lead distribution, making it perfect for small teams with straightforward use cases. 

However, it’s less ideal for businesses with complex lead routing scenarios (segmented round-robins, account ownership, etc.)

Feature Comparison: Distro vs Salesforce Lead Assignment

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the features that set Chili Piper Distro apart.

Who should use Chili Piper Distro vs Salesforce Lead Assignment

Distro is the best choice if you have more than 5 sales reps and you’re starting to add complex lead routing scenarios — for example, routing based on company size or account owner. Salesforce Lead Assignment is if you have fewer than 5 sales reps and need something super basic.

Chili Piper vs Salesforce Lead Assignment Usability

It’s fine to throw around buzzwords like “user-friendly” and “intuitive”.

But it’s probably better if we show you:

Visualizing all your routing rules in one place

Distro

At Chili Piper, we use Distro to assign CSMs/AMs after a deal is marked Closed Won. On the left are all the different teams. The first rule we have is “route by account owner”.

If you want to route based on Round-Robin instead, you hover over “change” and switch to Round-Rboin.

Salesforce Lead Assignment

In Salesforce Lead Assignment, there’s no way to see all your routing rules altogether. If you want to route to different queues, you’ll need to duplicate your rule and change the queue. 

So that means if you make a single change to your routing rules, you’ll have to duplicate the change across all your rules. 

(that’s why we don’t suggest Salesforce Lead Assignment unless you’re routing to just one queue). 

Adding Team Members

Distro 

You can add new teammates in just a few steps — and you can bulk add multiple teammates at once:

Salesforce Lead Assignment

You can add members to the queue by first searching “users” and adding them with the arrow feature.

Setting up rules

Distro

Here’s an example of how you would create a rule to route according to country and employee count: 

From here you can: 

• Change AND/OR logic by clicking on the purple button that says “AND”
• Add an additional lead routing condition (e.g. industry = software)
• Add an additional group (if you want to add and/or logic to a GROUP of routing conditions together)

Salesforce Lead Assignment

In the left-hand column you can add the field you’d like to route by and add the value in the right-hand column. 

Backend differences 

Aside from having a cleaner interface, Chili Piper differs from Salesforce Lead Assignment because it doesn’t have to compete with other Salesforce processes running in the background. 

In Salesforce, a governor limit known as Apex CPU Limit caps Apex code and declarative tool transactions at 10 seconds. 

If the threshold is reached, Salesforce will end the transaction and not commit the changes. There is no way around the restriction as it’s hard-coded in Salesforce. 

Side note: You can see which transactions are using the most CPU time by viewing the Analysis Perspective in the Debug Console. From there, you can troubleshoot your open transactions to determine what processes need to be edited. A Salesforce Admin will still need to make edits to the identified areas in order to resolve the governor limit issues.

This means more time elapsed between lead routing and assignment, which means slower lead response times for your team. 

Distro conducts all assignments outside of Salesforce and then simply commits the changes to Salesforce meaning its operations don’t compete with other backend operations, and the Apex CPU governor limit doesn’t apply.

Distro Use Cases

• MQLs/PQLs - As soon as the lead score hits a certain threshold, set up a trigger to distribute MQLs/PQLs to your sales team
• Assign named and target accounts - Take fast action to close high-value accounts
• Webinar or event lead distribution - When the Salesforce Campaign status is updated, distribute those leads to your sales team
• Ebook downloads - Distribute leads that downloaded gated ebook content. 
• Soooooo much more

Oh, and if you don’t want reps to manually follow-up with leads, you can automatically add them to a Salesloft or Outreach cadence. 🤯

What people are saying in the wild 

Source: G2 Crowd 

Source: G2 Crowd

72 Hours Becomes 2 Minutes with Chili Piper

Before Chili Piper, SwagUp was using custom Salesforce lead distribution.

Anytime they wanted to make a change, it would take about 72 hours of lead time. 

72 hours! 

Now that change takes about two minutes. 

Someone just has to go into Distro and press save. That’s it. 

Read the full SwagUp story here.

The Bottom Line

Salesforce Lead Assignment is a wonderful (and free!) tool for small teams or companies with simple lead routing needs. To support more complex lead distribution scenarios, check out Distro by Chili Piper. 

If you have more questions about which solution is right for you, talk to a Chili Piper rep and get a demo of Chili Piper.