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Assign leads to your team

Assign leads to your team

You have multiple reps. New leads come in. Who gets which one? This recipe walks through the three ways thola handles it, and how to pick the right default.

The scene

You have, say, four salespeople. Leads come in from a website form, WhatsApp, walk-ins, an ad campaign. Right now: either you manually triage every lead (slow, you're the bottleneck), or you go round-robin (fair but ignores fit), or your best rep cherry-picks from a WhatsApp group (everyone else gets the leftovers).

thola gives you three modes. You can mix them per source. Most workspaces settle on one.

The three modes

Mode 1 — Manual

You pick the owner per lead. Suitable for high-value B2B deals where each lead needs careful matching. Not suitable for high-volume retail / services.

How to set it up: Settings → Sales → Lead routing → Mode: Manual.

Daily flow: You see new unassigned leads on your Home screen each morning. Tap each, pick an owner, done.

Mode 2 — Round-robin

thola distributes new leads evenly across selected employees. Fair, simple, ignores fit.

How to set it up: Settings → Sales → Lead routing → Mode: Round-robin → Select team members.

Daily flow: New leads route automatically. Each rep sees the new leads in their own Home.

When it's wrong: If your reps have very different skill levels (one senior, three junior), round-robin sends the senior the same load as the juniors. Complex leads might go to the wrong rep.

Mode 3 — AI-routed (the popular one)

thola ranks every incoming lead as simple / mid / complex and routes the complex ones to your senior reps, the simple ones to your juniors. Workload-balanced so nobody gets all the easy ones.

Always a two-step flow — thola previews the assignments, you tap Confirm before they commit.

How to set it up: Settings → Sales → Lead routing → Mode: AI-routed. Optionally pick:

  • Workload-balanced (default) — even total load across reps
  • Source-based — leads from specific sources always go to specific reps
  • Role-based — only assign leads in matching territory / language to matching reps

You can also enable strict role matching — never assign a lead to a rep whose role doesn't match, even if that means the lead sits unassigned for a few hours.

The steps to switch modes

If you're starting from scratch:

  1. Settings → Sales → Lead routing
  2. Pick AI-routed (we default new workspaces to this)
  3. Tick the team members who should be in the rotation
  4. Save

If you're switching from round-robin to AI-routed:

  1. Same path
  2. New mode applies to new leads from now on
  3. Existing assigned leads stay with their current owner unless you bulk-reassign

The bulk-reassign flow

When someone joins or leaves the team, you'll want to redistribute the existing pipeline:

  1. Sales → Leads → Filter: assigned to [departing rep]
  2. Select all
  3. Tap Reassign
  4. Pick: redistribute round-robin / by-source / AI-routed
  5. Preview — every lead with its proposed new owner
  6. Confirm

This is one operation, fully auditable. The previous owner is recorded so you can revert if needed.

Talking to the Sales agent about assignment

A few prompts that come back useful:

"Show me leads assigned to each rep this month." "Which rep is over-loaded right now?" "Reassign all leads from the Instagram source to Karthik." "Show me unassigned leads." "Why was lead INV-4521 assigned to Priya?" — the agent will explain the routing decision

The gotchas

Leaving manual + AI mixed

If you set AI-routed but then manually reassign a few leads, the AI doesn't second-guess you. Manual overrides stay sticky. That's good — but it means your rep performance metrics need to be read with that in mind.

Strict role matching can leave leads unassigned

If you tick "strict role matching" and no rep matches the lead's role/language, the lead sits unassigned. It shows up in your Unassigned filter for your attention. Don't enable strict matching unless you actually want this behaviour.

The first AI run can look surprising

The AI's first set of suggestions might not match your gut — "why is this lead going to Karthik, not Priya?" — the agent will show you the reasoning ("Karthik has highest conversion on this source, current load is balanced"). Read it; it's usually right after two weeks of data.

What's next

Import your sales sheetUnblock stuck deals