As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly route each lead to the right salesperson.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Hand it to a person

   Second choice

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, power-user skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your CRM or lead spreadsheet and export a representative set of recent leads with the fields used for assignment, removing unnecessary personal data.
   2. Create a second table of salespeople showing each person’s territory, sector, product specialism, customer size, language, availability, exclusions and existing-account responsibilities.
   3. Write down the current routing rules, response targets, ownership rules, escalation queue and what should happen when two salespeople qualify for the same lead.
   4. Paste the business context, salesperson table, routing rules and anonymised lead sample into a chatbot using the supplied prompt.
   5. Compare the proposed assignments and reasons with your existing ownership records and ask the chatbot to correct any rule that does not match your written policy.
   6. Give the decision table and exception process to your CRM administrator, configure the workflow, then run historical leads and deliberately ambiguous cases through it before enabling live routing.
   7. Have a sales manager check the first live assignments against the agreed rules, record wrong or disputed routes, and update the rules rather than silently accepting repeated exceptions.

   Prompt

   Design a lead-routing method for our sales team.
   
   Business context:
   - What we sell: [brief description]
   - Our target customers: [customer types, sectors, locations and company sizes]
   - Lead sources: [website, email, events, partners or other sources]
   
   Salespeople and their permitted assignments:
   [Paste a table with salesperson name, territory, sector or product specialism, customer size, language, current availability and any exclusions.]
   
   Routing rules and constraints:
   [Paste the rules, service levels, account ownership rules, capacity limits, conflicts of interest and escalation process.]
   
   Lead records:
   [Paste a sample of anonymised leads with every available field, including source, company, location, sector, size, product interest, enquiry text, existing account owner and timestamp.]
   
   Create:
   1. A clear priority order for the routing rules.
   2. A decision table that assigns each lead to one salesperson or an escalation queue.
   3. The reason for every assignment, quoting only facts present in the lead record.
   4. A list of missing fields that prevent a reliable assignment.
   5. An exception process for ambiguous, duplicate, existing-account and out-of-territory leads.
   6. Test cases for boundary conditions and a short monitoring plan.
   
   Do not invent lead facts, salesperson availability or business rules. Do not make a confident assignment where the required information is missing. Separate deterministic rule matches from judgement-based recommendations. Return the result in a format that a CRM administrator could translate into workflow rules.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.