Lead routing is the process of assigning each new lead to a specific rep or team, using rules based on fields such as territory, company size, industry or account ownership.
Routing runs after a lead is captured or imported and before anyone contacts it. Common methods are territory rules, round robin and account-based ownership, and most teams combine two of them. The rules live in your CRM or a routing tool. Hands-on setup steps are in how to set up lead routing in your CRM.
Why it matters for outbound
Routing decides who owns a lead, so a bad rule wastes the list. If two reps email the same buyer, or nobody owns a region, leads go cold and prospects get duplicate messages.
Outbound adds a data problem. A rule can only route on a field the lead record actually has. A lead with no country or headcount lands in a default queue, and the default queue is where leads stall. Fill the routing fields before the lead enters the CRM, not after.
Example
A team of three reps works an imported list. The rules run top to bottom, and the first match wins.
| Rule | Condition | Assigned to |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Existing account owner found | Account owner |
| 2 | Country is US or CA, 1,000+ employees | Jane Doe (enterprise) |
| 3 | Country is US or CA, under 1,000 employees | Rep B (mid-market) |
| 4 | Any other country | Round robin, reps B and C |
A lead at Acme, based in the US with 2,400 employees, matches rule 2 and goes to Jane Doe. A lead with a blank country skips rules 2 and 3 and falls through to rule 4. Names, rules and values are placeholders.
In LeadOcean data
LeadOcean does not route leads. It has no rep assignment, queue or CRM sync, and the app has no rep workspace. It supplies the fields your routing rules read, and you apply the rules in your own CRM.
country(ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code) andcontinentcover territory rules.employeeRangecovers segment rules such as mid-market or enterprise.industry(534 values) covers vertical routing.
Send these filters to POST /v1/people/search or the MCP tool search_leads. On POST /v1/companies/search the territory filters are hqCountry and hqContinent. Each person or company returned counts as one record. The free plan gives 1,000 records, one-off, with no card, and Pro is $499 a month. See /pricing.
To route at scale, export the rows with POST /v1/exports and load them into your CRM with the routing fields filled. The dataset is refreshed monthly, so re-check fields on old leads before you route them. For the tools that sit around this step, see AI lead gen tools. More terms are in the glossary.
Related terms
Get country, headcount and industry on every lead, free
Free to start. No credit card. 1,000 records to spend whenever you like.
Get your free API key →