Imagine your leads or cases as a deck of cards. Now you want to distribute the deck evenly among five players on the table - the players being agents or sales reps in your company. What you do is deal one card at a time to player 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5, then back to player 1 and so on, until all the cards are dealt.  

A similar system or algorithm of assigning leads or cases can be done inside Salesforce, and this method is aptly called the "round robin". 

“Round robin is an arrangement of choosing all elements in a group equally in some rational order, usually from the top to the bottom of a list and then starting again at the top of the list and so on.”

Simply put, round robin is all about taking turns on who gets a card. So while distributing cards, each participant is given one card at a time, in a rotational manner.

Round Robin as Applied in Salesforce

A very common requirement from many Salesforce customers is to be able to distribute leads or cases amongst the sales or support teams in a rotational manner.

So if there are three sales reps in the company and we would like to distribute leads, then:

• Lead 1 must go to Sales Rep 1 (Start of turn 1)
• Lead 2 must go to Sales Rep 2
• Lead 3 must go to Sales Rep 3 (End of turn 1)
• Lead 4 must go to Sales Rep 1 (Start of turn 2)
• Lead 5 must go to Sales Rep 2
• Lead 6 must go to Sales Rep 3 (End of turn 2)
• ….and so on

This requires using lead or case assignment, which is a standard feature, but if we would like to do round robin assignment, we need to do some configuration to make it work.

What we need:

  Create two Custom fields

To create a new field go to:
Setup->Object Manager->Lead->Fields & Relationships

Click NEW.

1- Set Auto Number Field (Lead Number)

When you set this, the field will be populated with an auto-generated sequential number whenever a new lead is created.

Using the wizard, select Auto Number and click NEXT.

In Step 2 of the wizard, you will see the following properties:

Fill them in accordingly:

2 - Fill in formula (Round Robin ID)

You may now configure the formula field by choosing Formula Field here, and clicking NEXT.

In Step 2 of the wizard, focus on the following properties (marked in red):

Fill in the values accordingly:

In Step 3 of the wizard, fill in the Formula:

In our example we have 3 sales reps, so the formula is:
MOD(VALUE({!Lead_Number__c}) ,3) +1

What the formula does is divide the the Lead Number by (Number of Sales Reps) and find the remainder of the division. MOD() function is used for the purpose. This returned remainder ‘R’ will be as per the below equation

Number of sales reps-1 >= R >= 0

We then add one to the remainder, so the equation becomes :
Number of sales reps-1+1 >= R=1 >= 0+1
i.e. Number of sales reps >= R+1 >= 1

So the number returned by formula (R+1) will always be one from the set
{1,2,3,4,…,Number Of Sales Rep}
This returned value will be stored in the Formula field ‘Round Robin ID’.

So if we have 5 sales Reps the formula will be MOD(VALUE({!Lead_Number__c}) ,5) +1.

And the Round Robin IDs generated will be 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5.

If the sales reps are given numbering starting from 1, then the corresponding ‘Round Robin Id’ can be used to assign the leads to the sales reps. In our case we have 3 sales reps, which we name Sales Rep 1, Sales Rep 2, Sales Rep 3. Round Robin Ids generated will be either 1 or 2 or 3.

The screenshot below was captured after six leads were created.

 Create Lead Assignment Rule

Now that the stage is all set, we can leverage the ‘Round Robin Id’ to create lead assignment rules to assign leads to the Sales Reps. To do this:

Select the User to be assigned the Lead

Optionally select an email template to notify the new owner they have just been assigned a Lead. There is an “out of the box” email template called “Leads: New assignment notification (SAMPLE)” that comes with Salesforce that is usually stored in the “Unfiled Public Email Templates” folder.

Repeat the steps to create rule entries for Reps 2 and 3.

When you successfully configure this for all your reps, you should be well on your way to enjoying the benefits of the Salesforce Round Robin method.

Some Helpful Notes

To configure this:

Lead Assignment Check box is now added on lead edit page layout.

While creating a lead or editing a lead, check this checkbox and the lead will be assigned to one of the designated Sales Reps.