You can assign leads to individuals or teams at any point in your sales process. Assigning leads to specific users or teams ensures that all of your team members know exactly which leads they’re responsible for and what tasks they need to complete to move the lead through the sales pipeline.

To add a user assignment:

If you set a user assignment for the first stage in your pipeline, that lead will stay assigned to that person or team for all of the stages unless you change the user assignment later in the pipeline.

You’re also able to change the user assignment at any stage in the pipeline. For example, if your business hands off leads to different people or teams after a certain stage, you can set up those assignments in advance so that your leads are assigned to the correct people at all times.

You can set up round-robin distributions so that all leads in that pipeline are evenly distributed amongst the members of a team. Assign the lead to any team (you can learn more about creating teams here) and check the Round-robin distribution box that appears below.

You can create additional rules to determine when a lead should be assigned to a specific individual or team based on certain criteria. If a lead meets your criteria, Nutshell will assign that lead to the individual or team that you include in that assignment.

Criteria you can choose from are:

To create a special case:

These special cases will overrule any default user assignment in the stage. If you set these user assignment rules and special cases for the first stage of your pipeline, they will also apply for all of the stages of the lead unless you change the user assignment rules for a later stage. You are able to set as many special cases as you’d like for each stage of your pipeline.

Nutshell enables you to set round-robin distribution rules for your special cases as well! For example, if you set up a special case that assigns leads in the Midwest territory to your Midwest Sales Team, you’ll receive the option to check that round-robin assignment box. If you do check that, any lead in the Midwest territory will be round-robin assigned to that Midwest Sales Team.

To remove a user assignment, click on the assignment box and select Delete in the bottom right corner of the edit window.

If there is a column in your .csv file which is mapped to the Lead assignee field upon import, Nutshell will assume you would like to override any automatic Lead assignment rules with the Lead assignment you are importing. Would you like to import your Leads and have Nutshell automatically assign your Leads for you based on the rules you created? Select 'Do not import' when mapping the Lead assignee column during your import, and Nutshell's automatic Lead distribution rules will take care of the rest.

When a user creates a new Lead using the + Create button, Nutshell will assume they are the owner of that Lead. If they are not, they can select 'Auto assign' in the Lead assignment field when creating the Lead.