I once audited a lead routing system that had 23 conditional branches. It evaluated industry vertical, company size, tech stack, geographic region, existing account relationships, rep capacity scores, and a custom "ideal customer profile" match percentage. It was genuinely impressive engineering.
It also took an average of 2.7 days to get a lead to a rep.
Meanwhile, their biggest competitor had a dead-simple round-robin within three broad verticals. Their average response time? Under 35 minutes. Guess who was winning more deals.
This is the routing paradox I see play out constantly: RevOps teams invest weeks building the perfect routing logic while completely ignoring the metric that matters most. Speed.
The Data on Response Time Is Brutal
Let's start with what the research actually says, because the numbers are stark enough to make anyone rethink their routing strategy.
The Harvard Business Review published a study on lead response time that found companies contacting leads within an hour were 7x more likely to qualify the lead than those who waited even two hours. Wait 24 hours and you're 60x less likely to qualify that lead compared to responding in the first hour.
InsideSales.com's research showed that the odds of contacting a lead drop by 10x after just the first five minutes. Five minutes. That's less time than it takes most routing systems to evaluate their first conditional branch.
And Drift's State of Conversational Marketing report found that the average B2B company takes 42 hours to respond to a lead. Over half of companies never respond at all. If you're responding in under an hour, you're already in the top 10% of B2B organizations.
These aren't edge cases or cherry-picked stats. The pattern is consistent across every study I've seen: speed kills -- in the best way possible.
Why Complex Routing Destroys Speed
Here's how the typical routing complexity spiral works. I've seen this pattern at least a dozen times.
Quarter 1: You start with round-robin. Leads get assigned instantly. Response times are great. But a rep complains they got a healthcare lead when they've never sold into healthcare. Leadership agrees -- let's route by vertical.
Quarter 2: Vertical routing works, but now a named account's inbound lead goes to a rep who doesn't own that account. The enterprise AE is furious. So you add account matching logic.
Quarter 3: Account matching is great, but some reps are overloaded while others are idle. You add capacity weighting. But capacity data is only updated weekly, so you build a real-time calculation based on open opportunities.
Quarter 4: Now someone notices that small deals are going to enterprise reps. You add deal size estimation based on company headcount and industry. But the headcount data from your enrichment provider is stale 30% of the time, so you add a fallback hierarchy.
Quarter 5: The system is now 23 conditional branches. Nobody fully understands it. A new rep was added three weeks ago and hasn't received a single lead because nobody updated the routing configuration. Your average assignment time has gone from instant to hours -- or days when something breaks and nobody notices.
This is exactly the overcomplicated systems problem I wrote about in Why GTM Teams Overcomplicate Everything. We keep adding rules for edge cases, and each rule adds latency, fragility, and opacity.
The Math That Should Change Your Mind
Let me put some numbers on this. Say your marketing team generates 500 inbound leads per month. Your conversion rate from lead to qualified opportunity varies based on response time:
- Under 5 minutes: 21% qualification rate
- Under 1 hour: 15% qualification rate
- 1-24 hours: 5% qualification rate
- Over 24 hours: 2% qualification rate
If your complex routing gets leads to reps in an average of 18 hours (which is common -- I've measured it), you're qualifying roughly 25 leads per month from those 500.
If you simplified routing and got response time under an hour, you'd qualify approximately 75 leads per month. That's a 3x improvement in qualified pipeline from the same lead volume.
At an average deal size of $50K, that's the difference between $1.25M and $3.75M in quarterly pipeline. No new marketing spend. No new headcount. Just faster routing.
Now tell me again why you need that conditional branch checking whether the prospect's company uses Kubernetes.
The Simple Routing Framework That Works
Here's the routing architecture I recommend for most B2B companies doing $10M-$100M in revenue. It's not sexy, but it works.
Tier 1: Named Account Match (instant)
Check if the inbound lead matches an existing named/owned account. If yes, route directly to the account owner. This is the one piece of complex logic that's genuinely worth the milliseconds it takes.
Tier 2: Simple Segment Round-Robin (instant)
For everything else, route via round-robin within broad segments. Three to five segments max. Think "Enterprise" / "Mid-Market" / "SMB" or "Healthcare" / "Tech" / "General." The segments should match your team structure, not your ideal customer profile.
Tier 3: Overflow Rules (instant)
If a rep is on PTO or has hit a reasonable capacity ceiling (15+ open leads in queue), skip to the next rep in the round-robin. This doesn't require real-time calculation -- a simple flag in your CRM handles it.
Tier 4: SLA Escalation (time-triggered)
If a lead hasn't been contacted within 15 minutes, send the assigned rep a push notification. If it hasn't been contacted within 30 minutes, alert their manager. If it hasn't been contacted within 60 minutes, reassign to whoever is available.
That's it. Four tiers. All of them execute in under a second. The SLA escalation is the secret weapon -- it creates accountability without adding routing complexity.
When Sophisticated Routing IS Justified
I'm not saying complex routing is always wrong. There are specific scenarios where it's worth the speed tradeoff:
Enterprise named accounts (100% of the time). If you have a defined list of target accounts with assigned owners, inbound leads from those accounts must go to the right person. This is relationship-based selling, and sending a Coca-Cola lead to a random SDR when you have a strategic AE who's been cultivating that relationship for six months is genuinely damaging. The good news: named account matching is a simple lookup, not a complex decision tree.
Regulated industries with compliance requirements. If you sell into financial services or healthcare and need specific certifications or clearances to engage certain accounts, routing needs to account for that. But this is still a one-dimensional filter, not a 23-branch tree.
ABM motions with coordinated plays. When marketing is running a specific ABM campaign with customized messaging and the sales team has prepared tailored outreach, routing to the wrong rep undermines the entire play. Again, this is account-list matching, which is fast.
Notice the pattern: the justified complexity is almost always about account-level matching, not lead-level scoring. And account matching is a simple database lookup that takes milliseconds.
How to Measure and Improve Speed-to-Lead
If you're not currently measuring speed-to-lead, start today. Here's what to track:
Lead-to-first-contact time. Not lead-to-assignment. Not lead-to-first-activity-logged. The actual elapsed time from form submission (or signal trigger) to when a human being makes contact with the prospect. This is the metric that correlates with outcomes.
Assignment-to-contact time. This separates your routing speed from your rep engagement speed. If leads are assigned in 2 minutes but reps don't call for 4 hours, that's a coaching problem, not a routing problem.
Contact attempt rate by time bucket. What percentage of leads get a contact attempt within 5 minutes? 15 minutes? 1 hour? This gives you the distribution, not just the average.
Qualification rate by response time cohort. This is where you prove the business case. Segment your leads by how quickly they were contacted and compare qualification rates. When you show your CRO that leads contacted in under 15 minutes qualify at 4x the rate of leads contacted the next day, you'll get whatever resources you need.
The Implementation Playbook
Here's how to move from complex routing to speed-optimized routing without breaking everything.
Week 1: Measure your current state. Before changing anything, instrument your current flow. What's your actual average response time? Where are the bottlenecks -- in routing logic, in assignment queues, or in rep behavior?
Week 2: Implement SLA escalation. This is the highest-impact, lowest-risk change. Add time-based alerts and reassignment rules. You'll be shocked how much response time improves just from accountability.
Week 3: Simplify segment definitions. Collapse your routing segments from 12 to 3-5. Yes, some leads will go to reps who aren't the absolute best fit. That's okay. A good rep calling in 10 minutes beats the perfect rep calling in 10 hours.
Week 4: A/B test. Run your new simplified routing alongside the old complex routing for a subset of leads. Measure qualification rates, not just theoretical "fit scores." Let the data speak.
This phased approach should tie into your broader annual planning process -- territory and routing optimization is one of the highest-ROI initiatives you can include in your Q1 plan.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The reason RevOps teams build complex routing isn't because the business requires it. It's because simple routing doesn't feel like it justifies a team. It doesn't demo well in QBRs. It doesn't make for impressive architecture diagrams.
But your job isn't to build impressive systems. Your job is to generate revenue. And every minute of latency you add to lead response time is revenue walking out the door.
Simplify your routing. Measure your speed. Hold your team accountable to response SLAs. And save the sophisticated logic for the one place it genuinely matters: named account matching.
If you're wrestling with how to restructure your territory and routing design to prioritize speed without losing strategic alignment, that's exactly the kind of problem we solve in our territory planning engagements. The best routing system isn't the smartest one -- it's the fastest one that's good enough.