How to set up automatic lead routing with HubSpot & Salesforce
Lead routing methods, tools, and best practices explained
Automating lead routing is essential to reduce your speed to lead with HubSpot and Salesforce.
When new contacts enter your database, they need to get into the right hands as soon as possible for conversion.
If you're using the HubSpot–Salesforce integration, you have several options for lead assignment.
You can manage this in HubSpot OR Salesforce. Before picking the tool, first consider how you want to assign leads.
Types of inbound lead assignment
The first option is round robin lead assignment.
- This distributes new leads evenly across a team.
- It can apply to your entire sales force or just a subset, such as evenly dividing all new leads from a specific state among five reps.
- Round robin is often paired with filters so only certain leads enter the rotation.
The second option is criteria-based lead assignment.
- Here, leads must meet certain qualifications before they’re assigned.
- These criteria often include geography, industry, company size, or product interest.
- This method ensures that specific types of leads land with the right specialists.
Both round robin and criteria-based logic are key components of effective automatic lead routing.
Should you assign leads in HubSpot or Salesforce?
If you want to use round robin, HubSpot Workflows are the easiest way to implement automatic lead routing.
The 'Rotate record to owner' action lets you assign leads to a team or specific users.
You can pair this with if/then branches to filter leads by region or industry before they hit the rotation.
HubSpot can skip records with existing owners, but you must ensure your sync settings allow HubSpot to update the 'owner' field to prevent Salesforce from instantly overwriting the change.
Workflows also handle criteria-based assignments with a user-friendly visual interface, making them accessible to marketing or sales ops without deep technical expertise.
In Salesforce, you have two main paths.
Lead Assignment Rules (LARs) handle criteria-based routing specifically for the Lead object, while Flows are required for contact-based routing, round-robin, or complex logic.
Best practices for implementation
- Start with a clear definition of your lead assignment logic.
- Decide whether fairness or specialization is the priority, or if you need both.
- Keep your rotation pools up to date so only active reps receive leads.
- Monitor lead volume and follow-up speed to ensure the system is working as intended.
- Always test with sample records before rolling out changes, and make sure someone owns responsibility for maintaining the assignment logic, whether that’s Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, or RevOps.
For deeper guidance on Salesforce routing, see Salesforce Help: Guidelines for Assignment Rules.
The punchline
The strongest native options are HubSpot workflows and Salesforce flows.
Lead assignment rules remain a legacy option for basic, Lead-object-only routing.
Though for complex, high-volume Salesforce environments, flows are now the recommended standard.
If your current automatic lead routing setup is clunky or inconsistent, let’s fix it.
Reach out to Tate if you’re interested in a tailored lead assignment design - built around your team, your tech stack, and your growth goals.
