Fast enough that speed stops being your problem. The classic Harvard Business Review study of 2.24 million leads found that firms contacting a prospect within an hour were about seven times likelier to qualify that lead than those who waited even one more hour, and sixty times likelier than those who waited a day. So the routing rule is simple: assign instantly, notify in the channel the rep already lives in, and set a response SLA in minutes rather than hours. Keep the routing logic itself boring (territory, then segment, then round robin among the eligible reps) with an explicit fallback owner, because a clever routing tree with no default is how leads quietly rot in an unassigned queue.
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it This is the original study behind every speed to lead claim you have ever seen, run across 2.24 million leads. Read the source rather than a vendor blog quoting it.
From Harvard Business Review by James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington 5 min read
Open hbr.org →Why we picked it An eight step sequence for cleaning a CRM that correctly puts validation at the point of entry before the backfill, which is the order most first ops hires get wrong.
From Default by Stan Rymkiewicz 14 min read
Open default.com →Why we picked it The best plain English description of what a sales ops function is for, written by someone who rebuilt one from scratch. Useful whether you are taking the job or hiring for it.
From First Round Review by Don Otvos 18 min read
Open review.firstround.com →How revops and the gtm stack reads from a different seat.
