Who gets the next lead is the most political question in any sales team — and in Bitrix24 (Alaio) the stock answer is blunt: a new lead lands on the default responsible person or whoever the integration was configured with. Fair rotation, routing by territory, load awareness — that layer you assemble yourself from automation rules. The good news: it takes four robots and an evening, not a custom app. This guide builds it up from simple rotation to rules a sales director would sign off.
What does Bitrix24 offer for lead routing out of the box?
A new lead gets its responsible from whatever created it: the form, the mail integration, the telephony connector or the default setting — one name per channel. That works exactly until the second salesperson joins. From there teams route by hand ("morning person distributes the night's leads") or overload one inbox, and both patterns show up in response-time stats immediately. Automation rules on lead creation are the natural place to fix it, because they fire before anyone has had time to cherry-pick.
How do I build round-robin distribution?
One rule on lead creation running Random employee from list or department: it picks a person from the list you configure — or from a whole department — and the rule writes them as responsible. Random is the pragmatic cousin of strict round-robin: over any meaningful volume the distribution evens out, nobody can game the order, and there is no counter to reset when the team changes. Exclude the team lead from the pool by listing members explicitly, or point the robot at the department and let org-structure changes update the pool automatically.
How do I route by source, country or department?
Layer conditions before the assignment. Branch on the lead source so advertising leads go to closers and partner referrals to the partnerships pool; branch on Country by phone number so language matches the manager (normalize numbers first — the phone formatting guide explains why); use Ternary (if-then-else) to compute the target list in one step instead of duplicating rules. When routing follows the org chart, Get employee department resolves where a person sits, so "assign within the same unit as the account owner" stops being manual knowledge.
How do I escalate and keep related records in sync?
Distribution is half the job; the other half is what happens when the assignee does not act. A delayed rule checks the lead after your SLA window, and Get employee manager resolves the responsible person's supervisor for the escalation notice — the SLA gets a name instead of a dashboard nobody opens. When ownership genuinely changes, Change responsible on related moves the deal together with its contact and company in one step, so the customer does not end up split between two managers; the manual mechanics are in the change responsible guide.
How do I handle vacations and absent managers?
A rotation that assigns leads to someone on leave is worse than no rotation — the lead sleeps in a silent inbox while the team believes it is handled. Maintain the pool: the simplest discipline is removing people from the distribution list (or department) for their absence, and the vacation management guide shows how to make absences visible and process-driven rather than tribal knowledge. Pair it with the escalation rule above and even a missed case surfaces within one SLA window instead of after the customer churns.
Where to go from here
Start with plain rotation on one lead channel and let the response-time stats argue for the rest — routing rules are much easier to sell to a team when the baseline is already fair. Neighboring recipes are in the automation examples collection, and if your case needs a brick that does not exist yet, the robot catalog is built from exactly such requests.