WHEN YOUR SALES PROCESS CALLS FOR AN OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNMENT SYSTEM

There are many other similar use cases that involve a similar initial ‘application’ process:-

• A financial services companies offering financial products e.g., insurance packages, loans, mortgages
• A recruitment agency inviting candidates to apply for a role
• An equipment hire firm supplying specialist machinery

And there are many, many other examples beyond across multiple verticals. The problem however is universal: How do you assign an Opportunity?

Believe it or not, there is no native functionality available in Salesforce to set up Opportunity assignment rules. The Salesforce IdeaExchange has plenty of organizations requesting this feature, with a few incredulous comments, such as “What?? This doesn’t exist already?”
The truth is that Opportunity assignment gets super complex, super-fast. You are not only wrestling with all the usual distribution factors that would apply to Lead assignment e.g.

• Language
• Skills
• Availability
• Capacity
• Location/ Territory Etc

No, Opportunity assignment brings even more complexity. For example, what if you have different owners determined by Stage, Probability, Campaign Influence, project revenue, new business or renewal for example?

How about when you throw in the notion that the Opportunity needs re-assignment throughout the deal based on various complex and dependent rules?

Maybe your reps have all been assigned to new territories, or you hand off to a specialist team when a deal reaches a certain size and probability for a specific product, but only when it’s new business?

And so on. Like I say, it gets very complex, very quickly. For all those waiting for this kind of advanced functionality to be rolled into the next Salesforce release, I would say, don’t hold your breath.

So, what are the options? Manual assignment is clearly not the solution. EF Education First’s Anuj Kapoor summarizes why not, quite neatly:
“We have a huge influx of customers enquiries every day, creating a high number of Opportunities. If we left a manager to do this manually, they would spend 2 to 3 hours a day just assigning records”

There is the option to set up Salesforce Workflow rules to achieve some of these aims, but that’s quickly going to become cumbersome and hard to manage. Your Salesforce Admin will start avoiding eye contact and there are limits to what you can realistically handle.

The truth is that managing this level of complexity is simply unworkable without the heavy-lifting capability of some intelligent automation. It was precisely the reason that Q-assign was created.

Opportunity assignment via Q-assign

Here’s how a brief step-by-step tour of how Q-assign takes on the Opportunity assignment heavy lifting.

1. Begin with easy configuration via a user-friendly interface. This may involve defining assignment rules based on various fields, such as region, industry, or lead source, and specifying the desired assignment criteria, such as round-robin, load balancing, or skill-based routing.
2. Triggering Assignment: When a new opportunity is created or an existing opportunity is updated, Q-assign evaluates the record against the configured rules and criteria to determine the appropriate owner for the opportunity.
3. Rule Evaluation: Q-assign evaluates the opportunity and applies the rules one by one, in the specified order, until a matching rule is found.
4. Assignment: Once a matching rule is found, Q-assign assigns the opportunity to the specified user or team as the owner. The assignment can be based on any (complex) algorithm, round-robin or load balancing, e.g. based on workload or capacity of users or teams.
5. Notifications: Q-assign can send notifications to the assigned users or teams, informing them of the new assignment. It may also log the assignment details, such as the assignment rule applied, the assigned user or team, and the timestamp, for reporting and auditing purposes.
6. Reassignment and escalation requirements? No problem. For example, if the opportunity’s status changes or a certain time period elapses, Q-assign may reassign the opportunity to a different user or team, or escalate it to a higher-level user or team for further action.

Clearly, this solution could be considered over-engineering for organizations who are handling a relatively low number of Opportunities. The real value of intelligent, automated Opportunity assignment comes into play when it is deployed in complex organizations with high inbound volumes, which is exactly the scenario that Q-assign was built to resolve.