Assignment rules
What this page is — the ordered rules that decide who receives a lead the moment it is created.
What it is for — routing automatically: enterprise enquiries to the enterprise team, a region to its owner, everything else into a queue.
The problem it solves — inbound leads going stale because nobody owned them. Unlike scoring, this automation genuinely runs on create — which makes the two easy to confuse. It also explains why a rule conditioned on the lead's score can never match a new lead.
Route: /org/marketing/leads/settings?tab=rules&rule=assignment
Permission enforced by the API: Edit Existing Leads — not manage_assignment
1. Assignment is the one automation that runs on create
When a lead is created without an owner, assignment runs immediately — whether the lead came from the interface, the API, the webhook or the CSV import. Scoring does not. So a new lead typically arrives owned and unscored, which is a confusing combination until you know why.
2. What a rule is
| Part | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Name | For humans |
| Order | Rules are evaluated in sequence and the first match wins |
| Conditions | Field / operator / value, the same shape as scoring |
| Target | A user, or a queue |
| Strategy | How to choose among several agents — round-robin and similar |
| Active | A toggle |
Assignment stops at the first matching rule. A broad rule placed above a specific one makes the specific one unreachable — with nothing to indicate it. Put the narrowest rules first.
3. What a condition can test
Everything scoring can, including the score itself — so a rule can route high-scoring leads to a senior agent. But note the ordering problem:
Scoring does not run on create, so a lead's score is 0 at the moment assignment evaluates it. A rule
conditioned on lead_score gt 50 never matches a newly created lead — only one re-evaluated after a
recalculate.
Route on source, company size, country or custom fields instead, all of which are present at creation.
The same validation gap applies as for scoring: a condition naming a field that does not resolve never matches, and nothing warns you. See scoring rules section 3.
4. Targets
| Target | Effect |
|---|---|
| A user | Assigns the lead to them directly |
| A queue | Places the lead in that queue, unowned until somebody claims it |
A queue with no agents, or a user not enabled on the Agents tab, absorbs the match and produces no assignment. The lead ends up unowned and the rule appears to have failed.
5. Permissions
Creating, changing, reordering and removing assignment rules all need Manage Lead Assignment Rules. The finer-grained View Lead Assignments, Create Lead Assignment, Edit Assignment and Delete Assignment let you split those actions if you would rather.
Assignment rules decide who receives every incoming lead. Grant them to the people who own routing, not to everyone who works leads.
6. The admin contract
| Needs | Or |
|---|---|
| Enabled agents | Rules match and assign nobody |
| Queues, if targeting one | Same |
| Conditions on fields present at creation | Rules never match. Section 3 |
| Sensible rule order | Later rules are unreachable. Section 2 |
7. Downstream
| Assignment reaches | As |
|---|---|
| The lead record | The Ownership panel |
| The leads list | The Owner and Assigned Queue columns |
| The Queues tab | The pool an agent works from |
| Team Performance | Per-agent load and queue load |
| The lead timeline | An assignment activity entry |
8. Don't confuse this with…
| This | Not this |
|---|---|
| An assignment rule | Manual assignment, or bulk assign |
| A rule's queue target | Auto-assign, which takes a lead out of a queue |
manage_assignment | Edit Existing Leads, which is enforced |
| Assignment | Scoring — one runs on create, one never does |
9. Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause |
|---|---|
| New leads arrive unowned | No rule matches, or the target has no enabled agents. Section 4 |
| A rule never fires | A broader rule above it wins first. Section 2 |
| A score-based rule never matches | The score is 0 at creation. Section 3 |
| Reordering changed nothing | Check the rules are active |
| Someone changed the rules who should not have | They hold the rule-management permission. Section 5 |