Delaying Distribution

 

In some circumstances you may want to delay distribution of a record for a period of time. An example may be if you have other automations that you want to give time to update the record before it is assigned.

There are two methods of doing this, one that relies on using Distribution filters, and another that requires a formula field .

Distribution Filter Approach

This approach shows the example of using a Distribution Filter to delay distribution. Note that this approach can also use team filters if you want the delay to apply to an entire team.

For your Distributor, enable FIeld-based Filter and add a new row. Select a date/time field that you want to distribute after a delay from, for this example, we are choosing to use 'Created Date', but any date/time value is able to be used.

Selecting 'less than' and 'n minutes ago' you are then able to define a delay, in minutes. The example below means that the distributor will not assign a record until 15 minutes have past since creation.

Third Party Tools - Distribution Filter

If using third party tools for pre-processing, we recommend that once the pre-processing has been completed, that a field is updated, which is then used in a Distribution Filter to determine that the record is ready to be processed.

Formula Field Approach

If a record matches multiple distributors and the formula changes during processing of all teams, it is possible for a record to distribute from a team/distributor lower on the list then intended. 

To accomplish this, you'll first need to build a formula field that determines when the record is ready. For our example we are going to build a formula checkbox field that delays for 5 minutes after a record is created. 

  • In Salesforce go to Setup/Object Manager and then choose the object you are editing and Fields and Relationship:

 

  • Create a New field of type Formula and Formula Return Type = Checkbox. We've called ours "Ready to Distribute?"
    • The formula you will enter will be:

NOW() >= (CreatedDate + 5/1440)

  • The 5 represents our 5 minutes and the 1440 represents the number of minutes in the day. You can use any Date/Time Field here. For example if you wanted LastModified vs Created. 

 

  • We now need to add this to our distributor as a filter. We want to filter to leads that have "Ready to Distribute?" equal to true. 

 

This configuration will allow you to delay distribution of records until they have been created for more than 5 minutes. 

How did we do?

Assigning Contacts - Pairing SDRs and AEs

Enforce Cap for Manually Assigned Records

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