Many organizations rely on routing tools like LeanData, Distribution Engine, or Salesforce to manage their leads. This article offers a guide to best practices for integrating Calendly with your existing routing tools, ensuring a seamless lead management process.

Creating routing rules

Organizations have the most success by taking the routing rules they’ve set up in their existing routing tool and mimicking those rules in Calendly routing. This creates a situation where Calendly routing and third party routing rules should come up with the same assignment for a new lead.

For information on how to set up routing rules with Calendly routing, check out How to set up routing forms.

Connect Salesforce and Calendly

If you haven’t done so already, you'll need to integrate Calendly and Salesforce using Calendly’s native Salesforce integration. This will allow data from Calendly to flow into Salesforce so you can have the proper triggers run. Once integrated, you'll have the following options:

You can create a routing exclusion

If you have leads coming in through various sources that are routed by an existing routing tool, but you want to prevent them from being routed through that tool once Calendly’s integration is in place, you’ll need to create a routing exclusion in the existing routing tool.

With the Calendly Salesforce Integration, by default, when you schedule a meeting, Calendly sends meeting data to Salesforce. Salesforce creates a new CalendlyAction record, which triggers the default CreateEvent flow to run. Salesforce will then attach the attribute CalendlyCreated to leads and events created by Calendly.

When configuring you will want rules in your routing tool to not route leads where the attribute CalendlyCreated is filled.

You can exclude assigned leads

Many routing tools will only route if the lead isn't already assigned. If the lead books a meeting, Calendly's Salesforce integration will automatically assign that lead to whomever they booked with. In this case, you can have your routing tool read that the assignment occured and skip this lead from running through their routing rules.

It's likely you'll add a wait step

To ensure a seamless process, add a wait step prior to having your routing tool run it's routing rules. This allows time for the lead to be updated with Calendly information and assignment before routing through your routing tool's routing flow.

Here are the steps to create a wait step within your routing flow:

1. Determine an appropriate wait time, typically 5-10 minutes, to ensure the lead is updated correctly before routing through your routing tool.
2. Add the wait step to your system (this is typically set in Salesforce) before initiating your rourint tool's routing rules.
3. Test the routing flow in Salesforce and your routing tool to confirm the exclusion and wait step are working as intended.

By adhering to these best practices, you can effectively integrate Calendly with your existing routing tools without disrupting your lead management setup.