Distribution Engine is a widely used routing tool for managing leads in organizations. This article provides a guide to best practices for integrating Calendly with Distribution Engine, ensuring a seamless lead management process.

Creating routing rules

To achieve the most effective integration, organizations should mimic the routing rules they’ve set up in Distribution Engine within Calendly routing. This ensures that both Calendly and Distribution Engine assign new leads consistently.

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 Distribution Engine, but you want to prevent them from being routed through Distribution Engine once Calendly’s integration is in place, you’ll need to create a routing exclusion in Distribution Engine.

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 Distribution Engine 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 Distribution Engine read that the assignment happened 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 Distribution Engine run it's routing rules. This allows time for the lead to be updated with Calendly information and assignment before routing through your Distribution Engine 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 Distribution Engine.
2. Add the wait step to your system (this is typically set in Salesforce) before initiating Distribution Engine's routing rules.
3. Test the routing flow in Salesforce and Distribution Engine to confirm the exclusion and wait step are working as intended.

By adhering to these best practices, you can effectively integrate Calendly with Distribution Engine, optimizing your lead management process, without disrupting your lead management setup.