VertiPump: why one rep gets half the leads
VertiPump sells industrial pumps through a six-person sales team split into 'Direct' (4 reps) and 'Partners' (2 reps). Leads are enabled; a web form and the alias [email protected] feed the pipeline with about 70 new leads a month. Exactly one assignment rule exists: domain Country = United States, team = Direct, rule = 'Least Open Leads'. After six weeks, rep A (the fastest closer) has received roughly 55% of all leads, while both Partners reps have received none for three weeks. Salespeople also complain that leads they create manually after trade shows are never assigned, and one prospect now exists as four separate leads because they wrote from a work and a personal address.
1. Explain the distribution pattern and state precisely which leads never reach the assignment rule at all.
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Two independent mechanisms are producing this.
1. The rule is self-reinforcing. 'Least Open Leads' counts only open leads (New/Qualified) per user in the rule's team. Rep A converts quickly, so his open count drops back to zero within days and he is permanently the 'least loaded' rep. The faster you close, the more you are fed - a feedback loop, not a bug.
2. Ordering and scope. Assignment rules are evaluated top-down and the first rule whose domain matches wins. With a single rule scoped to Team = Direct and Country = United States, every US lead is captured before the Partners team can ever be considered. They only see leads whose country is not the US - which, for this pipeline, is near zero.
What bypasses the rule: anything created by a user - manual creation, import, or 'Create Lead' from a partner form - is assigned to the creating salesperson. Only leads arriving through an incoming channel (web form, alias, or an API call that explicitly triggers assignment) are routed by rules.
2. The sales manager wants to switch Leads off so every web form goes straight into the pipeline. Is that the right fix, and what would you have to do first?
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It is the wrong fix for this symptom, and it is not free.
What disabling Leads actually does: the pipeline collapses to a single stage set, the qualification step disappears, and - importantly - the Convert to Opportunity wizard disappears with it. That wizard is also the tool that merges duplicates, links or creates the customer, and carries the lead's chatter across. With 70 leads a month on a long industrial sales cycle, a qualification stage is genuinely useful; the problem here is routing, not the existence of leads.
If they still want it: Odoo will not let you disable Leads while leads exist - you must first convert, close or delete every one. So the sequence is: clean the duplicates, finish or archive open leads, then flip the setting in CRM settings.
The real fix is a second assignment rule (Team = Partners, domain Country != United States or product-category based), and a review of whether 'Least Open Leads' is the right basis for a team whose reps have very different cycle times.
3. How do you collapse the four duplicate records without destroying the email trail, and what stops it recurring?
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Do not delete - merge.
Merge, don't delete. In the pipeline list or kanban, select the four records and use the merge action. Odoo's deduplication detects candidates by normalised email and phone, so the work and personal addresses should surface as suggested duplicates. Merging keeps the messages, activities and attachments of all source records on the surviving one; deleting loses the inbound emails that carry the commercial history and breaks any audit trail back to the web form submissions.
Then link to a single customer. At conversion, attach the merged lead to one partner rather than creating a new one per email address, otherwise you re-fragment at the contact level and the customer's order history splits across partners.
Prevent recurrence: the web form is capturing a free-text email field. Normalise it - one required email field, lowercased, no separate 'work email' box - and run the deduplicate action on a schedule rather than only after complaints.