Here’s a common one. A company’s biggest opportunities — enterprise inbound, exactly the leads reps fight over — were all landing on the wrong desk for months. Not lost, just misrouted, worked as ordinary mid-market by people who didn’t know what they were holding. One rule did it. Let’s take it apart.
What typically happens
Routing sorts leads by company size, using an employee-count field to split enterprise from the rest. Sensible enough. But the field is populated by an enrichment tool that, for a meaningful slice of companies, returns a blank or a low default rather than the true headcount.
The rule reads blank-or-low as “not enterprise” and routes accordingly. So any large company the enrichment tool can’t size confidently — which skews towards the newer, faster-growing accounts you’d most want — is silently demoted to the mid-market queue.
Why it leaked
The failure was a bad assumption dressed as a working rule. Everyone assumed the size field was reliable because it was usually populated. Nobody had asked what happened when it wasn’t. The rule had no handling for missing data, so it treated “unknown” as “small” — the most expensive possible default.
And it was invisible. The leads routed fine, to a real rep, who worked them. Nothing errored. The only symptom was enterprise reps quietly wondering where the big inbound had gone, and a mid-market team occasionally surprised by a huge logo.
The fix
Two changes. First, missing size data now routes to a review step rather than defaulting to small — unknown is treated as “find out”, not “assume the cheap answer”. Second, a weekly check reconciles enrichment coverage against routing outcomes, so a gap in the data surfaces before it misroutes a quarter of enterprise leads.
What it cost
Over the months it ran, dozens of enterprise-grade opportunities were worked as mid-market — under-resourced, under-prioritised, some lost to slower follow-up than they’d have got in the right queue. The rule wasn’t broken in any way a test would catch. It was quietly making the worst call on exactly the leads that mattered most.
The move
Misrouting hides because the leads still go somewhere. If you’ve never checked what your routing does with missing data, that’s the first place to look — a free health check will find your version of this rule.
Related reading
See five symptoms of routing you’ve outgrown and what lead-to-account matching is.