Deep Dive Into Round Robin & Weighted Round Robin

One of Lead Prosper’s most popular lead distribution methods is Round Robin. To put it simply, round robin distribution takes all of your buyers, groups them together, and then cycles new leads to the next buyer in line until all buyers have accepted a lead. Once all buyers have gotten a lead, the distribution cycle begins again.

Think of it like a pizza pie - you have 8 slices (buyers) in a standard pie of pizza, each with an equal chance of being chosen to be devoured at 12.5%. As each slice is taken away and eaten, the remaining slices have increased odds of being chosen next. Once the pie is empty, a new pie is brought out and all slices start with equal odds again.

As shown in the example above, as a pie gets taken away, the odds increase. When there are 7 slices left, the odds of getting chosen go up to 14.29%. Another slice gets taken, and the 6 remaining slices have a 16.67% chance of being chosen next. Continue and continue until all slices are gone, and then the next pie comes out and they start again.

How does this play into lead distribution and routing? Well, let’s say for example you have an agency with 12 sales agents. If you want to ensure that all sales agents are getting a fair amount of leads you can utilize Round Robin distribution and all of your sales agents will have an equal share of the leads that are ingested. In a perfect, and highly unlikely, scenario, all of the 12 sales agents would accept every lead sent to them without any filters, caps, or other disqualifiers. Your campaign gets 12 leads, they go out 1 by 1 to each buyer. Rinse, repeat.

There is a common misconception when it comes to Round Robin distribution, though, especially when it comes to lead routing. Just because you have Round Robin distribution in place does not mean that every buyer in your campaign will get an equal percentage of the leads. There are a number of reasons why this might be the case. If you have any filters or caps in place, every buyer in your campaign may not be able to accept 100% of the leads that are ingested. Data validation, compliance checks, duplicate checkers, etc. These are all reasons why an agent may not be able to accept a lead that is ingested.

Here is a scenario - let's say you have 12 buyers in a campaign, 4 of those buyers only accept leads from Florida state and the other 8 accept leads from every state. If a lead comes in from Florida then all 12 buyers are able to accept that lead, and there is a 8.33% chance for each buyer to get that lead.

However, if a lead comes in from New York, that lead only has 8 buyers who can accept said lead. So the Round Robin will be applied to the 8 buyers that are able to accept the lead. This means that each eligible buyer in this case would have a 12.5% chance of getting the lead.

This logic is applied to EVERY lead that comes into the campaign, and at the end of the month, if you were to add up all the leads it will become very obvious that each buyer’s percentage of the leads will not add up to an even 100%. Statistically, it would be impossible to get 100% total unless you had a total number of leads that is divisible by the total number of buyers in a given month. For example, 100 leads distributed amongst 10 buyers would be 10 leads each, and when added up at the end of the month would give you 100% even distribution. Highly unrealistic, but is an edge case worth noting.

To make things even more complicated in terms of a perfectly equal distribution method with Round Robin, there is also the option to use Weighted Round Robin. This distribution method allows the user to alter the percentage of leads distributed to each buyer. Situations where Weighted Round Robin may be useful could be if you have agents where the number of leads they are given is directly proportional to their sales numbers. If an agent closes more deals, they may be entitled to more leads.

Take the example above with the 12 agents - 8 agents who accept all leads, and 4 who only accept leads from Florida. Lets adjust it slightly down to 4 agents and apply Weighted Round Robin percentages. The second column below represents the Weighted Round Robin distribution percentages for all of these buyers. The third column represents the percentages if a Florida lead were to come in. But look at the fourth column - these updated percentages are what would happen if a lead from NY were to come in.

These percentage fluctuations are what happens when the pool of available buyers shrinks. If you look at the graph below, you will see the Round Robin percentages adjusted against a simulated distribution size of 5,000 leads. You can see how the percentages fluctuate across the amount of leads that are distributed- this is a visual way to show how at the end of a lead cycle you can have less than perfect percentages, rather than the exact numbers that you set up in your campaign settings. Buyer 1 ended with 20.4% distribution, Buyer 2 ended with 4.9% distribution, Buyer 3 ended with 24.9%, and Buyer 4 ended with 49.7%. Only slightly off, but off nonetheless.