Randomly assigning leads via Zapier
Lead assignment in Close is a great way to establish ownership of leads for your team to ensure that no lead slips through the cracks. Sometimes, you'll have a defined set of criteria for Lead assignment. If you don't, randomly distributing Leads to users is a quick and easy way to get up and running.
What you'll need
To set up this zap, you'll need to have the following:
- A Zapier account that allows for multi-step Zaps
- Optional - a Business plan with Close for Groups (more detail below)
How it works, and when to randomly assign
If you're unfamiliar with lead assignment in Close, you'll want to check out our guide on assigning leads to users. If you are familiar with lead assignment in Close, you'll know that our goal here is to assign an active user to a user-type custom field on the lead.
This zap will automate the following process you might handle manually today:
- A new lead enters your system or moves into a particular status;
- You have a set group of users that you want to reach out to, or be assigned to, this lead;
- You select a user at random and update a custom field in Close.
Setting up your Groups
If you're a team with multiple job functions (BDR/SDR/AE) all working within Close, you'll likely want to set up a group for each set of users. Having groups configured will allow you to select a random user from a more specific group of users.
Setting up the Zap
Step 1 - Choose your trigger.
The first decision you'll want to make in setting up this zap is what is going to trigger the lead assignment.

Here are some examples that many of our customers have set up:
- Randomly assign the lead to a user when the lead is created
- Randomly assign the lead an AE once the lead hits a particular opportunity status
- Randomly assign the lead to a CSM once the lead becomes a customer
The choice here is yours - if you'd like some suggestions on the best trigger to use for your use case, reach out to our support team!
Step 2 - Select a random user.
The core of this zap takes place in this action step. You'll use the Select Random User
action as shown below.

One of your configuration options will be to select the group (or groups) to select a random user from. You can have multiple groups here in case your use case requires it.
Simply test the zap here, and Zapier will pick a user randomly to use in the next step.
Step 3 - Updating your Lead.
The last step here is to update your lead custom field with the user selected randomly in the previous step. Use the Update Lead in Close
action and select the Lead ID from Step 1:

Now, ensure you're updating the lead custom field named Lead Owner with the User ID value from Step 2 (random user):

Once you've done this, you're done! Go ahead and turn on the Zap, and you'll now have random Lead distribution for your team!
But wait - will each user get the same number of leads?
One of the biggest concerns around lead distribution is the idea of being fair when assigning leads to team members. Here are some things we've learned in setting up similar workflows for many customers.
- If you look daily, there will be some variability in your distribution. However, over time this will even out.
- Random lead distribution is much easier to set up and manage than a round-robin lead assignment, but both can be done - for more information, look at Round-robin lead assignment.
- For teams mainly concerned about load management (number of leads per user), you can quickly move users between groups to remove them from the available user pool. To do this, you'd simply duplicate your groups and name them something like "Sales Reps - No Assignment".