How Merchant Growth cut lead assignment from a morning's work to under a minute.

In short

Merchant Growth has lent over $1 billion to Canadian small businesses since 2009. Realising responsiveness was key to merchant experience, they have replaced manual assignment and a patchwork of Salesforce Flows with Distribution Engine. Leads, Opportunities and Tasks now reach the right rep within a minute.

Problem

The clock starts when a merchant applies. But lead assignment was still done by hand.

A small business seeking capital rarely asks just one lender, so speed and responsiveness matter. Canadian alternative financier Merchant Growth has built its business on getting capital to entrepreneurs efficiently, and as the company grew, it saw an opportunity to make its lead assignment process just as fast and scalable as the rest of its operations.

Leads, renewals, broker outreach and partner handoffs were coordinated by managers, an approach that worked well at a smaller scale but required more time and attention as volume increased.

We caught up with Janet Leung, Business Systems Manager to find out more.

“Our out-of-the-box Salesforce process couldn't fix it. Assignment logic sat in scattered Flows, propped up by a scheduled import someone would run by hand. Round robin, workload caps and out of office awareness were things native Task assignment rules or a Flow couldn't handle cleanly.”

The goal was clear: route every opportunity to the right person quickly, keep workloads balanced across the team, and give managers full visibility into how work was being distributed.

Solution

The right rep assigned in real time - across Leads, Opportunities & Tasks.

Seeking a solution Janet found Distribution Engine on the Salesforce AppExchange (AgentExchange as it’s currently known). Putting herself in the customer's shoes, she knew that responsiveness was key to delivering a great experience for their merchants.

So the solution needed to solve for both speed and accuracy of assignment, resulting in better customer service, and in turn boosting their lead conversion rates.

“It mattered more that a lead had someone assigned right when they applied, rather than sitting in a backlog, since that directly affects the customer experience for our merchant clients.”

Distribution Engine brought the speed and accuracy they were looking for. It enables Janet and her team to allocate leads across reps in real time based on their availability, product specialisms, account ownership, language, and capacity to take on new work.

“We needed round robin and out-of-office-aware routing that Salesforce’s Task assignment rules or Flow couldn't handle cleanly.”

Distribution Engine also assigns more than just Leads. Opportunities route to New Business and Renewal reps based on account ownership without the need for manual lookup. Tasks routing automates the merchant onboarding process for their buy-now-pay-later product Tabit - ensuring next steps are handled by an available member of the team immediately and that nothing gets dropped.

Outcome

Leads routed to the right rep in under a minute. Manual process gladly retired.

Feedback from the sales team has been overwhelmingly positive. Lead allocation has gone from an open-ended manual process to something that happens automatically in under a minute. Now, nothing gets dropped, and nothing bounces between reps, because the engine knows who is out of office, who owns which accounts, and who has capacity.

“Ownership disputes are now a thing of the past. Reps no longer lose the first hour working out who owns what.”

And by being more responsive, lead conversion, pipeline and customer satisfaction has increased as a result.

“We send surveys and Trustpilot reviews about the funding process to our customers. The biggest difference is the speed of the application process, and assignment plays a part in that.”

It wasn't long before Merchant Growth began to find new uses for Distribution Engine as well. Now any merchant leads that go unfunded or go on to pay back their loans are now automatically reassigned to reps who can win them back again in the future.

Sitting behind the business success Merchant Growth have achieved with their improved Salesforce routing solution is Distribution Engine's Support Team. As Janet says:

“What stood out consistently was the outstanding level of support. I reached out about an assignment issue and Jimmy from their Support Team pinpointed the root cause and resolved it all within the same day. Beyond fixing the immediate issue, Jimmy proactively suggested a better way to structure our routing logic, meaningfully reducing duplication in our setup.”

Curious to know how much faster your applicants could reach the right rep? Read our speed to lead guide for the small business loans market.

How did they build it?

1. Dynamic Tag Filters

What is it?: When records hit Salesforce, they're classified with a Tag that is used to route them towards an appropriate team member based on the value of a field on that record. Tags can be used for skills like the languages spoken by each team member - such as "English" or "French". Using Dynamic Tag Filtering, you use the "Language" field on the record to route it to a team member that speaks that language. This way one set of distribution logic can cover many segments without needing duplicate scenarios.

Merchant Growth uses tags for attributes like role, tier and even agent name to assign records back to their existing owner for renewal conversations.

Result: Opportunities reach the right Renewal or New Business team without a manual lookup.

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2. Sticky Assignment

What is it?: A record tied to an account someone already owns goes straight back to that person.

Result: Renewals land with the rep who already holds the relationship, without a manual lookup.

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3. Round Robin Weighting & Caps

What is it?: A standard round robin shares records out equally. Weighting changes that ratio so some reps take more than others, and caps set an upper limit on how many records anyone can hold at once.

Result: Even load across reps, and daily caps of ten accounts per rep on reassignment.

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4. Availability / Out of Office

What is it?: The engine tracks who is away, skips them from being allocated any records, and brings them back into the round robin on return.

Result: Leads never land with an absent rep, and onboarding Tasks stay covered during vacation.

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