How to split leads between agents

9 October 2026 · 9 min read

The short answer. Split new leads evenly by count, within minutes of them arriving, and split each lead source separately so nobody ends up with all the website enquiries. Take back any lead nobody has contacted by the end of the next working day. Judge fairness on bookings per source over a few months, not on lead counts.

Lead distribution is the argument every growing brokerage has eventually. It usually starts the week a new agent joins and notices that the experienced people seem to get the good ones.

1. The three ways brokerages do it

Almost every brokerage runs one of these, whether or not anybody chose it.

The free-for-all. Leads land in a shared list and whoever claims one first works it. It feels fast, and with a small, hungry team it often is. The trouble starts when leads differ. An enclosed move for a 2023 Porsche and an open-carrier sedan going 200 miles do not look the same in the list, and the agent who spots the Porsche first gets it every time. The leads nobody wanted sit there getting older, and an aged lead in car shipping is mostly a lead someone else booked. New agents, who are slower to claim, learn the job on what is left over.

The manager hands them out. This works well at two or three agents, because the manager knows who is busy and who is good with dealers. At six agents it becomes a queue with one person at the front of it. Leads wait while the manager is on a call, at lunch, or asleep. And the judgement about who is "good with" which kind of lead lives in one head, so nobody else can check it or argue with it.

An even split. Leads are shared out in equal numbers, either one at a time in turn (round robin) or in batches. It is the fairest of the three on paper, and it is fast, because nobody is deciding anything. Its weakness is the one the free-for-all exploits: equal numbers of leads are not equal amounts of opportunity. The rest of this piece is mostly about fixing that.

2. Equal counts are not equal chances

Say Monday morning brings 40 new leads and you have four agents. Twelve came through the quote form on your own website. Twenty-eight came from a lead provider you buy from.

Those two groups are not the same. A website lead chose you. A bought lead is usually shared, and one industry help centre, Web Auto Transport's, tells customers to expect 5 to 10 brokers to contact them after filling in a single form. Check your own numbers, but expect the website leads to book at a noticeably higher rate, for that reason alone.

Split all 40 in one round robin and each agent gets 10, but the mix is luck. One agent can easily end up with six website leads and another with one. Over a week that is a real difference in bookings that has nothing to do with skill, and it is exactly the kind of thing that starts the argument.

The fix is simple: split each source on its own. Twelve website leads become three each. Twenty-eight provider leads become seven each. Every agent still gets ten, and now every agent gets the same ten.

The same logic applies to anything else that changes the odds a lot. If your brokerage does a meaningful number of dealer or auction moves alongside private customers, split those as their own group too. Do not overdo it, though. Two or three groups is plenty. Split by six different attributes and you are back to a manager deciding everything, just with more steps.

3. Assign in minutes, not at the morning meeting

The most expensive thing about any distribution method is the time a lead spends unassigned. While it sits in a pile, nobody owns it, so nobody calls it.

This matters more in car shipping than in most sales, because of the sharing above. The research on response time is old and was not done on vehicle shipping, but its direction is hard to argue with: a 2011 Harvard Business Review study found firms that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited an hour longer. We went through what that research does and does not show in how fast to call back an auto transport lead.

So whatever method you use, the assigning has to happen when the leads arrive. A batch split at 9am for leads that came in overnight is fine. A batch split at 9am for leads that came in at 9:05 yesterday is not.

4. Take untouched leads back

Every brokerage has an agent whose list quietly silts up. Sometimes it is a strong agent who is too busy closing to call new leads. Sometimes it is someone who is on holiday, off sick, or about to leave. Either way, the leads assigned to them are not being worked, and because they are assigned, nobody else will touch them.

Write down a rule and stick to it. Ours would be: a lead with no contact attempt by the end of the next working day goes back into the pool and is split again with the next batch. It does not matter what the rule is, as long as everybody knows it and it is applied to everybody. A rule applied only to the junior agents is a punishment, and the team will treat it as one.

The same goes for an agent who leaves. Their open leads should be reassigned the day they go, not discovered three weeks later when a customer rings to ask why nobody called back.

5. The leads worth assigning by hand

An even split should cover most leads. A few are worth a person's judgement:

• Returning customers. Someone who shipped with you last spring and is going south again this autumn should go straight to the agent who looked after them. That relationship is the reason they came back.
• Dealer and commercial accounts. A dealership moving cars every month is an account, not a lead, and it needs one consistent contact.
• Language. If a customer writes in Spanish and one of your agents speaks it, that is not a hard decision.

Keep this list short. Every category you add is another lead waiting for someone to decide where it goes.

6. Should the best closers get more?

It is tempting. If one agent books 25% of website leads and another books 12%, sending more leads to the first looks like free money.

In the short term it often is. The cost shows up later. New agents get fewer leads, so they learn more slowly, so they stay worse, which justifies giving them fewer leads. A few months on, the brokerage depends on two or three people, and when one of them leaves, the bookings leave too.

Our view is that an even split should be the base for everyone, and performance should change other things: who gets the hand-assigned accounts, who gets first call on returning customers, how commission works. If you do want to weight distribution, keep the weighting small and review it every quarter, and never let it drop a new agent below the volume they need to get better.

7. How to tell whether the split is fair

Counting leads per agent tells you whether the split is even. It does not tell you whether it is fair. For that you need, per agent and per source, every month:

• Leads received
• Share contacted within the hour
• Share quoted
• Share booked
• Broker fee booked

Be careful with small numbers. An agent who receives 40 leads a month moves 2.5 percentage points with every single booking, so one good week can look like talent and one bad week like a problem. Look at three months together before deciding anything. If two agents get the same number of leads from the same source for a whole quarter and one books twice as many, that is a coaching conversation. If the gap moves around from month to month, it is probably noise.

This is also where keeping broker fee and carrier pay as separate fields pays off. Bookings tell you who closes. Broker fee by agent tells you who closes at a price that makes money.

8. Where TruxCRM fits

In TruxCRM an admin can select as many leads as they like in the Leads list and assign them to one agent in a single action, or choose to auto-assign them evenly and have them shared across the team in equal numbers. Select one source's leads at a time, using the Source column, and you have the split described in section 2. Each agent then works their share in their own portal, and the lead's source stays on the record from the first enquiry through the quote and the signed order, which is what makes the per-source numbers in section 7 possible.

Leads imported from a CSV file arrive unassigned for the same reason: so the list goes to the team the way you decide, not to whoever opens it first. If you are comparing systems on how they handle distribution, our auto transport CRM comparison covers who does what, and you can book a demo to see the assignment on your own lead volume.

9. Frequently asked questions