Twelve years on: 4x the volume & speed-to-lead in under a minute. How GoTo runs Salesforce routing on Distribution Engine.

In short

GoTo has run Salesforce routing on Distribution Engine for 12+ years. The platform has grown with them through mergers, rebrands, and every sales motion in between. Today it routes five record types across 700+ users, gets inbound leads to a live conversation in under a minute, and keeps the receipts on every routing decision.

Problem

Slow leads, ownership disputes, & custom code straining under scale.

GoTo, the Boston-based SaaS company behind GoTo Connect and LogMeIn Resolve, are a big name in communication and collaboration software and IT management software for small and midsize businesses. It’s an industry where the first vendor to the lead usually wins the deal. So GoTo’s Salesforce routing had to do three things well: be fast enough to compete, accurate enough for the sales team to trust, and adaptable enough to grow with the business.

Before Distribution Engine, none of the three were happening reliably. We caught up with Chris and Mike from GoTo’s Business Applications team to hear the full story.

Originally, Leads and Opportunities were handled by a pair of custom-built routing systems, maintained by the Sales Ops team. Other records - Business Requests, Onboarding, Partner Interest - weren’t routed at all. Whoever had a spare minute picked them up.

The out-of-the-box Salesforce logic that had got them this far was starting to creak, and it showed up in the numbers. Records routed to the wrong rep multiple times a week, requiring manual admin intervention to work out why. Rules-of-engagement disputes between reps took up hours of manager time every month. And inbound records could take 30 minutes or longer to reach the right rep.

As Chris Sweet, Director of Business Applications, puts it:

“We had inconsistent lead distribution, with some reps receiving too many leads while others received too few, ultimately affecting productivity and revenue outcomes.”

Solution

One Salesforce-native routing engine. Every object. Every decision. Every sales motion.

When GoTo picked Distribution Engine over a decade ago, three things stood out. It was Salesforce-native. It could handle any object (standard or custom). And it was built to be run by ops, not by engineering. That combination fit a growing SaaS business that needed routing to be a job the ops team could run without asking a developer.

Today, Distribution Engine handles routing across their go-to-market, distributing five record types across four teams. Chris’s Business Applications team runs everything centrally without needing a Salesforce developer dedicated to routing.

For GoTo’s Sales team, the moment that matters is the handoff. Inbound opportunities go to Business Development Reps (BDRs) first for qualification. Once the BDR has qualified the prospect on the phone, they hit a Pass button on the record. Distribution Engine picks the right Account Executive (AE) and routes it there instantly. As Mike Stokes, Senior Manager of Business Applications, says:

“Distribution Engine allows the BDR to identify the assigned AE in real time and facilitate a warm transfer immediately, creating a much smoother customer experience.”

Chris reflects that the competitive advantage this speed has given them would not have been easy with Salesforce’s out-of-the-box tooling.

“It would’ve been extremely difficult to operationalize this with native Salesforce tooling alone. We’d have required significant custom Apex development and considerably more operational overhead to maintain over time.”

Distribution Engine does three things the old systems couldn’t. It shows why every routing decision happened. It handles any routing shape you can design - simple round-robin, multi-tier handoffs, anything in between. And it runs every routable object on one platform.

The ops team self-serves as the business evolves. Whether that’s a new team, a new territory, or a new sales motion, the update ships in hours, not sprints.

Outcome

30x faster speed-to-lead & 4x the routing volume.

Twelve years on, Distribution Engine has become an essential part of how GoTo runs Salesforce. The ops team keeps routing running with a fraction of the effort. And the sales team gets to prospects thirty times faster.

Accuracy

When a rep questions why a lead was allocated the way it was, Chris’s team pulls the log and gets a definitive answer on the spot. Rep and manager confidence in the routing process is high, mis-routed records are rare, and 4-5 hours of ops time per month that used to go into arbitration now goes into work that actually moves the business. As Mike says:

“With Distribution Engine, we can audit any routing decision and clearly show why it happened. Questions that used to take hours of manual investigation now get resolved in minutes. It’s hard-wired our rules of engagement, so we settle disputes quickly, with matter-of-fact answers.”

Speed

A prospect fills in a form on GoTo’s website and a rep is on it in real-time. That’s under a minute - where it used to take thirty. A 30x acceleration in a sector where first-to-conversation often wins deals. Chris reflects:

“The speed at which we are getting an interested user into the hands of a sales rep has increased by an order of magnitude or more.”

Scale

Tens of thousands of records a month, five record types, 700+ users receiving routed work - all running on the latest version of the platform GoTo originally installed 12 years ago. Roughly 4x the volume of the legacy systems, with comfortable headroom to double again.

Curious how GoTo routes leads into live conversations in under a minute? Learn more about Distribution Engine →

How did they build it?

GoTo routes five Salesforce record types across four teams, including two-tiered Opportunity handoffs from BDR to AE with a live warm-transfer motion. Here are the Distribution Engine capabilities doing the heavy lifting.

1. Multi-object routing

What is it?: Distribution Engine routes any Salesforce object, standard or custom, through a single platform.

Result: GoTo routes five record types on one platform (Leads, Opportunities, Business Requests, Onboarding records, and Partner Interest). Tens of thousands of records per month, maintained by one team.

Learn more →

2. Trigger Distributors

What is it?: Routing that fires the instant something changes on a record, a field updates, a status flips, a checkbox is ticked. No waiting for the next batch.

Result: GoTo’s BDRs qualify inbound Opportunities and pass them to Account Executives with a single click. The Trigger Distributor identifies the correct AE in real time, enabling a warm transfer while the BDR is still on the phone with the prospect.

Learn more →

3. Sticky Assignment

What is it?: Sticky Assignment keeps related records with the same rep. Anything that shares an Account, an Email, or a custom match field goes to the same person for a set time.

Result: For GoTo, it’s how the Business Applications team enforces rules of engagement across the sales floor. Without it, the team would need custom logic and constant operational policing to stop multiple AEs from the same product group calling into the same account.

Learn more →

4. Dynamic Tag Matching

What is it?: Tags label reps by skill, territory, product specialism, anything you want. Dynamic Tag Matching routes records to whichever rep matches, so one rule does the work of dozens.

Result: In Mike’s words:

“It allows a single rule to handle far more scenarios than if we had to build separate rules for every tag or variation. Without it, our rule count and maintenance overhead would explode.”

Learn more →

5. Lookup Distributors

What is it?: Build a distributor once, use it in as many routing flows as you need. One place to update the logic.

Result: For GoTo, this means the same routing logic doesn’t have to be rebuilt across different flows. As Mike puts it:

“Without them, things would get messy fast and become much harder to maintain at scale.”

Learn more →

6. Distribution Logs

What is it?: Every distribution is logged with timestamps, matched distributor, and outcome. Tracking exposes exactly why a record went to a specific rep, and how long each stage of the routing process took.

Result: For GoTo, Tracking replaced 4-5 hours per month of manager time on routing disputes with matter-of-fact answers pulled from the log. It’s also how GoTo measures speed-to-lead down to the second, the metric behind the 30-minute-to-under-a-minute improvement.

Learn more →