Automatic Dealer Assignment

When a lead arrives from a national campaign, someone in your organisation still needs to figure out which dealer should receive it. Done manually, this creates a bottleneck that adds hours or days of delay between a prospect submitting a form and a salesperson making contact. Automatic Dealer Assignment removes that bottleneck entirely by matching every incoming lead to the nearest dealer in real time, using the customer's postcode.

What is Automatic Dealer Assignment?

Automatic Dealer Assignment is a Driftrock feature that compares a customer's postcode against your dealer network and adds the nearest dealer's details to the lead record before it is routed anywhere. The match happens in milliseconds, as the lead is processed, with no human intervention required.

The result is that every lead arriving in your CRM already carries the correct dealer ID and dealer code, ready for the CRM to assign it without any additional routing logic or manual review.

Why use Automatic Dealer Assignment?

Speed-to-dealer is one of the biggest variables in lead conversion for retail networks. Every minute between a prospect submitting a form and a dealer making contact increases the chance of the prospect losing interest or engaging with a competitor. Automatic Dealer Assignment eliminates the delay caused by manual routing:

Leads reach the right dealer instantly. No central team needed to review and forward leads, no CRM workflow rules to maintain per dealer.

Dealer-level reporting becomes possible. Because every lead is stamped with a dealer ID at the point of capture, you can report on lead volume, CPL, and conversion rates at the individual dealer level.

Out-of-catchment leads are identified automatically. When a customer's postcode falls outside your dealer network, the lead is still processed, but the dealer fields are left empty. You can use this as a routing signal to send those leads to a central team or a different nurture flow.

Multiple networks are supported. If you manage separate retail networks (for example, 10 dealers for one brand and 15 for another), you can maintain separate Store Locations sets and assign the correct one to each Capture.

How it works

When a lead arrives in Driftrock, the platform reads the customer's postcode and calculates the straight-line distance to every dealer in your selected Store Locations set. The nearest dealer is matched, and two fields are added to the lead record:

location_id (Driftrock's internal dealer ID) and location.external_id (your own dealer code, used for CRM mapping). The lead then continues through the rest of your automation, now carrying the dealer's name, address, and codes.

If no dealer is found within range, both fields are left blank, and the lead flows through normally. Downstream routing rules can be used to treat these out-of-catchment leads differently.

Getting started

Before you begin, make sure you have a Store Locations set uploaded in Driftrock under Settings and Store Locations. This file should contain at minimum the dealer name, your own dealer code (external ID), and the postcode for every dealer in the network.

Go to Settings and Store Locations and confirm your dealer location set is up to date.

Open a Capture and navigate to the Automate step.

Enable Automatic Dealer Assignment and select the correct Store Locations set for that Capture.

Confirm the postcode field from your lead form is mapped correctly. Without a postcode, no match can be made.

In your CRM destination, map location.external_id

to your CRM's dealer code field. This is the recommended mapping as it uses your own dealer codes rather than Driftrock's internal IDs.

Send a test lead with a known postcode and verify the correct dealer appears on the processed event.

Tips for getting the most out of Automatic Dealer Assignment

Use location.external_id rather than location_id when mapping to your CRM. Your own dealer codes are more stable over time and are what your CRM and DMS systems already recognise.

If a lead is being assigned to a dealer that seems geographically illogical (for example, across a body of water), this is because the matching uses straight-line distance rather than road distance. You can address this by adding supplementary entries to your Store Locations set to absorb specific postcodes that behave unexpectedly.

Keep your Store Locations file up to date whenever dealers open, close, or change their codes. An out-of-date file is the most common cause of leads arriving at the CRM with an invalid dealer code.