Full definition
Buyer capacity is the per-buyer ceiling on how many leads can be routed to them in a given time window — commonly per hour, per day, per week, or per month. Capacity exists because buyers are humans with finite bandwidth: a broker can only meaningfully work so many leads a day before quality collapses, and a buyer paying for a monthly lead quota wants protection against spikes that would blow past their budget. A good distribution system checks capacity before routing any lead and skips over buyers who are at cap, rather than queuing leads that might go stale waiting. Capacity rules interact with distribution strategy: under round-robin, a capped buyer is skipped and the rotation continues; under waterfall, a capped top-tier buyer causes the lead to cascade down; under weighted, capped buyers effectively drop out of the pool until their window resets.
Related terms
The recipient of leads in a distribution system — typically a sales team, broker, agent, or end-customer who converts leads into revenue.
The process of automatically routing incoming sales leads from suppliers to buyers using rules and software.
A distribution strategy that sends every lead to the top-priority buyer first, cascading to the next buyer when capacity is hit.