When leads come into a database it is very important to assign them to the right team members in order to start working on them. That’s when a lead routing system comes into play!

In this blog, we will show you what is lead routing and what to consider when building a lead routing workflow.

What is Lead Routing?

Lead routing is a set of rules that helps you assign new leads to the right team members in order to start working on them. This can be either part of your Sales or Marketing processes, and we highly recommend that you automate this for a seamless customer experience and for a productive and efficient internal team.

A sales lead routing process can assign leads to certain team members based on their territory, for example. In the case of marketing, downloading a piece of content can assign new leads to the marketing team as well. There are many ways to establish those rules based on your business model, which takes us to our next topic.

via GIPHY

Building a Lead Routing Workflow in HubSpot

Yes, we will use the workflow tool in HubSpot!

via GIPHY

In order to build an effective lead routing workflow you will need to understand how your current sales or marketing process works.

Start by asking yourself questions like:

How are leads entering the database?
When leads enter the database, what happens?
How and when should leads be passed off to your team members? (think lead qualification, interests, activity, contact properties, and behavior)
Which of your sales people and account executives touch leads and when?
What lead source makes my leads sales or marketing qualified?

Identifying Properties in HubSpot

Once you have a better idea of your lead flow, it’s time to start identifying the properties that can be used in your workflow.

Sometimes you have an ideal scenario in your mind, but there is no system in place collecting the data needed to make that scenario a reality.

In this case, you can search for a default option in HubSpot or create a custom property to fulfill that need to start bringing data to HubSpot.

If the properties are all in place, troubleshoot to see if there is anything not hooked up correctly. That means look at the forms you want to use, for example. If your Contact Us form brings SQLs, are all the form fields using the right properties? Make sure your workflow will have the exact same property. We often see duplicated properties tricking people into thinking HubSpot is broken!

via GIPHY

Depending on the properties involved in this process, you might find room for improvement or need to troubleshoot to make sure when you turn on the workflow there will be data coming through.

Here is how to troubleshoot if the right data is not coming through:

Navigate to Settings > Properties, and look for the properties you are using. See if they currently have contacts with that value
Look for potential duplicated properties. Are there any similar properties that could be confused with each other? Example: you might have the default property State/Region, but the portal also has a custom property State with multiple dropdown options. Make sure you are adding to the workflow the same property you are using to collect data.
If leads are being imported, is the desired data coming over? In this example, do all imported spreadsheets have a column for the State property? Are these imported contacts marked SQL to include in this workflow?
If leads are coming into the database via forms, do all SQL qualification forms have the field State required, for this example?

Organize Your Plan on a Spreadsheet

If you have a big team and need to build your workflow under several different conditions, start by organizing the workflows on a spreadsheet. That will help you have a clearer vision of who gets assigned to what, then you just need to translate that into HubSpot.

Following this example where the State property is used to route leads to different reps, you could list all 50 States in one column and each State's corresponding reps’ name and email next to it. This will help you to:

Check if all those reps are users in HubSpot to be assigned tasks, for example.
Verify your State property. The spelling you have in the spreadsheet should match the property
If several reps cover the same State, this will help you group them faster and find extra possible filters to differentiate them (i.e. zip codes)

Building a Lead Routing Workflow

Continuing with our example of assigning reps by State, we will use the submission of the Contact Us form as the enrollment trigger since this is a form that usually qualifies SQLs (If that’s not your SQL rule, be, find something that is).

Next, we want to create branches which will allow us to have all 50 States in the same workflow instead of creating 50 workflows.

In the image below, we added branches with “if State is any of” Texas, OR, California, OR New York:

Adding Actions to Your Workflow

With the triggers figured out, it’s time to work on the workflow actions.

In this example, we are creating tasks for the reps reminding them to reach out to the lead. We will include personalization tokens so they know the name of the lead and the name of the lead’s company. Feel free to choose the best action such as email, to-do, task, etc. and explore HubSpot’s tools to better deliver the message to the assignee.

The State property is a simple example, but you might have a more complex lead flow to translate into HubSpot that will require other types of actions to fit your needs such as send in-app messages, email, send SMS, etc.

The goal of the lead routing workflow is to have an engine running in the backend helping the sales process to be seamless for the lead and for the sales team.

Check out the video below with a quick round up of how to build the Lead Routing Workflow:

Testing

Once your workflow is done, turn it on and perform a test to make sure contacts will get enrolled and go through the process as expected.

To perform the test, see what triggers the workflow and try it yourself. For example, the enrollment trigger is a form fill, go to the page where the form is at, fill up the form and see if you go through the whole process by checking the History tab of the workflow.

Cookies might prevent you from completing the workflow if you are already in the database, so you might need to use an alternative email in an incognito tab of your browser.

If something doesn’t work it’s time to troubleshoot. Contact HubSpot support and keep testing!