What are the main workflows you should have set up in HubSpot to improve lead management? In this blog, we're looking at the best workflows for successful lead management in HubSpot. Have a read and find out more.
If you’re using HubSpot Professional or Enterprise, you have access to a key tool that isn’t included with any of the smaller versions of HubSpot.
The workflow tool.
HubSpot’s workflow tool allows you to automate repetitive marketing and sales tasks and scale up your activities. Using workflows, you can be more efficient, productive, and consistent, and it's brilliant!
But if you’re a brand-new HubSpot user – or perhaps you haven’t delved into the workflow tool or automation just yet – don’t fear, we can help. This blog will provide you with the best workflows for successful lead management that you can start using today, all of which will automatically improve your use of HubSpot if you aren’t using them already.
Workflow #1
Setting lead owners for new contacts
What happens to new leads when they are generated through HubSpot? At the very least, you should have form submission notifications set up to notify your marketing, sales, and customer success teams when new leads and contacts are generated.
In addition to having these notifications set up, you should also have workflows configured to automatically assign leads generated to marketing or sales. Here are three examples of how you might set this up:
Example One:
You have a list of qualified leads and want to automatically split and distribute them amongst your sales team.
First, create a new workflow and add a new action. Look for the “Rotate Leads” action under the “Sales” section and add it to the workflow. The Rotate Leads action works in a “round-robin” style - add any number of owners to the rotation and they will be assigned the leads evenly.
Using this workflow, every lead you generate will be assigned to one of the salespeople (specified lead owners) that you’ve added to the rotation.
Example Two:
If you run a large business, you probably have someone in your marketing team - or perhaps a marketing and sales admin - who qualifies leads and delegates them to specific salespeople depending on what each lead needs.
Start by creating a new workflow and add a new action. Under “Contact properties”, select “Set contact property value”, then choose the property “Contact owner”. Finally, set the “Property value” as your lead administrator.
In this scenario, new leads are assigned to your lead administrator, who can then qualify the leads and hand them over to sales when required.
Example Three:
In the earlier stages of the buyer’s journey, most potential prospects might not necessarily want to speak to a salesperson. However, there will certainly be a small percentage of website visitors or newly generated leads who do want to speak to your sales team right away. In your new workflow, set the enrolment triggers to “Trigger workflow when:” then choose “Form submissions”. From the list, select your ‘Contact us’ and ‘Request a quote’ style forms. You can then assign an owner using examples one or two.
With this workflow set up, if someone fills out a ‘contact us’ or a ‘request a quote’ form, they are immediately put through to a salesperson who can follow up straight away. Don’t let your marketing-to-sales handover delay a hot lead who wants to talk to you!
Workflow #2
Qualifying out leads
While most of the leads you generate through your Inbound Marketing activity will be legitimate, on occasion you will get the odd false lead, competitor submission or student looking to learn more about a specific industry.
We’ve seen them all. Leads calling themselves James Bond or Mickey Mouse, false emails such as ab@abc.com, and leads with mobile or phone numbers that most definitely don’t belong to any known network…
You don’t want your sales team following up and you definitely don’t want to include these people in your performance reports. So, set up a workflow to exclude them.
First and foremost, you need to exclude any lead that has qualified out (leads that you don’t want to follow up with, e.g. competitors) from any email activity and lead management. You then need to ensure that the leads aren't associated with a certain lifecycle stage, or lead owner. There are a number of fields in each lead’s contact record in HubSpot that you can change to ensure this:
- Lead owner - you should clear the property so that the contact no longer has a lead owner
- Lifecycle stage - you should clear and revert the lifecycle stage back to ‘other’
- Lead status - you should change the lead status to ‘closed’ - meaning that someone has run the lead and the lead doesn’t need to be contacted any further
Workflow #3
Handover from Marketing to Sales
Inbound is working for you, website visitors are engaging with your content, and you’re generating high-quality, qualified leads. But how do you turn qualified leads into real sales opportunities for your business?
There are two main ways for you to move leads from marketing to sales and both can be automated with workflows:
1. Lead scoring
Lead scoring is where you assign values (scores) to leads to help both marketing and sales to prioritize engagement and determine just how interested leads are. Scores are assigned to leads based on the actions they take on your website, including (but not limited to): the number of website visits, number of page views, amount of form submissions, which specific forms they’ve completed, where they’re based, what industry they’re in - the list is endless!
When you have lead scoring configured, you can create a workflow to say, ‘Once contact has reached a lead score of X’, change these two properties:
- Lifecycle stage - switch from marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL)
- Lead owner - switch from marketing to one of your sales team
What exactly is HubSpot's lead scoring and can you score leads to enhance your sales engagement?
2. Manual update
Without lead scoring, you’ll have to create a workflow that automatically updates specific fields in a contact’s HubSpot record when one specific property is changed. For example, you can set up a workflow to say, ‘If you switch a contact from marketing and give them a sales owner, update their lifecycle stage to SQL’. Similarly, if you update a contact’s lifecycle stage from MQL to SQL, you can force HubSpot to ensure the contact is automatically assigned a lead owner.
Find out more about optimizing your lead qualification to better align marketing and sales.
Workflow #4
The creation of deals for new opportunities
So far we’ve covered generating new leads, qualifying out irrelevant leads, and moving leads from marketing to sales. Once leads are with sales, however, you need to create deals for new business opportunities. There are two levels of engagement at this point.
The first is where sales are trying to reach out and start a conversation, perhaps a short five to ten-minute connect call has taken place and they are trying to book another call in. At this stage, the salesperson may not have enough information on the lead’s budget, business position (whether they are a key decision-maker or not), or the probability of this lead becoming a customer.
The second is where an ‘opportunity’ or ‘deal’ is created. What this means is that there’s a real business opportunity. You can put a projected value against it, you know who the decision-maker is, and there’s a real chance of the deal becoming “closed” or “won” in the near future.
But how can you automate the process?
You can do this using HubSpot lifecycle stages. In HubSpot, you can create a workflow to automatically create a new deal for a lead (and their associated contacts and companies) the moment their lifecycle stage changes from SQL to Opportunity.
In addition, the system will force you to insert all relevant information e.g. predicted value, probability of close, and much more.
Workflow #5
The 'we’ve got a new customer' workflow
The last workflow is the most exciting: new customers. What we want to avoid is new customers being created in HubSpot and nothing happening with them.
The moment you generate a new customer, you need to be thinking about what to do next! Your engagement or lead management shouldn’t stop there!
Using HubSpot’s workflows, and starting criteria of ‘lifecycle stage = customer’, you can do many things:
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Send a welcome email thanking them for becoming a new customer
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Switch the contact’s lead owner from sales to customer success and account management
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Update the lead status field to “closed” so that no other salespeople will try to follow up
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Send an internal email round to your team updating them on the new win
As you can see, there are lots of different workflows you can build to manage your leads in HubSpot based on different scenarios and possibilities. The best way to think about workflows is to picture someone submitting a form and then try and work out what’s needed at each step in your sales journey.
You should have workflows in place to manage every aspect of the process - whether that’s managing new leads, handing leads over to sales, updating lead status, or moving leads from an opportunity to closed/won. You want to reduce the amount of manual data updating wherever possible and let HubSpot do the work for you.
If you still need help, we run one and two-day lead management workshops. These workshops are specifically designed to help you plan and build out your lead management process in HubSpot.
