How to Route Contacts using Hubspot Workflows

Why contact routing is important

It’s not enough to just capture information from the people visiting your website. As it turns out, anonymous website visitors very often are often real people (e.g. prospects and existing customers) who expect someone to take action on their requests.

You may be surprised to learn that businesses ignore lead and customer inquiries literally all the time. How’s that for a revenue growth plan?

Try reaching out to 5 - 10 businesses about buying something they sell. 1 or 2 will get back to you instantly (if you’re lucky). Half of them will take days or weeks. The rest you’ll never hear from.

My goal with this guide is to make sure you’re instantly notified when people want to give you money, every time.

Note: This guide is focused on routing form submissions, which are likely your main source of leads and support requests. Chatbots and meeting booking conversion should also be accounted for in a similar way, but are beyond the scope of this article.

1 - Sketch out your routing enrollment and workflow actions

Where to sketch out your routing plan

A pen and paper helps to focus on crafting a plan and avoiding distractions. Unless I’m checking if specific functionality exists, I personally prefer to keep things simple using a blank white space with no distractions. I would stay out of the Workflows tool until the next step.

If you really want to use a computer, the basic flowchart functions in Miro and LucidChart (rectangles and arrows) work well. As with most major updates that require deep focus and zero distraction, I’ve found it beneficial to stay out of the tool it eventually needs to be built in.

How to enroll a contact into lead routing automation

You’ll need to determine what causes a contact record to enroll in your routing automation. Here’s what you should use in most cases:

• Enrollment trigger = Any form submission - Plan to enable re-enrollment when you get to actually building the routing workflow.

This means every contact who submit form - no matter if its a sales, support, or marketing request - will enroll.

You can filter down via automated actions after they enroll. The alternative to this is specifying each and every form as enrollment criteria, which has significantly more room for error.

What other actions are needed after a contact enrolls

Make sure to include these basic fundamentals and tailor them to your business:

• Major branches could represent your teams - The first branch can split into Marketing, Customer Support, and Sales by grouping marketing forms together, CS forms together, and sales forms together.

• Additional branches break down the type of request - From there, you should get as granular as needed with additional branches. For example, if it’s a sales demo request, you may want to segment further by looking at what the contact is trying to accomplish or which product they’re interested in. if it’s a support request, you could look at type of support needed (e.g. login issue, product improvement, bug alert). Your fields should already be set up to enable this segmentation.

• Assignment may be different if it’s an existing or net new contact - If it’s a contact that was already in your system and has a contact owner, you may want to the existing owner to be alerted. If it’s a net new contact converting for the first time, they should be assigned to the relevant sales or support rep.

2 - Create a contact-based workflow

Once you sketch out the plan, it should be fairly easy to build the enrollment criteria, the if/then branches, and the actions.

• Enrollment criteria = Any form submission - As mentioned in the previous section, this will enroll all contacts who submit a form, no matter what form they submit or page they convert on.

• 1st if/then branch - Sales vs. Support vs. Marketing - Create an if/then branch that looks for specific forms relevant to each team. Filters in if/then branches will be checked in the order they appear. It doesn’t really matter which team and their collection of forms you start with.

• Within-team if/then branches - Under each team branch, add if/then logic that looks at the items you identified were important to your business (e.g. type of request). These will be based on the form field selections available and selected by the contact.

• Assign - Use round robin to the contact owner. If a contact owner already exists, assign to them.

• Fill in actions as needed - You may have a unique routing setup. But simplify it as much as humanly possible.

Takeaways on contact routing