Route and Assign Contacts with Hubspot Workflows
This guide will show you an approach to sending leads and support requests to the right rep, every time. Here’s how to accomplish this via a scalable, automated lead routing and assignment workflow.
Why automated routing is important
Once contact information is captured (e.g. via a website form submission), alerts won’t necessarily be routed and assigned to the right person on your team to take action.
Overall, I tend to think of it as not just “lead” routing, but instead, “contact routing and assignment” which encompasses the whole process. It accounts for each and every form on a given website so that nothing slips through the cracks.
What are the costs of ignoring this?
When the routing and assignment process is neglected, it causes:
A leaky funnel in the short term. Would-be revenue gets ignored. For example, take a conservative estimate of 2 qualified leads that are ignored each weekday. Say their expected contract value is $2,500, and so that’s $5,000 in created pipeline per day being ignored. This ends up being over $1.3M over the course of a year, given 260 business days. Multiply that by your close rate to get the closed revenue that would be missed out on.
A build up of frustrated contacts (i.e. prospects and customers) in the long term. We’ve all had the experience of wanting to buy something, filling out a form, and never hearing back. It doesn’t seem to make people feel good about doing business with you and so it’s probably a good thing to avoid doing at scale.
What about Hubspot’s default contact owner form notification setting?
It’s possible to use the “notify contact owner” form setting, but the problem with this is:
Manual intervention is still needed. The form setting doesn’t account for net new contacts with no contact owner, so leads and support requests don’t go to the right people or get ignored.
It’s not good for scaling the assignment process. It doesn’t take into account the wider picture of how contact routing is set up. It’s very focused on individual forms and does not centralize routing and assignment processes.
It doesn’t enable the use of multiple owners. Some teams have multiple ownership fields. For example, there may be different sales owner and a support owner fields. This notification setting doesn’t offer enough functionality to optimize for this set up.
This setting is fine when just starting out, but it’s a recipe for a leaky funnel
Prerequisites
Building this out will be much smoother if the below items are completed. Not having them won’t totally prevent you from building a solid routing and assignment process, but they will be extremely helpful:
Your contact capture process is in a good place
Forms are well organized and are assigned a unique conversion type (e.g. demo request, support request, email subscription)
Users on Sales and Customer Success teams are well organized in Users & Teams settings
Responsibilities around contact ownership are clear and expectations are reinforced by leadership
1. Sketch the workflow
What’s expected of the routing and assignment automation?
Before I even touch the workflows tool, I’ll draw out the routing and assignment goals on paper. I aim to be as thorough as possible and to loop in as many relevant people into the process as possible. At all costs, I want to avoid a situation where I’ve built one thing, but the business ends up needing something completely different.
1.1 - Determine the enrollment triggers. It’s possible to use “all form submissions” as the enrollment trigger and then use if/then statements to filter those down (recommended). Some businesses specify each individual form that should enroll a contact, but be forewarned that setup requires more active management. In any case, I’ll write down the answer to “What trigger should cause a contact record to get routed and assigned out?”
Planning on paper vs. creating the workflow - Unless I’m checking if unique functionality exists, I prefer to sketch this out on paper because, for me, contact routing and assignment planning requires deep focus and zero distraction. Using basic shapes in Miro or LucidChart is helpful when sharing sketches with the different teams.
1.2 - Determine if/then needs. The main if/then branch I tend to use specifies the type of form that was submitted (e.g. demo request, support inquiry, email subscription). These can be set via a hidden field at the form level via a custom “Recent conversion type” property. I’ve learned that splitting forms by type often brings much needed clarity to the business and saves a ton of would-be headache.
1.3 - Specify owner assignments. Are your teams structured for round robin assignments? If so, that would make the assignment process simpler because you can use Hubspot’s built in round robin action. Team management becomes easier as well because you can edit who is currently on each of the teams via Users & Teams, rather than needing to edit the assignment workflow(s). If you need to specify individual users, this is not the end of the world, but the workflow will be slightly more complex and you will need to edit the workflow if/when a sales or support person leaves the company. Both approaches are detailed in the next section.
1.4 - Any other requirements? There’s always essential requirements that come up. This doesn’t mean they need to be implemented exactly, but it’s helpful to have them on deck so they can be accounted for. I like having them written down along with everything else.
2. Build the workflow
Translate the requirements into automation-speak.
The following approach has repeatedly worked out well for the businesses I’ve built it for because it’s simple, organized, and requires minimal management. There are many different ways to create a contact routing and assignment workflow. It’s also true that the more complicated a lead routing setup is, the more management, upkeep, and troubleshooting it will require.
2.1. - Enroll all contacts who submit a form. This is under the “form submissions” filter and the default settings often work just fine. Forms that don’t need to be assigned out to an owner (e.g. email subscription submissions) will be filtered out in the next step.
2.2 - Route via if/then branch based on Recent Conversion Type. Create an if/then branch action with branches for each type of conversion . This is how I filter down the contacts that enter from the all-encompassing “all form submissions” enrollment trigger. The conversion type is stamped on the contact every time they submit the form, via a hidden field on the form. You may have a few more than three forms, but ideally not more than five or ten max.
2.3 - Create the assignment workflows - After branching on conversion type, I go down each branch and use the “Enroll in another workflow” action to immediately enroll the contact into a relevant assignment workflow (e.g. assign to sales, assign to support). These workflows can be round robin-based or assign to specific users. Some branches don’t need a workflow action (e.g. email subscription and none met), though you could add them to a list for reference.
Why are there separate workflows for assignments? I like to keep the assignment workflow separate from the routing because it helps to more easily answer questions about how things routed vs. how they got assigned. I find it doesn’t add too much additional complexity. In my mind, there are two main types of assignment workflows: Round Robin and Custom Alerts. Which one is needed depends on business needs.
2.3a - Assign - Option 1 - Round robin - Hubspot’s round robin feature will automatically assign unassigned contacts to the next person in line. If the contact is already assigned, it will alert existing owners and won’t assign it to a new person. This is perfect if the sales team is set up to function in this way and your Users & Teams are in good order. If you can go this route, try to do so.
Here’s how I tend to set up the round robin options:
Rotate the record to the Contact owner. Sometimes companies have multiple owner types (e.g. sales owner vs. support owner), and so we can use this option to select that specific type of owner.
Leave “Overwrite if contact has existing owner” checkbox unchecked. There may be a good reason not to, but generally sales and support teams want existing contact owners to keep their contacts.
Rotating between Teams is preferred, but you can also rotate between specific individuals. Teams is better so you don’t have to go back in and update the workflow if/when users leave the company.
Here’s what the separate round robin assignment workflow ends up looking like. It includes a manual enrollment (from the routing workflow) and a “Rotate record to owner” action. Clean and simple.
2.3b - Assign - Option 2 - Assign and send alerts to specific people - Not all sales and support teams want to rotate leads evenly among themselves. The biggest item to be aware of when building assignments like this is that if this person ever leaves the organization, the workflow must be updated, otherwise there’s a risk of leads never getting to sales and support requests never reaching the support team.
Here’s how I like to set up the specific alerts when round robin is not an option:
Use an if/then branch to check if Contact owner is known. This enables you to determine what will happen with existing contacts vs. net new contacts.
If a contact already has an owner, send an alert to the existing Contact owner. An internal email notification keeps things simple. In the email alert, you can include any data you have on the contact, not just the form submission information. Customize this to include all relevant information for that sales or customer support team member.
If the contact is net new and/or doesn’t have an existing owner, set contact owner and alert them. Create a “Set property” action that sets the Contact owner. Then, send an internal email notification to them (exact same thing as previous step).
2.4 - Review workflow settings. You should be able to get away with the default settings, but it’s worth reviewing them. Here are a few you may want to consider:
Timing - For example, do you want to avoid leads and support requests getting assigned on the weekends?
Goals - If someone meets a certain criteria, should they be removed from this workflow?
Enrollment history and changes - Hubspot tracks who enters the workflow and when, as well as any updates to the workflow. All of this is good to be aware of when diagnosing unexpected outcomes.
Routing and Assignment Takeaways
The better organized your contact capture and user management process is, the better the routing and assignment process will be. It’s worth taking the time to get forms organized (e.g. naming, conversion type, pages they’re on) and users grouped into teams before starting in on this.
Plan first, create later. Thorough requirements gathering saves the headache of building something for the business and needing to completely overhaul it. Smaller tweaks should be expected, but all relevant people should be on the same page before work starts on the automation.
Getting leads to sales reps is important, but don’t forget about support requests and other types of inquiries that you allow for.
Not all submissions require reps to take action on them. For example, email subscribers probably don’t want you reaching out to them. Add them to a list instead of assigning them out.
Have a routing and assignment plan for meeting booking and chat. Form submissions are fundamental, but if you’re capturing contact information in other ways, consider how that interest is being translated into action.
