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Sales teams need to be highly responsive and productive in order to meet revenue goals. This requires excellent operational efficiency, which means removing friction from their day-to-day tasks, from receiving a lead to successfully closing it. If you expect productivity from your sales team, you need to simplify their work process, starting with the first step: The distribution of leads. If you don’t reach out to your customer within 5 minutes, your chance of conversion drops up to 8x. How do we solve this?
To reach customers quickly, your sales team needs to be fast, which means leads should instantly reach the best-suited representative so that he/she can take appropriate actions and start working on the lead. This is only possible through automated lead distribution to your team.
The Need for Lead Routing
If you use HubSpot to manage your whole marketing process, you need to integrate automated lead distribution into your process. Chances are that you or someone from your sales team is dedicated to distributing leads among the reps, or you have integrated basic automation, allowing you to distribute leads evenly among the reps regardless of their performance and availability. Both methods are highly outdated and inefficient in HubSpot.
*Jump to the good part: Skip this section If you know what a HubSpot workflow is and how it works*
Conventional Lead Routing in HubSpot
HubSpot is a powerful and practical marketing tool that helps you manage your marketing strategy from top to bottom. It offers a complete email marketing solution from gathering leads, distributing them, keeping up with the progress, and helping you keep your process transparent.
But the complete functionality of HubSpot is also, at the same time, a problem for sales managers. There are so many things happening at once sales experts find it hard to leverage the full potential of HubSpot. One of the key examples is the creation of HubSpot workflows.
Everyone can create a basic HubSpot workflow but creatively building a workflow that can gather and distribute leads automatically requires expertise and time. Surprisingly, only 50% of businesses use automated lead distribution as a part of their strategy. This reduces their chances of customer acquisition by 90%.
What is a HubSpot Workflow?
HubSpot workflow is a fantastic feature for creating condition-based actions that get triggered when the condition is met. For example, the lead might be transferred to a specific person from your team based on the set condition (matching demographics, performance, workload, etc.).
Creating a workflow requires logic because you are technically conditioning the software to perform a specific action when a condition is met. Still, you need to ensure that your action and condition are valid and exist. For example, if you want to distribute incoming leads based on location, you also need to categorize your team based on their locations so that tool can know which rep to transfer to.
Create a condition to check if the lead fits the criteria
Set a suitable action (rotate lead to rep in this case)
Select reps from your team that will receive this lead
You need to create different workflows if you want to create a hyper-efficient lead routing process. For different types of leads and the availability of owners, your lead distribution process should adapt accordingly. Since there is no AI involved in HubSpot workflows, you will need to define conditions and related responses for each type of condition that can occur.
For more information on creating an automatic lead distribution workflow in HubSpot, see our article on HubSpot lead routing automation.
Is HubSpot Workflow Enough to Keep the Sales Team Agile?
Can you get creative with the lead distribution workflow? Yes, you definitely can. If you want a lead of a particular type be directed to a specific owner, you can create a workflow for that. If you want to do a weighted lead rotation, you can also create parameters of weighting distribution and keep track of it for the upcoming leads but… there are problems.
HubSpot is a great tool, but since its primary focus isn’t automated lead rotation,
the feature does not have much to offer. HubSpot provides a blank workflow section you need to build from scratch. If you want to do weighted workload-based distribution, your workflow be extremely complicated to build.
So, if you were initially looking to save time through the automated lead rotation, you now face the resistance of setting up a complicated workflow. Even if you hire an expert to create a workflow, keeping the workflow updated is another hassle.
This is why HubSpot workflows fail to meet the needs of a dynamic marketing world that keeps transforming.
Think in terms of revenue, if potential leads are routed to sales reps who have a lot of new uncontacted leads on their hand, they will not be able to get back to them in time. Similarly, if one of your sales reps has a higher conversion rate in a certain demographic, it makes sense that the lead only gets distributed to their account.
The whole point of automated lead distribution is operational efficiency and increased revenue, but HubSpot workflows make you miss out on a lot of potential business due to a lack of functionality.
Routera: AI-Based Lead Routing
Your HubSpot leads deserve more careful treatment than just random distribution. Since complicated workflows are a bad idea, you can use third-party apps like Routera that are available on HubSpot’s marketplace and offer AI-based lead routing.
Routera helps fully automate lead distribution using efficient AI-based models that not only distribute leads based on performance and availability but also measure individual rep's performance, push them to clear unfinished leads, and create progress reports for sales managers.
This removes the need to create distribution workflows and set complex parameters. Routera can be easily integrated with HubSpot in a few simple steps and help you stay on top of your marketing operations by ensuring every lead is worked on in the least possible time.
Find more information about Routera on our site.