The Ultimate Implementation Guide to HubSpot Lead Routing

HubSpot Lead routing or automated lead assignment on HubSpot is the process of automatically assigning leads to a team or a specific set of users. It ensures inbound leads are distributed evenly amongst a team, and that contacts are contacted quickly after they submit a form or call in.

Different businesses will have different lead routing strategies. For example, sales reps may work with Account Based matching, that is if a lead from an existing company submits a form, this lead would be assigned to the representative who already owns the company. Most businesses use a round robin distribution, which assigns evenly amongst a team, ensuring each representative gets the same amount of opportunity.

Implementing lead routing in HubSpot can seem complicated, but I'll break it down into some simple steps. We will start by discussing the types of lead routing processes for each department:

Considerations Before Setting Up Lead Routing

Every business has its own unique go-to-market strategy. Before implementing lead routing in your organization, consider these fundamental questions with your entire revenue team:

Once you've clarified these aspects, you'll have a comprehensive view of your lead flow process. The next step is connecting this process to specific HubSpot properties.

For instance, if your qualification criteria require companies to have at least 100 employees, you need to identify which HubSpot CRM property stores this information. This mapping is essential because you'll need to configure your system to collect and utilize the right data points to make your lead routing framework operational.

Common Lead Routing Strategies

Implementing Lead Routing in HubSpot

To set up lead routing, navigate to the Automation menu and access the Workflows feature. From there, you can create custom workflows that automatically assign leads to appropriate team members based on your predefined rules and conditions.

This automation helps ensure timely follow-up and proper lead management across your sales organization.

Step 1: Navigate to your HubSpot workflows

Within HubSpot, navigate to the main menu and click on "Automations" and then click on "Workflows."

Workflows is an automation tool that allows you to make automated actions when specific triggers occur. The workflow we will be building here is going to take any contact that has submitted a form, and assign them to a specific specialized sales representative based on the region of the contact.

Step 2: Create a new HubSpot workflow from scratch

Once you've navigated to the workflows, let's go ahead and create a new workflow. To do this, click on

Once you've navigated to the workflows, let's start by creating a workflow. To do this click on "create workflow" and then click on "From scratch."

Step 3: Select the object you will be routing

Depending on your use case, you may not be routing contacts. HubSpot has four default objects; contacts, companies, deals and tickets - but if you're on an enterprise version you can also route custom objects that you may have created.

In this example, we will be routing contacts. So you can select "Contact-based" and then click on "Next."

Step 4: Name the workflow and select the enrollment trigger

Start by naming your workflow, in this case we'll call it "Contact Form Lead Assignment." Once you've named the workflow, let's go ahead and add the enrollment trigger.

To edit the enrollment criteria, simply click on the"Group 1" and then once the sidebar pops up click on "When filter criteria is met."

There are different enrollment triggers, but here we will use a specific filter criteria, in this case being that the contact has submitted a specific contact form. You could also create your own criteria based on a set of contact properties, or other events like a CTA being clicked.

Step 5: Qualify leads or Segment leads

If you want to qualify the leads before they are assigned to a sales representative, or you want to segment them, you'll need to add a conditional branch.

Start by clicking the "+ button" and then click on "branch."

Once you've clicked the plus button and added a branch, you will be prompted to select the criteria for this specific conditional.

In this example, I'll go ahead and chose "AND/OR logic" as the way contacts will be conditionalized by.

Once you've selected this option, you'll be able to set the criteria for each branch. In this example I've branched out based on a few specific state regions:

Keep in mind the order you put these conditionals does matter in the case that you are using a property that can hold multiple values (multiple select, etc.) For example, someone may be interested in different products. If a contact has selected interest in Product A and Product B, when branching out in the assignment workflow, if the first branch is checking Product A - the lead will fall into this branch first, as this is the first in the order of conditionals. Meaning, the contact will be assigned to the rep that works with product A, and not to the rep that works product B (since checking this conditional comes after checking for product A.)

Step 6: Assign leads with the "Route to Owner" action

Once you've added conditionals, the next step is to add the "Rotate record to owner" action.

You'll want to add this action to each branch to ensure contacts from each state are assigned to the correct sales rep.

This action here will be the most important step in this entire workflow, and typically the step that is modified and managed the most.

Here you will select a few options, first which owner field are you assigning. By default HubSpot includes the default "Contact owner" field, but you may have a custom owner field like "Account Executive." Second, you'll need to select the "Users or Teams" that will be included in this distribution. Keep in mind this uses a round robin distribution model, meaning each user included will receive an equal amount of leads.

Here you can also chose to overwrite existing owner if the contact should be assigned a new owner even if they already have one. This is typical in a reassignment lead rotation.

As users are added/removed from rotations. After this action you may also have specific timestamp properties to better record when reps are assigned leads and how long they take to work them.

HubSpot Lead Routing Best Practices

HubSpot's comprehensive platform offers powerful tools for configuring and managing lead routing—a critical component for sales efficiency. To maximize the effectiveness of your lead routing strategy, implement these best practices:

Regular Review and Adjustment

Continuously evaluate and refine your lead routing rules to match current performance metrics and business conditions. This ongoing optimization ensures your routing strategy evolves with your business, leading to improved conversion rates and sales outcomes.

Leverage HubSpot Analytics

Take full advantage of HubSpot's built-in routing reports and analytics capabilities. These tools provide valuable insights into routing performance, helping you identify potential bottlenecks and optimization opportunities. Embracing this data-driven approach enables smarter decision-making and more efficient workflow design.

Encourage Cross-Team Collaboration

Foster strong communication channels between your marketing and sales teams. When these departments regularly share insights and feedback, your lead routing process becomes more effective and responsive. This collaborative environment ensures leads move smoothly through your pipeline and receive the right attention at the right time.

Lead Routing Limitations in HubSpot

HubSpot provides a lot of functionality within the workflows to manage your lead routing. But note there are some limitations of what can and can't be done.

1. No performance/weighted assignment (or upgrade to Operations Hub to run a custom code)

4. Hard to maintain workflows - easy to break and something goes wrong + maintain in multiple workflows sometimes hundreds.

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How to manage ongoing lead rotations in HubSpot?

Managing lead rotations requires going into the workflows that you added these rotate record to owner actions. This can be cumbersome, especially if you have multiple workflows and many if/then conditionals.

Routera provides a solution for this, by giving sales managers and users an assignment status which if marked ON the owner will be assigned leads, and if OFF then they will not receive any leads.

This is important to manage especially when users are out of the office, work specific shifts/hours, are on vacation.

When re-publishing your workflow after potentially changing enrollment criteria ensure you select "Save and don't enroll existing contacts"as if you select the other option you will enroll all contacts who currently met the criteria, maybe leading to problems of leads being reassigned.