Account-Based Lead Assignment using HubSpot and Salesforce

Overview

SmartAcre® helped our client, Smartling, develop and implement a scalable, enterprise-wide, custom solution using HubSpot and Salesforce across their global sales team. This solution uses Lead-to-Account matching in order to assign and notify the proper member of the sales team.

Challenge

• Inbound leads from target accounts were not consistently being identified and assigned to an account owner, resulting in a major gap in the lead-to-sale process.
• A relatively new lead assignment strategy was not balanced across sales teams and geographic territories.
• Leads that were related to partner or customer accounts were clogging up the sales queue.
• Many existing leads were assigned to inactive owners and were not being followed up with.

Approach

Overview

SmartAcre worked with Smartling to develop a custom account-based lead assignment model using HubSpot and Salesforce. This was executed by creating a custom formula that compares the domain in a lead’s email address to all of the website domains listed in existing accounts to identify a match.

Lead Assignment Business Rules

First, we used Salesforce Process Builder and Flows to see if the lead’s email matches an existing account’s domain. If the lead matches an existing account, the workflow assigns the lead to the Account Executive who currently owns that account and alerts them via a “new strategic lead notification.”

Flows were used to find a related account and determine the new owner

Next, we had to build the logic for unassigned leads or those with inactive owners. Leads need to be assigned to either the North America or EMEA sales queues to then be assigned via a round-robin rotation. For the leads that don’t have country data, we used the HubSpot property “IP country” and mapped it to Salesforce. We then used the country to determine the region based on several custom Salesforce workflows and formulas. The region field determined whether the lead was assigned to the North America or EMEA sales teams.

After the new lead assignment process was implemented, we created a blended lead grading and scoring model. We initially provided strategy and consulting and then facilitated a team review session to adjust the model to align with the sales team’s input. Through this model, leads with a Grade of A are passed directly to sales. Leads with other grades require different thresholds of behavioral scoring in order to meet the MQL criteria to then allow them to be passed to sales.

Outcomes

• Sales Managers and Account Executives have more time: By removing the burden of manually reassigning leads across the team, there is more time for higher-value tasks.
• Leads don’t slip through the cracks: Leads are now automatically detected from target accounts and assigned to the appropriate Account Executive so high-quality leads are followed up with in a timely manner.
• Sales team gets better leads: By implementing a blended lead scoring and grading model, the leads assigned to sales are higher quality.
• Close more deals: By implementing this new process, marketing now properly identifies and assigns qualified leads that the sales team has a higher probability of closing.