Contact Owner Assignments in HubSpot: Streamlined Pipeline Strategy

Quick action on a lead is a priority for most B2B companies. If you don’t engage the prospect right away, you risk losing their interest as they seek a solution elsewhere. In order to do this, a new lead must be assigned to an available rep or account executive as soon as they enter your sales pipeline.

But relying on manual owner assignment is inefficient and risky. Lead qualification, the process of collecting information from and categorizing based on their perceived value to the organization, becomes much more difficult when you rely on manual assignments. You’ll be slower to respond, decreasing the chances of a successful outcome. You’re 21 times more likely to qualify your lead with a fast response time compared to those who respond after 30 or more minutes. If no contact ownership is assigned, the lead may go uncontacted, and the opportunity may be lost.

Poor contact owner assignment processes can trip up even the most well-intentioned account-based marketing (ABM) plays. Leads slip through the cracks, sales cycles stretch out, and customer experiences suffer.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Efficient automated assignment systems take into account rep availability and workload balance when making assignments. This ensures that leads are helped quickly and keeps your team from taking on too much.

By automating contact owner assignments in HubSpot, you can ensure the right leads land in the right hands every time, on time. The result? More efficient lead routing, faster response times, and happier customers. Reps can focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals—while sales leaders gain visibility into the health of their pipeline.

The Operational Impact of Inefficient Contact Owner Assignments in HubSpot

Inefficient contact owner assignments can have far-reaching consequences for your sales operations and revenue growth. Misrouted leads cause missed opportunities, frustrated customers, and demotivated teams.

• Imbalanced workloads among sales reps can burn out teams and decrease productivity. For example, if one sales rep consistently handles twice as many accounts as their colleagues, it'll overwhelm them and increase the turnover risk.
• Delayed responses to leads because they haven’t been assigned to reps jeopardize a promising opportunity. Prospects expect swift, personalized attention, so when a hot lead goes cold because of poor contact ownership, you risk losing them to a more responsive competitor.
• When rep availability isn't taken into account, the risk of losing potential customers is inevitable. Imagine a high-value lead, carefully nurtured by your marketing team, finally reaching out to sales—only to be met with radio silence because their assigned rep is out of the office, leaving them wondering if your company values their business.
• Challenges in maintaining up-to-date assignments during turnover can throw a wrench into even the best-laid ABM plans. When a rep leaves the company or moves to a different role, manually updating complex assignment workflows can be a time-consuming headache, causing leads to fall through the cracks and potential deals to slip away.
• Lead routing and management inefficiencies create a ripple effect across your entire revenue operations. When leads aren't promptly and properly assigned, reps waste valuable time chasing down the right contact information. At the same time, managers struggle to get a clear picture of the pipeline, making it difficult to forecast accurately and allocate resources effectively.
• Harmed customer experience because of these issues can have long-lasting repercussions for your brand reputation. Thanks to social media and online reviews, one frustrated prospect's poor experience with your sales process can quickly snowball into a public relations nightmare, deterring potential customers and eroding hard-won trust in your company.

Understanding the potential impact of mis-assigning—or not assigning—leads is a first step. The next is preventing it from happening, which we'll discuss below.

The Issue With Contact Owner Assignments in HubSpot

HubSpot's features for assigning contact owners are ideal for smaller operations and basic lead routing but can be a headache for more complex sales processes. What if a rep is out sick, at a conference, or simply overwhelmed? You don’t want them to receive more assignments.

HubSpot offers limited availability and workload-balancing settings, forcing sales managers to resort to time-consuming manual workarounds.

For example, while they do offer a basic availability toggle for inbox conversations, and some availability settings for round-robin meetings, there is no simple way to handle rep availability for your entire team in just a few clicks. Most companies with more complex operations handle availability manually by adding and removing reps to and from their assignment workflows. This is an arduous task when dealing with larger sales teams, and often leads to mistakes when forgetting to remove an unavailable rep.

And even if you keep your workflows up to date, there's always the looming specter of human error. One misplaced click or one forgotten update, and your carefully balanced system crumbles like a house of cards. Cue the frantic scramble to reassign leads and smooth over frustrations from sales reps.

But all this manual labor doesn't just drain your time and sanity—it's also a morale killer for your team. No one wants to spend their days playing workflow cleanup or begging their manager for a more equitable distribution of leads. They want to be out there selling, not stuck in the weeds of HubSpot's assignment limitations.

Naturally, this leads companies to start exploring more robust solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world sales operations.

How Flexible, Automated Contact Owner Assignments in HubSpot Change the Game

With Insycle, you can eliminate the common problems associated with manual contact owner assignments in HubSpot, such as uneven workload distribution, human error, and time-consuming processes. Insycle offers seamless, automated contact owner assignments in HubSpot. It removes the headache of lead routing so your team can focus on what really matters—generating revenue.

Insycle's advanced contact routing features allow for balanced and automated contact owner assignments that consider rep availability and current workload. No more overloading your top performers or letting leads slip past when a rep is out of the office.

Insycle optimizes your team's capacity by allowing you to schedule and balance assignments over a set amount of time, such as by quarter.

Insycle also balances workloads to ensure a fair distribution of leads. You can set up routing rules based on a rep's experience level, expertise, and historical performance. For example, a new hire can receive fewer assignments while they ramp up, and a high-performing veteran can take on a heavier load. And if a rep specializes in highly technical cases, you can adjust their assignment settings accordingly.

For lead routing, you have several balancing and assignment rule options:

• Balanced: Insycle balances contacts between selected reps, accounting for the current levels of all assigned tickets.
• Even: Insycle distributes assignments evenly among selected sales reps, regardless of the number of contacts they are already assigned.
• Random: Insycle randomly assigns each lead to a rep.
• Weighted: Assign different weights to different reps for more control over contact assignment balancing. With this setting, you can, for example, assign fewer contacts to a newly hired rep.

But Insycle doesn't just streamline lead assignment; it simplifies managing turnover and daily availability. When a rep leaves the company or takes a well-deserved vacation, Insycle automatically updates assignments without manually editing complex workflows. No more racing to redistribute leads or wondering who's responsible for what.

You can also set working hour availability for reps on an individual basis, including time zones:

You can also set upcoming out-of-office, paid time off, and unavailable dates in advance. Then the sales rep will not receive any assignments on those days.

And on sick days, you can quickly toggle the rep unavailable.

The best part? Insycle seamlessly integrates with your existing HubSpot Workflows, so automated assignments happen whenever a new contact enters the system. You can set up schedule-based automation to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, ensuring no leads escape notice.

And with Insycle's Recipes feature, you can bundle multiple templates together and automate them to run on a set schedule, in the order you define. This means you can create a Recipe that first deduplicates incoming leads, then standardizes their data, and finally assigns them to the appropriate rep—all without lifting a finger.

Boost Your HubSpot Sales Performance With Insycle's Automated Contact Owner Assignments

Every second counts in ABM. You can't afford to let leads languish in the queue or risk losing them to a competitor because of inefficient contact owner assignments. Insycle's automated assignment features solve this problem by routing every lead to the right rep at the right time, based upon availability, workload, and expertise.

But Insycle's benefits don't stop there. As a complete customer data management platform for HubSpot, Insycle offers tools to streamline your sales and marketing operations. From data cleansing and deduplication to data standardization and import, Insycle gives you the power to maintain a clean, accurate, and actionable database that is the foundation of any successful ABM strategy.

So, if you're ready to make your HubSpot ABM campaigns more efficient, explore what Insycle can do for you. Learn more about our HubSpot data management solutions and how they unlock the full potential of your customer data. With Insycle on your side, you'll be well on your way to ABM success.