Customers crave fast, decisive interactions that drive them towards purchase. HubSpot's Sales Hub is a powerful tool for managing leads and closing deals—but it doesn't always reflect the real-world availability of your sales reps.
Sales teams are dynamic. Reps may be on important calls, tied up with demos, taking well-earned time off, or even unexpectedly leaving the company. Ignoring availability leads to misrouted leads, delayed responses, and lost momentum for customers.
Imagine a potential buyer eager to close a deal before the end of the quarter. They submit a query through HubSpot, which directs it to a rep who's out for the week. The clock's ticking, and the buyer's interest cools with each passing hour. They might start exploring competitors, leaving your deal in limbo.
These inefficiencies hurt more than just the customer experience. They put undue pressure on other reps, scrambling to pick up the slack, potentially jeopardizing their own deals along the way. For sales leaders, a lack of real-time availability insights muddies performance tracking, making it hard to identify where processes can be improved.
HubSpot's Workflows do give some options for handling sales rep availability in HubSpot, but requires time-intensive daily manual management.
Not Tracking Rep Availability Sabotages Closing Speed
Closing speed is the new battleground for sales success. In today's fast-paced market, the first relevant response often wins the deal. When your lead assignment system doesn't account for rep availability, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
If a hot lead goes to a rep who's slammed with appointments, it sits in a queue while the buyer's interest wanes. Worse yet, it may not be reassigned quickly enough, forcing the lead to turn elsewhere for a faster solution.
This is especially critical in industries where rapid responses are everything – think technology sales, consulting, or any B2B solution with complex decision-making. Delays caused by not knowing who's available give your competitors the edge.
HubSpot's sales tools are undeniably sophisticated, but failing to factor in real-time rep availability creates a serious vulnerability in your sales pipeline.
Misaligned Availability Hurts Team Morale and Performance
A system that doesn't reflect the real-time availability of reps can demoralize top performers and cloud your performance analysis. Your star closers may get bombarded with leads they simply don't have time for, leading to frustration and potential burnout. This hurts their ability to nurture their own hot prospects effectively.
On the flip side, newer reps or those specializing in specific products might be underutilized. Not knowing who has bandwidth leads to uneven lead distribution, making it harder for sales leaders to accurately assess performance and identify coaching opportunities.
Setting Up Sales Rep Availability in HubSpot: Challenges and Workarounds
HubSpot's Sales Hub is a powerful tool, but it doesn't have a built-in way to say "Only assign leads to reps who are currently online and ready to work."
Let's explore types of unavailability, why this matters, and how companies are currently handling this in HubSpot.
Reasons for Sales Rep Unavailability
- Work hours: You can't close deals if your reps aren't actively working. Routed leads to offline reps sit idle, losing momentum. This is frustrating for buyers, and makes it look like you're not responsive.
- Time zones: If you operate internationally, misrouting a lead due to timezone differences could mean hours of delay. That hot lead in Australia might not be so excited when a US-based rep finally calls the next day.
- Planned absences: Vacations happen! HubSpot doesn't consider them automatically, so a rep on PTO will still get leads, leading to delays and disorganized reassignments.
- Unexpected unavailability: People get sick, appointments pop up. Unavailable reps shouldn't get leads, but HubSpot doesn't let you quickly toggle a rep 'offline'.
HubSpot Workflows: A Limited Solution
Technically, you can use HubSpot Workflows to try and mimic availability, but it's a headache:
- Complexity: You'd need multiple workflows for each time window, each timezone, etc. This explodes quickly, becoming a nightmare to manage.
- Manual work: Absences mean constantly adding/removing reps from workflows. It's time-consuming and prone to mistakes that hurt your lead response time.
HubSpot's out-of-the-box setup is designed for basic routing, but the management of this system can become cumbersome, especially in larger teams. This costs you deals.
With the help of Insycle, you can easily manage HubSpot sales rep availability without the daily manual management work.
Insycle Delivers Automated HubSpot Rep Availability With Easy Day-to-Day Adjustments
In HubSpot, ensuring that out-of-office and unavailable reps aren’t assigned leads often means digging through dozens of HubSpot workflows and manually removing the rep from every assignment workflow in which they are included.
Insycle offers deep flexibility for HubSpot sales rep availability management. You can quickly select a rep to edit their availability settings from the dashboard:
You can set working hour availability for reps on an individual basis, including time zone settings:
You can set upcoming out-of-office, paid time off, and unavailable dates in advance. Then the sales rep will not receive any assignments on their future unavailable days:
And on sick days, you can quickly toggle the rep unavailable:
With these rep availability management features, you can ensure that tickets are assigned to available reps, so that response times are quick and customers have a good experience.
Insycle: The Key to Supercharging Your HubSpot Lead Routing
Efficient lead routing that takes sales rep availability in HubSpot into account is the lifeblood of a high-performing sales team. HubSpot's Sales Hub offers powerful tools, but for truly dynamic lead assignment, you need a solution like Insycle.
Insycle goes far beyond basic routing. It's a full-featured tool for optimizing your entire HubSpot sales process. Insycle can:
- Pinpoint the right rep: Match leads to reps based on availability, skills, product expertise, deal size, and more. No more lost momentum on mismatched assignments.
- Prevent data decay: Bad data kills deals. Insycle keeps your HubSpot contact info clean, accurate, and up-to-date. It deduplicates and standardizes information for optimal performance.
- Boost team efficiency: Eliminate time wasted on manual data tasks. Insycle's automation puts those hours back into deal closing activities.
Ready to see a demo? Discover how Insycle can power-up your HubSpot experience and accelerate your sales growth!
