The challenge
Inbound demo requests arrived through three forms and a chat widget. An operations coordinator copied each one into HubSpot, looked up the company and posted it in Slack for whichever rep covered that region.
On a good day that took an hour. Over weekends it took two days. The median wait for a first reply was 19 hours, and leads regularly went to the wrong rep.
What we did
- Map the processWe sat with the coordinator and two reps for a morning and wrote down every step, rule and exception in the current process.
- Build the workflowAn n8n workflow now takes every form and chat lead, enriches it with company size and country, scores it, creates or updates the HubSpot contact and assigns the owner.
- Hand-off to peopleThe assigned rep gets a Slack message with the lead’s details and a one-click link to book a call. High-score leads are flagged to the sales lead as well.
- Safety netsFailed steps retry automatically, and anything still unassigned after 30 minutes is escalated to a person.
Who does what
Handled by automation
- Enrichment, scoring and owner assignment for every lead
- Slack hand-off with lead details and a booking link
- Retries and an escalation if a lead is unassigned
Owned by our team
- Routing rules agreed with the sales lead
- Monthly review of score accuracy against closed deals
- Changes to territories and reps as the team grows
Results
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Median time to first reply | 19 hours | 6 minutes |
| Inbound leads booking a meeting | 18% | 27% |
| Leads assigned to the wrong rep | ~1 in 8 | 1 in 60 |
| Manual routing work | 11 h / week | Under 1 h / week |
Measured over the 90 days before and after launch. Lead volume was similar in both periods.
Tools
- n8n
- HubSpot
- Slack
- Clearbit
- Google Sheets
This is a sample case study, shown while our client studies are approved for publication.