Case Study: Streamlining HubSpot Lead Routing Automation for Global LMS Provider

Project Overview

Totara, a global learning management system (LMS) provider with a partner-led sales model, needed a more effective way to route leads. Their existing automation had grown into a tangle of conflicting workflows that created gaps, delays, and excessive manual data entry. The team at Process Pro stepped in to design and implement a streamlined lead assignment process in HubSpot that aligned with Totara's complex organizational and data structures.

Challenges

This project focused on solving pain points within their lead assignment process, particularly as they moved from a direct sales model to a partner-led model. 

Across more than eight different workflows, Totara was setting record ownership based on Lifecycle Stage, Region, most recent converting form, etc. Totara's legacy lead routing automation, which was not built with a partner-led sales motion in mind, triggered automation from the company record and copied the assignment down to the contact record. This automation was highly complex and often had conflicts among its many different workflows, leading to improper or overwritten assignments that would need to be manually updated by their HubSpot admin. 

These are the issues they were facing due to their legacy automation:

• Data gaps caused by improperly timed or conflicting workflow enrollments.
• The region property being improperly set due to missing country values (exacerbated by the sunset of HubSpot Insights).
• Confusion among reps due to improper or overwritten lead assignments.
• Intervention from Totara’s HubSpot admin was required to manually update records.

They also needed to account for multiple different contact types within their CRM, multiple country properties, and multiple lifecycle stage properties. Managing record assignments in so many different places made ownership assignment of HubSpot records a headache for marketing and sales teams alike.

Project Goals

• Consolidate automation into fewer workflows
• Establish a definitive order of operations for required automations
• Shift lead routing logic from company-first to contact-first
• Ensure region, type, and lifecycle-based assignments are accurate
• Reduce the manual data entry needed by Totara’s HubSpot admin

The Solution

Process Pro rebuilt the entire lead assignment process with a contact-first approach. We designed four coordinated workflows managed by a new controller property: Lead Assignment Status. This allowed us to walk each contact through the automation in the correct order, pausing as needed until each required property was entered.

Key components included:

• Creation of new contact properties for Lead Assignment Status and Contact Type.
• Four interconnected workflows controlled by the Lead Assignment Status property that would be responsible for:
  1. Set Lead Assignment Status: Responsible for setting the controller property and enrolling the contact in each of the remaining workflows.
  2. Check Lifecycle Stage: Checks the current Lifecycle Stage and sets the Contact Owner according. Sends contacts to the remaining workflows to backfill required values for Contact Type or Region. 
  3. Set Contact Type: Sets the Contact Type property.
  4. Set Region: Checks multiple Country properties and sets the Region property.

• Setting up re-enrollment criteria so updates (form fills, country changes, Lifecycle Stage changes) would re-trigger the process as needed.
• Copying Contact Ownership to the associated Company property if unknown.
• Implementing a fallback to CRM admins if Region data was incomplete.
• Replacing HubSpot Insights with AccountScout to maintain company record enrichment.

Before going live, the automation was tested in the HubSpot sandbox and then in production using test contacts. Post launch, we implemented a data integrity report that displayed contacts who were enrolled and all necessary properties. This allowed us to identify any potential tweaks and ensure the automation was working as intended.

The Results

Totara now has a clean, reliable lead routing process that reflects the complexity of its global, partner-led business model. Lead handoffs are more accurate, automation timing conflicts have been eliminated, and the CRM team has seen a dramatic drop in manual assignments.