How to Automate Lead Rotation (3 Steps to a Smarter Sales Process)

How quickly is your sales team reaching out to new leads? If the answer isn’t measured in minutes — it’s too long.

Even if business is booming, the old method of manually assigning leads (and pestering reps to follow up) is contributing to missed opportunities.

The old way may have gotten you this far, but let's face it — it's a model of inefficiency. It’s draining productivity. And most importantly, it’s not scalable.

That’s why it’s time to talk about sales process automation.

Not the kind that’s overly complicated and full of fancy tools your team will never use. Not the kind that requires reps to spend half their day performing data entry.

I’m talking about a simple, user-friendly sales management solution designed to save loads of time.

Let’s take a quick look at how easy automated lead rotation is with HubSpot, our go-to sales automation software. Their Workflows tool makes it as simple as 1-2-3.

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How to automate lead rotation with HubSpot Workflows

1. Set enrollment triggers
2. Define actions to automate lead rotation
3. Create tasks to automate follow up
   
   

Sales process automation should be easy.

The problem with most automation software is that it’s just too complicated. Reps and sales managers simply don’t have time to learn new tools with steep learning curves. That’s why HubSpot designed its platform to be so easy to use.

A basic Workflow to automate lead rotation can literally be done in a few clicks. Let’s take a look:

1. Set enrollment triggers

An enrollment trigger is the first step in a Workflow. It determines when the Workflow actions start and who gets included.

What will prompt your automated lead rotation to begin? How about a form submission on your website?

For this example, we’ll say any form submission on your website by an unassigned contact.

So, any time a visitor completes a form on your website — and they don’t have an assigned rep — they’ll be entered into your lead rotation Workflow.

2. Define actions to automate lead rotation

Next comes the fun part — automating the busy work.

With HubSpot automation Workflows, you can choose from dozens of actions — and combine them to accomplish just about anything.

For this example, we’re using the Rotate leads action so you won’t have to assign leads manually anymore.

The rotator works in a "round-robin" style — add any number of reps to the rotation, and leads will be assigned evenly among them. Reps will even be instantly notified of their new leads.

3. Create tasks to automate sales follow up

Bam. This Workflow is now adding new leads to your CRM, assigning reps and notifying them — and nobody has to lift a finger.

Now, let’s remind that rep to follow up and keep those hard-earned leads from slipping through the cracks.

We’ll do this by creating a Task action.

First we’ll decide how long to wait before reminding the rep. How about 2 hours?

Then, the Task is assigned — firing an email reminder off to the rep. If using the free HubSpot CRM, they’ll simply click on the lead’s name in the email and connect via phone, email or text.

That’s it.

And you thought sales automation was scary.

Customize your entire lead management process

As you can see, setting up a basic lead rotation Workflow is pretty darn simple. From here, customizing them to suit your sales process is easy and intuitive. A few ideas:

Let’s say the assigned rep doesn’t reach out after a few hours. Create an Action to automatically re-assign the lead if they haven’t been contacted during a specified time frame.

Or, hold reps accountable with an Action that alerts sales managers when there’s no follow up activity.

Maybe you’d like to rotate leads from sources other than a website form?

For example, new contacts uploaded to your CRM after a trade show. Or when a lead is handed off from marketing to sales.

Whatever your current lead rotation process is, there’s an easier way to do it with Workflows. Not only will your team engage way more leads, they’ll do it with less effort than ever before.

Harvard Business Review research shows that most companies are not responding nearly fast enough to online sales leads.

What else can a sales automation system do?

With automated lead rotation, HubSpot Workflows puts valuable time back in your day. But that’s just the tip of the automation iceberg.

The best sales automation software needs to address a multitude of manual data entry and admin tasks that hijack sales productivity every day.

Easily automated with HubSpot:

• List segmentation
• Email follow up
• Email nurture sequences
• Lead status
• Leads scoring
• Deal stages
• Meeting scheduling
• Sales reports
• And yes, much more…

“How quickly is your sales team reaching out to new leads? If the answer isn’t measured in minutes — it’s too long.”
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That wasn’t so hard, was it?

In theory, automation is supposed to make life easier for sales teams — but overly complex software usually just adds to the problem. That’s why we love HubSpot’s perfect marriage of functionality and ease-of-use.

There’s not a rep or sales manager out there who wouldn’t benefit from automating repetitive grunt work … but only if it actually saves time, boosts productivity and helps close more deals.

For businesses looking to scale up, it’s not just a productivity hack. It’s a necessity.

Whether it’s lead rotation, follow up, data entry or other redundant chores that pull your team away from the business of selling — there’s a solution. It’s a solution not only because it works, but because it’s so easy they’ll actually use it.