How to automate follow-up for new website leads in HubSpot

Every website lead needs four things: a HubSpot contact and deal, one rep who owns it, a first reply within the hour during business hours, and a point where the chasing stops, such as three attempts over about ten days.

A customer fills in your website’s contact form to ask for a quote or a visit. When the office is one person and the crews are out until dark, that message waits in a shared inbox until somebody has a free hour. The reply goes out that night or the next morning. In a busy week, nobody adds the customer to the CRM at all.

A written standard for every form lead

Reply within the hour during business hours. A study reported in Harvard Business Review in 2011 looked at 1.25 million leads at 42 US companies. Firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried an hour later. To the authors, qualifying a lead meant having a meaningful conversation with a decision maker. If a lead comes in after you’ve closed, aim to reply before your first crew heads out the next morning.

Give each lead one person who answers it (the rep, from here on). Before you automate anything, write down your rule for picking the rep. For a cleaning company with one office manager, that rule can be a single line: the manager answers every lead, and you cover the manager’s days off. A landscaper with separate maintenance and design crews can split leads by service.

The rep’s first reply is short and written for this one customer. It uses their name and repeats the job back in their words. Then it asks for the one detail the rep needs before quoting, such as photos of the yard or the number of bedrooms. The rep signs off with a direct number and a link that books one specific type of meeting, like the scheduling link for a Calendly event type.

In HubSpot, each lead gets a contact and a deal, and the deal starts in a stage called New Lead with the rep as Deal owner. It records where the lead came from and keeps the form message. The rep logs calls and emails on the deal, so anyone who opens it can see whether the customer has heard back.

New Lead should only hold leads someone is still working, so decide when the chasing stops. Three attempts over about ten days is a workable rule, with the last one telling the customer you’ll close their request unless they write back. If they don’t, the rep moves the deal to Closed lost and fills in its Closed lost reason, a property HubSpot keeps on every deal.

The HubSpot settings that come first

Five settings come first, and all of them work on every HubSpot plan, free tools included.

1. Open Settings in HubSpot, click Objects, choose Deals, and on the Pipelines tab add a stage named New Lead at the start of your pipeline. HubSpot’s default sales pipeline starts at Appointment scheduled, which is further along than a lead nobody has answered.
2. Check that your form reaches HubSpot. HubSpot’s own forms do. A form built into your website platform can get there through the non-HubSpot forms tool. That tool needs the HubSpot tracking code on the page and a form that meets HubSpot’s requirements, such as not sitting inside an iframe.
3. Open the form in Marketing > Forms, click the settings icon, and leave Automatically create new contacts from unknown email addresses on. HubSpot then creates a contact for each new email address and updates the existing one when the address is already there.
4. Select the people who answer leads under Add users to notify on the form’s Submission settings tab. Have each of them turn on Form submissions in their own notification settings. Notify contact owner sends nothing while a contact has no owner, so it misses leads nobody has claimed.
5. Click the automation icon in the form editor and, under Send an email after form submission, click Create this workflow. Use that email to confirm the message arrived and to say who will reply and by when.

HubSpot’s own automation, plan by plan

On HubSpot’s free tools, the confirmation email is the form’s only simple workflow, and it gets one action, so the form creates no deal and assigns no rep. A Starter account without Marketing Hub gets one simple workflow per form with up to three actions, and Marketing Hub Starter allows ten. Depending on your subscription, those actions can include creating a record and assigning the contact among paid users.

HubSpot’s Slack app, on any plan, can pass form submission notifications to each user who turns them on under Settings > Notifications > Other apps. A custom Slack notification to a record’s owner, with the properties you choose, comes from a workflow. Workflows need a Professional or Enterprise subscription.

A sequence handles the chasing for a rep with an assigned Sales or Service seat in Sales Hub or Service Hub Professional or Enterprise. It sends timed emails from the rep’s connected inbox. By default, it unenrolls the customer when they reply or book a meeting through a link in one of those emails. Workflows on those plans can also create the deal, rotate the owner between reps and message that owner in Slack.

WebRun’s steps for each form submission

Whichever HubSpot plan you’re on, WebRun or another automation tool can take over the steps between the form and the reply. WebRun, an AI agent, uses your saved login to open HubSpot in a browser. Its template for turning website form submissions into HubSpot deals runs each time someone submits your form. According to the template page, it works with HubSpot’s own forms and with forms from most website builders.

WebRun takes the name, email, company, phone number and message from the submission and searches HubSpot’s contacts for that email address. If the person is already there, it updates their contact; if not, it adds them. Then it creates a deal in the New Lead stage, linked to the contact. It puts the company and source on the deal, with the form message as a note. A past customer who fills in the form again gets a new deal on the contact they already have.

The rep assigned to the lead gets a direct message from WebRun in Slack, with the customer’s name, company and message, plus a link to the HubSpot deal. It suggests when to reply, based on the lead’s source and your business hours. WebRun also copies the rep’s scheduling link for an intro call event type from Calendly into the message, ready to paste into the reply.

The rep writes and sends every reply

WebRun’s template doesn’t email the customer. The rep answers from their own inbox, in their own words, and pastes in the Calendly link from the Slack message. The template ends at that Slack message, so the rep also sends the follow-ups and moves a quiet lead’s deal to Closed lost in HubSpot.

Leads that can still slip through

Send two test submissions before you rely on the template. Use an email address HubSpot has never seen for one and an existing customer’s address for the other. The first should leave one new contact with one deal in New Lead; the second should update the customer’s contact and add a new deal to it.

WebRun matches people by email address, as HubSpot’s own forms do. A customer who writes from a work address in spring and a personal one in fall ends up as two contacts. Look through Contacts for doubled names each week while you’re starting out.

Every submission that gets past your form becomes a deal and a Slack message, spam included. If junk keeps arriving from the same email domains, a HubSpot form can block them under Email domains to block on its Submission settings tab.

Check Last contacted on each deal in New Lead. HubSpot sets that property from calls, chats, one-to-one emails, meetings and messages logged on the deal. A blank on a day-old deal means nobody has replied, or the rep replied without logging it in HubSpot.

The Slack message goes to one rep’s direct messages. Before that rep’s next day off, decide who covers, and have that person check New Lead in HubSpot each morning until the rep is back.