topic Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround in Sales Hub Tools

Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

marlene00 — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 14:37:35 GMT

Hi,

Hoping someone could help. Recently we have built workflows with a deal owner rotation, only to realise all of the users require pro licences for this to work. This is not an option at the moment as the team is significantly expanding.

I am hoping to find out if anyone out there could assist with unique workflow ideas to achieve this. We have tried:

Rotating contact owners (Same issue)
Creating a Lead ID, and values to allocate but have run into subsequential issues
Looking for plug-ins to assist
Looking at external platforms to push and pull data back and forth and attach owners from a spreadsheet

Any idea or assistance regarding this is highly appreciated.

TIA

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

warrendavey — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 16:44:24 GMT

@marlene00 - It sounds like you currently have some users with licenses already. I would highly suggest that you first contact your HubSpot Account Manager and discuss your current license structure and what you are trying to do. You would be surprised what they can do to help you.

Answer 1: There is no workaround with workflows to get deals assigned within HubSpot.

Answer 2: Zapier and Automate.io can achieve what you need but may need a paid license. @Bryantworks is an expert at setting these up and may be able to give you some insight.

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

AVeley — Thu, 12 May 2022 21:20:29 GMT

I read another solution that used a handful of paid pro users to setup a multi-level round robin workflow.

Example, you have 3 pro users with a team of 9 total people who need round robin assignment;
Round Robin the 3 pro users; then use if/then tree to create another round robin for those same 3 users, which will activate depending on the first round robin result - now you effectively have a round robin of 9; add an assign property value at for each result which specifically sets the user to one of the 9 users.

Such an example can be scaled to effectively work evenly for nearly any non-prime number of users.

This example can also be used to "weight" your round robin, by assigning for example 4 of the 9 results to 1 user, 4 of the 9 to another, and the remaining 1 to a 3rd user = thus getting about 45% weight for users 1 and 2, while user 3 would get about 10% of cases (1 out of 9)

This can get very messy, very quickly, especially if you are scaling up your team - but it is a workaround to this that technically can work, especially for smaller teams.

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

DianaGomez — Thu, 12 May 2022 23:01:07 GMT

Hi @AVeley hope you are doing well!

Thank you for sharing 🙂

Best,

Diana

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

MohsanAzad — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 03:56:58 GMT

Rotating (round-robin) leads is possible between unpaid users using Hubspot API.
Need to write a small custom script/web service

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

VPearcy — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 16:52:07 GMT

Hi @MohsanAzad, we are having a very similar problem - do you have an example you could share of the small custom script you mention?

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

MohsanAzad — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 17:02:51 GMT

Hi @VPearcy,

Can you please elaborate on your problem? so I can share how that can be resolved.

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

CJohnson32 — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 00:24:13 GMT

Hey @MohsanAzad hoping you can provide an example of the script you mentioned. We have many different park locations and need to restrict contact access by team (if contact is associated with NY, assign contact to someone on the NY team so only this team can see this data). Any and all advice here is appreciated!

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

MohsanAzad — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:37:32 GMT

Hi @CJohnson32

If you have all paid users in your Hubspot, then it can be easily managed inside Hubspot, you can assign Leads/Contacts easily by HubSpot Workflow.

but if all your Hubspot users are not Paid (Sales Professional) then you would need to use Hubspot API, check every 1 or 5 minutes that if there is new Contact Created in Hubspot (See Hubspot API documentation to get recent contacts) and check the values of the field and apply the conditions.

if the Contact is from the State of NY then assign it to Team A user Abc
else Assign it to Team Z user Xyz
(or whatever conditions and business logic you want to apply)

Then update that contact using API with a new Owner ID for that record.

Thanks
Mohsan

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

kepan — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 03:08:17 GMT

You're definitely not alone — "rotate owner" in HubSpot gets annoying fast when you don't want to pay for Pro seats for everyone who needs to be in the rotation. The most practical workaround I've seen is to handle the round-robin logic outside HubSpot and just update the record owner through the API.

It doesn't require heavy infrastructure. Basically you set up a webhook (or a lightweight polling job every few minutes) that fires when a new record is created. You keep a simple pointer somewhere — could be a key-value store, a database, even a spreadsheet — that tracks whose turn it is for each team or pipeline. When a new record comes in, you read the pointer, pick the next owner from the list (and optionally skip anyone who's out of office if you have that data), update the owner via HubSpot's API, then bump the pointer. Logging each assignment with the record ID, chosen owner, and timestamp makes it easy to audit and debug later.

If you can share a few details, I can sketch out the simplest version that would work for your case: Are you rotating deals or contacts/leads? Where are these records coming from — manual creation, forms, imports, an integration? And do you only want to assign when the owner field is empty, or overwrite existing owners too?

Quick disclosure: I'm building a small starter-friendly router called NextUp that does exactly this — pointer-based round robin with audit logs, focused on record owner routing rather than workflow hacks. The pattern I described above is basically what it does under the hood.

Re: Lead/Deal Rotation Workaround

kepan — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 03:10:35 GMT

Hi @VPearcy — yeah, the "small script" approach is pretty much what you'd expect: listen for new records (webhooks or polling), look up a stored pointer to see whose turn it is, update the owner through the HubSpot API, and log the decision so you have a clear trail of why each record went where it did.

Happy to sketch out a more concrete example if you can tell me a bit more about your setup. What object are you assigning — contacts, deals, or leads? What triggers the assignment — new record creation, form submission, import, something else? And should it only assign when the owner field is empty, or is it okay to overwrite existing owners?

If you can also give me a rough sense of volume (like 10 a day vs 1,000 a day), I can outline the flow and what the pointer and logging setup would look like.

Quick disclosure: I'm building a starter-friendly router called NextUp that does exactly this — strict round robin with audit logs using a pointer-based approach. Same idea under the hood.